Artist:     New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers

Album:     New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers Volume I

Label:     Stony Plain Records

Release Date:     09.04.2020  

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If your idea of a good time is sitting around the shanty and playing music with friends, the New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers are for you. The shanty in question is the Dickinson family’s Zebra Ranch Recording Studio in Coldwater, Mississippi, where the late Jim Dickinson and sons Luther and Cody of North Mississippi Allstars fame have laid down many memorable tracks. Joining father and sons for this impromptu session were blues legend Charlie Musselwhite and family friends Alvin Youngblood Hart and Jimbo Mathus.

Recorded in 2007, two years before Jim Dickinson’s passing, the ten tracks on Volume I are for blues aficionados, with Charlie Musselwhite’s harmonica front and center on “Blues Why You Worry Me,” “Strange Land” and several other tracks. Alvin Youngblood Hart has toured with and opened for the North Mississippi Allstars and is as solid a bluesman as they come. “Pony Blues” is a good example, but his cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Stone Free” is one of the album’s standouts. Jimbo Mathus is another long-time colleague who gets his turn in the Freedom Rockers spotlight on “Night Time” and “Shake It and Break It.”

Jim Dickinson was an influential player and producer on the Southern music scene for nearly five decades. He started out in Memphis where he formed the Dixie Flyers, in addition to doing sessions work for Aretha Franklin, Delaney and Bonnie, Ronnie Hawkins, Brook Benton and many others. He played piano for the Rolling Stones on “Wild Horses,” recorded in 1970 at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, and produced for Alex Chilton, The Replacements, Willy DeVille and Toots and the Maytals. Listeners get to sample his gritty style on two tracks: “Come on Down to My House” and Canned Heat’s “Let’s Work Together.”

Luther and Cody provide the musical engine behind the ten songs without stepping out on their own. Perhaps they do on other recordings in the vault, scheduled for release as Volume II in Spring 2021. Until then, enjoy the music and banter among family and friends on this intimate recording.

—Lou Montesano