Dan Auerbach poses with the gem he used to record much of Delta Kream: a Kawai Kingston S4T once owned by raw blues slide master Hound Dog Taylor. Note Taylor's name on the headstock, courtesy of the Dog himself, via a plastic-label punch.
Burnside and Kimbrough, in particular, are the album's marrow, and that's a matter of faith. "People might not have heard of them, but they are two of the most important American musicians that ever were," preaches Dan Auerbach, the guitarist and singer who, along with Patrick Carney, breathes life into the Black Keys. "Pat and I are doing this entire thing in honor of them."
The Black Keys' "Crawling Kingsnake"
Watch the Delta Kream crew—Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney of the Black Keys amended by guitarist Kenny Brown, bassist Eric Deaton, and percussionist Sam Bacco—play Junior Kimbrough's version of John Lee Hooker's "Crawling Kingsnake." Auerbach plays his 1960 Tele Deluxe and Brown is on his 1958 Silvertone. The primary location is the Blue Front Café in Bentonia, Mississippi—the longest continuously operating juke joint in the United States. Its proprietor, Jimmy "Duck" Holmes, for whom Auerbach produced a Grammy-nominated album, makes a cameo at 2:10.
And so a band that worked its way up from dive bars to headlining arenas, outdoor sheds, and festivals over 20 years—along the path distilling and evolving their original garage/blues sound into a brilliantly crafted, writerly, and eclectically influenced approach that's magnetized multiple Grammy nominations and hordes of fans, plus yielded 10 studio albums—does a musical 180. The smooth-but-sassy hooks inside albums like Brothers, El Camino, and Turn Blue—their platinum-selling trilogy from 2010 to 2014—are replaced by the rough-hewn, barbed ones of "Coal Black Mattie," "Poor Boy a Long Way From Home," and "Stay All Night." And nods to funk, psychedelia, pop, rockabilly, surf, and other normative forms are replaced by a devotion to a sound that echoes up from the African diaspora.
"In R.L. [Burnside], I could hear the ghosts of the whole lineage of the music that comes up the Mississippi River combined with all the cool bar sounds I loved about Chicago blues, all rolled into one person." —Dan Auerbach
That the call and response of Senegambian village drummers, the drone of the 1-stringed njarka, and the keening trill of handcarved reed fifes would still resonate so distinctly in a strain of rural electric blues might be called a near-miracle, if not for the dark cloud of their origins. As musicologist Edward M. Komara explained to me one night over copious beer and whiskey in a bar in Oxford, Mississippi, his extensive research shows that North Mississippi's slave owners were more tolerant of the indigenous music of their human property than those of the Delta and most other parts of the deep South, where drums and traditional rhythms, especially, were feared to be signals of rebellion. As a result, even today the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band plies grooves forged in the Niger Delta, and the one-chord stomp perfected by the late Kimbrough and Burnside stands as a nexus between the sounds of world music, psychedelia, rock, folk, and anything else that came into its octopus-like grasp over the past 400 years—amplified loud.
"The first time I heard the North Mississippi sound was in Alan Lomax's field recordings and Fred McDowell's Arhoolie label recordings," Auerbach recalls. "I fell in love with that stuff, and Fred's 'Write Me a Few of Your Lines' became a favorite song. With this stuff, some people get it, some people don't. When I first heard Junior Kimbrough"—whose melismatic singing and greased-spider guitar lines are a form of sonic hypnotherapy—"I didn't get it. It was way easier for me to get into R.L. Burnside. I had both of their albums, on Fat Possum, and in R.L. I could hear the ghosts of the whole lineage of the music that comes up the Mississippi River combined with all the cool bar sounds I loved about Chicago blues, all rolled into one person. And at the Euclid Tavern in Cleveland, I got to witness R.L. destroying a crowd. It was a combination of those records and seeing those guys play live, which was so intense it was mind blowing."
TIDBIT: The cover of the Black Keys' new album is a photo by William Eggleston, who in the 1950s began capturing Southern life. It was taken at a snack bar in North Mississippi.
By the time Auerbach and Carney, who've been playing together since they were 16 and 17, determined to make the Black Keys' 2002 debut, The Big Come Up, the sound of other raging Mississippi jukers like Paul "Wine" Jones and T-Model Ford was also in their gullets.
The Black Keys have paid homage before, with 2006's Chulahoma: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough. "I think we tried some of the songs we recorded for Delta Kream on those sessions, but it just didn't work out," Auerbach offers. "I'm not sure that, even 10 years ago, we would have been able to play these songs correctly, but Pat and I have both grown as musicians, and Pat's drumming blows me away on this album. It's so on the money and so him at the same time."
Junior Kimbrough holds court from the stage of his juke joint in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1995.
As Auerbach's solo albums and productions for artists as diverse as the Pretenders and 73-year-old bluesman Jimmy "Duck" Holmes have shown, he's also developed a knack for assembling the right cast of musicians. And for Delta Kream, he invited guitarist Kenny Brown, who played with Burnside for decades and earned the old wizard's praise as his "adopted son," and Eric Deaton, an MVP among hill country and Delta bandleaders, to help make the album bone-true. Percussionist Sam Bacco, another of Auerbach's frequent accomplices, completes the krewe.
"What some people miss about this music is that the right-hand technique is what really makes it." —Kenny Brown
Honestly, they were already at Auerbach's Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville, where they'd been pressed into service for Sharecropper's Son, an album Auerbach produced for Robert Finley. "When we finished the session for Robert's record, I texted Pat and told him he should come over the next day, just because it was so much fun to play with Kenny Brown. And that was pretty much it. It was a bunch of first takes. Two days later we had an album. We played all these songs we loved, from memory, and having Eric there to help me was great, because he knows all that stuff cold. And Kenny played on all of the original recordings! If you're a lover of hill country records, you love Kenny Brown even if you don't know it. I didn't fully realize it until he was sitting next to me, playing. It was that sound—the slide, those heavy notes. That great sound on 'Sad Days, Lovely Nights,' where he just hangs on the slide and makes this atmospheric sound.… He did that behind Junior Kimbrough on the original recording. That's my favorite musical moment from one of my favorite records—and there it was."
Kenny Brown, left, with his twice-stolen-and-returned 1958 Silvertone, added authentic blood to the Delta Kream sessions at Auerbach's Easy Eye Sound Studio. This master of Mississippi hill country guitar initially learned from the legendary Joe Callicott, Brown's neighbor as a child, and then apprenticed under the decades-long guidance of R.L. Burnside.
Photo by Alysse Gafkjen
Brown first met Auerbach over a decade ago at Norway's Notodden Blues Festival, on an artist shuttle heading back to the airport. "We had all had a late night and nobody was talking much," he says. But at the Delta Kream sessions, they instantly spoke the same musical language. "Dan is great to play with," Brown notes. "I loved the studio because it had great gear and Dan got really good sounds quick, and he's like me: He doesn't really play anything exactly the same way twice, so it always feels real fresh.
"Man, doing these songs bought back all kinds of memories. I was thinking about how we played 'Crawling Kingsnake' on Junior's first album, that we cut at his juke joint. And playing 'Poor Boy a Long Way From Home.' After 40 years, at least I can do 'em good now," Brown says, laughing.
"What some people miss about this music," says Brown, "is that the right-hand technique is what really makes it. A lot of the songs R.L. did, you can play with one finger on your left hand, but the right hand takes about three fingers working really fast. To really get the sound, sometimes you need to hit the strings, like a percussion thing. I think that comes from the fife and drum music. I do a lot of muting with my left hand and the heel of my right hand, and even the bass of my thumb. I don't even really think about it anymore, unless I try to teach somebody how to do it."
R.L. Burnside cradles an old Teisco in this 1996 publicity photo, but he was never fussy about what guitar he played.
For the sessions, Brown brought his beloved 1958 Silvertone. The guitar's been stolen from him twice, and returned, largely because it's recognizable by the twin popsicle sticks behind the headstock used to raise and anchor the tuning pegs. He also brought along the 1989 made-in-Mexico Stratocaster he frequently wielded with Burnside. And he used a third guitar: Fred McDowell's familiar Gibson Trini Lopez model, which Auerbach now owns along with Hound Dog Taylor's Kawai Kingston (a model often referred to generically as a Teisco, one of Kawai's popular spin-off brands), which also dishes out dirt on Delta Kream. Brown used only one pedal—Auerbach's Basic Audio Scarab Deluxe Fuzz, which he admired enough that the Black Key sent him one after the sessions.
Besides Hound Dog's Kawai, Auerbach played his beloved 1960 Telecaster Deluxe, which, he notes with a laugh, Nashville session legend Tom Bukovac has dubbed "the finest Tele on Earth." He enjoyed pairing it with an Analog Man Sun Face. "I used it a lot and kept it on with the volume down for my clean sound. The Tele pickups really work well with it. And the B-string on my Tele buzzes a little, because of the action, and I really like that. I told my guitar tech to leave it, because it always has a little sitar thing. You can hear it on the album."
"When I was 18, I label-maker-ed my name on the headstock of one of my Teiscos because of Hound Dog Taylor." —Dan Auerbach
DAN AUERBACH'S GEAR
Guitars
- 1960 Fender Telecaster Deluxe
- 1960s Kawai Kingston S4T formerly owned by Hound Dog Taylor
- 1960s Gibson Trini Lopez Standard (played on the sessions by Kenny Brown and formerly owned by Fred McDowell)
Amps
- 1950s Fender narrow-panel tweed Deluxe
Effects
- Ebo Customs E-Verb
- Analog Man Sun Face
Strings & Picks
- SIT .011 sets
- Jim Dunlop Custom picks
Auerbach acquired the Kawai through Bruce Iglauer of Alligator Records, the label Iglauer founded in 1971 to put out Hound Dog Taylor's debut album. "That was really gracious of him, and I've been using it non-stop ever since I got it," Auerbach attests. "We didn't do anything but clean up the pots, and it sounds and works great. It still has Hound Dog's name on a strip from a plastic label maker on the headstock. When I was 18, I label-maker-ed my name on the headstock of one of my Teiscos because of Hound Dog."
His amp of choice was a vintage, narrow-panel tweed Fender Deluxe paired with an Ebo Customs E-Verb. "I set the reverb right next to me when I played so I could turn it up and down in the middle of songs, for solos," he adds. Since the original versions of all the numbers on Delta Kream were recorded by players who eschewed picks for fingers, it seemed natural to ask Auerbach if he followed suit. "I did both. Junior and R.L. never used a pick, but once in a while I indulged myself," he said, chuckling.
"There's no set pattern to how we record or plan an album," he says. "Every one's been pretty different, and we never talk about it ahead of time—never. It's just fun and spontaneous, and sometimes those moments and ideas end up being the most pivotal."
Put Dirt in Your Ears
Fuel up on the North Mississippi hill country blues sounds that inspired the Black Keys' Delta Kream.
Too Bad Jim, R.L. Burnside: Burnside's debut album on Mississippi's Fat Possum label is a rough-hewn testimonial to the rugged, ragged power of this regional folk-art form. With Burnside and Kenny Brown on slide, rhythm, and lead guitars, this set was a major influence on Auerbach and Carney during the Black Keys' formative years.
All Night Long, Junior Kimbrough: From the first notes, Kimbrough's idiosyncratic approach to blues is obvious and mesmerizing. Listening carefully, you can hear the threads of African music, hardcore blues, psychedelia, improvisation, and primal rock pulling together in his rather eerie sound.
You Gotta Move, Mississippi Fred McDowell: The rural majesty of McDowell's rhythm 'n' slide style is instantly arresting. No wonder he became a popular opener for major rock bands from the late 1960s till his death in 1971. You know McDowell's "You Gotta Move" from the Rolling Stones' version, and here you can enjoy the original "Louise," which the Black Keys recorded for Delta Kream.
Everybody Hollerin' Goat, Otha Turner and the Rising Star Fife & Drum Band: Get down to the roots of the hill country sound with this album of the straight-from-Africa echoes of Mississippi fife-and-drum music. Turner, who carved his own reed fifes with heated metal rods, died at age 95 in 2007, but his granddaughter, Shardé Thomas, still leads the band today.
Foremost, perhaps, is the inability to come together and create with other musicians, and to commune with audiences, due to the pandemic. "It's been hard to be disconnected from what's a part of my identity," Nash says. "Performance is something I deeply appreciate. It's human, and it connects people that would never be connected. I mean, when you're in a room of people at a rock show, those are people that will never be assembled in that room again."
That frustration is shared by millions around the world, of course. But just when Nash began seeing glimmers of hope for live music's return, he was hit with another setback. A very un-Texas arctic winter devastated his region, forcing him and his family—whom he'd relocated from New York City to rural Dripping Springs a decade ago—to overcome obstacles yet again.
Israel Nash - "Southern Coasts" (Official Video)
"A week ago, I had to learn how to fix our water pump that froze and exploded," he says. "Living out here, you just start buying tools, start getting things, and start doing some things yourself because you can't get anyone out there when you need it."
That self-reliance—Nash's ability to adapt and grow—informs every note on Topaz, the first fully self-written, recorded, and produced album of his career. Nash's career started in New York City, when his original mix of psychedelic roots music springboarded from hip clubs like the Living Room and Rockwood Music Hall to catch ears around the world.
But even as his international success grew, the Missouri native was yearning for the slower lifestyle of his youth as well as a place to let his muse run wild.
"The guitar just doesn't feel right until it's up to about 4 on my Fender Bassman. No pedals. Just a hollow-body Gretsch."
"I was just drawn to the country and to live in a place that [my family] could build our own world," Nash says. "I needed to create a space that allows for anything to happen and allows those good things to happen."
The move to Dripping Springs, known as the "Gateway to Hill Country," really paid off. Settling on a 15-acre ranch about 30 minutes west of Austin, Nash found his forever home. He also slowly crafted an HQ for all of his creative endeavors, including hosting an annual music festival called From the Hills with Love. But most importantly, the ranch is where he built his studio, Plum Creek Sound.
Nash sees it as balancing the yin and yang of a musician's life. "You read about how many of our musical heroes had a little country space or home in the country. But music, except for this year, is also such a social thing. I love that. It keeps me alive! I really need that duality."
TIDBIT: Topaz is Israel Nash's sixth studio release, but it's his first entirely self-made album. It was recorded at Nash's own studio, Plum Creek Sound, located on his 15-acre homestead in the gateway to Hill Country, Dripping Springs, Texas. The album was co-produced by fellow Texan Adrian Quesada of the Grammy-nominated Black Pumas.
All of that, along with some urging by his wife, coalesced into Topaz. "Sometimes it takes someone outside of the business to see some of the absurdities of things," Nash says. "My wife saw just how much effort was put into other albums. So she basically encouraged me, saying, 'Hey, you have the studio. Do something different!'"
With that, work on Topaz began. Though it's Nash's first true solo album, it's actually the third album recorded in Plum Creek Sound. His original intent for the studio was to make albums the way he always had. He'd bring in his engineer, have his band join him for a couple of weeks, and hammer it out. But, without realizing it, he began to learn and absorb the recording process. The studio was becoming another instrument to play.
"I'd never thought that stuff that I would record by myself, without the blessing of an engineer, could be a professional, industry-standard album," says Nash. "But I found that the studio and the control room are just like a big guitar pedal. You got things going in and things going out. And you learn how to use it over time."
This realization opened the songwriting floodgates for Nash. Other than help from co-producer Adrian Quesada and some guest musicians, he could now create an unfiltered expression of the music swirling around his head. Nash didn't have to worry about album cycles, other musicians' schedules, or the business. If he heard something in his head, he was free to figure out how to get it to tape.
Israel Nash's Gear
Guitars
- Gretsch White Falcon
- Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster with White Falcon-style appointments and Clapton circuitry
- Les Paul Studio
- Gibson J-200
- Epiphone J-200 for Nashville tuning
Amps
- Fender Deluxe custom clone, made by bandmate Eric Swanson
- Fender '59 Bassman reissue
Effects
- Big Ear n.y.c. Frank Boost
- Roland RE-20 Space Echo
- Electro-Harmonix MEL9
- Vintage A/DA Flanger
- Maestro Rhythm King drum machine
- Jim Dunlop Volume Pedal
- Big Ear Pedals Elle reverb
- Ernie Ball Cobalt (.011 and .012 sets, for electric)
- Ernie Ball Everlast custom sets (.013, .017, .026, .035, .045, .056)
- Jim Dunlop .50 mm
- Jim Dunlop heavy brass slide or glass bottle
"On 'Closer,' I played everything except for the pedal steel," Nash says of Topaz's second song. "I played every instrument at some point on the whole record: piano, lead guitar solos, almost all the harmonies. Except for the ooh ooh, and shalala harmonies, it was just by myself, over time.
"It felt beautifully simple," he says. "I was growing with the space, the environment, and the resources I had. It gave me empowerment, just like the plumbing. That was an unknown. I didn't ever expect that I would do emergency plumbing out of necessity [laughs]."
Nash didn't waste his new-found empowerment. From Sam Cooke-style soul to the fuzzed-out melody driving "Down in the Country," Topaz feels remarkably personal and complete, even while paying tribute to his favorite bands from the 1970s. And it does so while maintaining his trademark troubadour-from-outer-space sound.
"Music is about creating an experience," says Nash. "Albums are like movies for the ears. And songs are like chapters in a book. You shouldn't get everything in one song. You get it in the collection of them. The collection is the experience."
Israel Nash thrives on connecting with live audiences. "Music, except for this year, is also such a social thing," he says. "I love that. It keeps me alive!"
Photo by Matt Condon
Nash's opinion is no doubt influenced by the bands from his favorite decade in music. Influences like Pink Floyd—which he lovingly refers to as "The Floyd"—pervade the album. "The Floyd is the epitome of headphone records. You put on an album and get locked in," Nash says. "And maybe, on 'Dividing Lines,' someone will hear more of the soul or funk element. But by the end, it's full-on Floyd! There's a massive cacophony of stuff and guitar solos. The Stones did that, too."
Pink Floyd and Rolling Stones DNA doesn't stop there. Nash also makes heavy use of pedal steel and slide guitar throughout Topaz. The way he sees it, it's a key to finding his transcendental sound.
"There's just something so emotional about that instrument," says Nash. "It's like church in a box. I mean, you could just listen to Eric [Swanson, Nash's bandmate] play pedal steel by itself and feel you saw the face of God."
With such a high view of the instrument, it's no surprise that it's often front and center in Nash's music. But keeping with Topaz's DIY ethic, much of the slide you hear on the record is actually Nash running his trusty Gretsch White Falcon through a wash of delay.
"Guitar is pretty much always where a song starts," Nash says. "It's just such a beautiful instrument to find a melody and to find a rhythm. It's a powerful place to start. That's where you write a song. The kick-drum pattern usually comes from a strumming pattern.""When you're in a room of people at a rock show, those are people that will never be assembled in that room again."
From there, Nash begins to build. The first step is marrying his acoustic strumming with a cranked electric. Each tone is carefully crafted for the song at hand, but emanates from a surprisingly small collection of guitars and, usually, one very loud amp.
"Sometimes I like to pick up an electric guitar and just have it fucking cranked," he says. "The guitar just doesn't feel right until it's up to about 4 on my Fender Bassman. No pedals. Just a hollowbody Gretsch. That Gretsch White Falcon is as important to me as my acoustic."
Nash's White Falcon is ever-present. It's also the main guitar you'll see slung around his shoulders onstage. He loves it so much that when the Fender Custom Shop built Nash a one-off Stratocaster, it was decked out in a white body, gold inlays, and gold hardware. Add in a Les Paul Studio for most of his leads, and that's all he needed to craft Topaz's electric soundscapes.
Nash's other main guitar is his time-tested Gibson J-200 acoustic which lays the rhythmic foundation for nearly every song on Topaz. But unlike the White Falcon, the J-200 is generally only used in the studio.
"It's been all over the world," says Nash. "But live, it's only electric. I might have an acoustic and do a song or two. But I just can't get into it on a stage without the electric. I want to feel it in my feet."
"Guitar is pretty much always where a song starts," says Israel Nash. His Gretsch White Falcon is his live companion, as seen here in his performance at the 2018 Hopscotch Music Festival.
Photo by Matt Condon
Though it features Nash's tried-and-true stable of guitars, Topaz broke with previous albums in the amp department. A custom, handwired Fender Deluxe clone (built by Eric Swanson) converted Nash into a bona fide small-amp guy.
"I love big amps! That's what I want onstage," Nash exclaimed. "For years, I wanted only that. But when you start getting into smaller amps, you find the control and the tone that you can get out of them are a pretty big deal."
It was a big enough deal that Swanson's Deluxe clone was the only amp used on Topaz. And whether plugging straight into his Neve console for a Beatles-esque fuzz or pushing his low-gain Big Ear Frank Boost pedal to sound like a trombone, everything else was up to experimentation.
"Lately, I like running two delays together for a nice ambient thing," Nash says. "My favorite has got to be the [Roland] Space Echo. I love the analog stuff. I like to use that also on vocals, on tons of stuff. Just patch it through anything."
Nash's sonic adventures also translate to live performance. Watch his solo YouTube delivery of "Canyonheart" and you'll hear beautiful, ethereal textures not normally associated with acoustic solo acts.YouTube It
With a little creative guitar signal routing, Nash turns a solo acoustic performance of his song "Canyonheart" into an ambient and emotional journey.
"I'm getting tired of just being a guy with an acoustic guitar," Nash explains. "So I split the guitar's signal with an ABY pedal and ran into the Electro-Harmonix MEL9 pedal. I also had a DI and a mic on the acoustic. I used a volume pedal before the MEL9, so I could make little swells and control it."
This sort of sonic experimentation makes it clear that Nash puts the song and the experience first, and finds passion in the process of creation.
"I always looked at myself as a songwriter first. It was one of those things in my whole life that just felt like it was the only option," he says. "Happiness, being creative, using my talents, making a living—all those things come down to making songs and albums."
Though the past year has been a struggle for everyone, Topaz is what can happen when an artist turns adversity and setbacks into art. But getting the album out into the world is only the first step for Nash. Now, it's about continuing to create and watching his music bring people together.
"I'm just starting to see a world that'll maybe look a little more familiar than it has been," he shares. "And the passions that inspired me and keep growing as I get older are to have fans that want to hear this and put it in their lives. I've had a fan that started playing guitar because he was inspired. Now, he and his dad play guitar every Thursday on the porch. It's beautiful. It's from those songs. They start so private and become collective, and I like that a lot. I like being a part of something."