Mississippi Blues and Beyond Color the Allstars’ Tapestry

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.

They come to this music naturally, having grown up in northern Mississippi. But they also have a pedigree as the sons of Jim Dickinson, a producer and musician who’s participated in key explorations by Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin and the Replacements.

With that background, the All-stars’ scope Tuesday reached beyond blues purism for fluid excursions that recalled the Allman Brothers and ‘60s psychedelic blues jams, picking up where the original Paul Butterfield Blues Band or very early Steve Miller Band left off.

Though the building blocks of the Allstars’ music are clearly identifiable, the group is well on its way to a truly distinctive construction of its own. Watch out.