If two young white kids who look like clean-cut grad students are going to call their band the North Mississippi Allstars and draw on the primal African American blues of that rural area, they'd better be good.
They are. At times at the Troubadour on Monday, guitarist Luther Dickinson and his drummer brother Cody, with bassist Chris Chew, showed a stunning mastery of the raw rumble of the late legend Mississippi Fred McDowell and his more recent "discovery," R.L. Burnside. These artists' songs made up the bulk of Allstars' repertoire, and Luther displayed dazzling fluency in the slide and picking vocabulary of those masters, adding his own inventive touches to their rollin' and tumblin' trance-blues. Cody's flurries matched his brother's flying fingers step for step.
