Southern Soul Assembly ranges from Cajun soul to swamp rock songs, stories
When JJ Grey suggested four years ago that he wanted to do an acoustic tour, his manager quickly upped the ante.
“He said, ‘Why not put together a singersongwriter-thing-in-the-round, and he just started naming off people.’ I was like count me in, let’s do it!” Mr. Grey says.
And so began the Southern Soul Assembly, starting in March 2014, which puts the singer-guitarist from Jacksonville, Fla., on stage with Marc Broussard, Anders Osborne and Luther Dickinson to celebrate their Southern culture with songs and stories.
“We’re like siblings from the same sort of musical parents,” Mr. Grey says, “but just like brothers and sisters you always turn out differently, which is so cool.”
Mr. Broussard, the youngest of the crew at 35, is a smooth Bayou soul singer who made his major-label debut in 2004 and has charted on the Hot Adult Top 40. The 44-year-old Dickinson, the Memphis-born son of famed producer and pianist Jim Dickinson, is the frontman of blues-rockers the North Mississippi Allstars and a former member of the Black Crowes. The Swedishborn Osborne, 50, left home at 16 and settled in New Orleans three years later to play gritty Southern blues.
“As far as I’m concerned, he’s as Southern as anybody,” Mr. Grey says. “We were talking the other day, what was Thomas Jefferson 15 minutes before they signed the Declaration of Independence? He wasn’t an American, so it’s kind of the same thing.”
Mr. Grey, who formed JJ Grey & Mofro in the late ‘90s and released two albums on Fog City Records in the early ‘00s before moving to Alligator Records in 2007, has inherited the label of “swamp rock.”
“People say that and that’s not something I ever bestowed upon myself,” he explains. “I was born and raised in the swamp and I like a lot of sounds that I consider swampy — like Jerry Reed is one of my favorite swamp dudes, but everything he did wasn’t necessarily swampy. Or Tony Joe White, that’s another one of my favorites. But that said, Creedence Clearwater Revival from San Francisco sounded swampy. There ARE swamps in the East Bay. I’ve never been able to put my finger on it, but it’s where I’m from and I guess that’s why people came up with that moniker.”
It wasn’t his early musical calling. In his surfer days, he gravitated toward punk and New Wave.
“They say you spend the first half of your life running from home and the last half running back,” he says. “I mean, [Southern] music was always part of my life, but there was a point where you think you want to be Adam Ant or somebody like that. You want to be someone else, you don’t want to be yourself. That’s true for anybody anywhere. … I finally found out I don’t know who I am, I’ll never know who I am, and I’m ecstatic about that.”
But what he realized in his early musical ventures was, “I’m from the South, so whatever I do sounds Southern. I guess soul music, old-school soul reggae was always in the periphery. I would rather have been Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys, a band I really liked and still do, but I wouldn’t be able to sustain that every day of my life because I’m not Jello Biafra, so you just be you, and that’s effortless.”
JJ being Jello also would have made it more difficult to get into a circle with the guys from Southern Soul Assembly, who require no prep or rehearsal to do their thing.
“We just get on stage and watch what each other’s hands are doing, and just have fun with it,” he says. “When you get guys like that, they know music, so they just follow along. They’re really great at what they do. That said, all of us have been exposed to or have roots in what people like to call the jam-band scene.”
And when he says “jam-band,” he knows he’s throwing out a label that’s even more loaded with presumptions.
“I don’t know what a jam band is, per se, because it’s so varied. I played at the first Bonnaroo and the third Bonnaroo, and the third one I saw the Blind Boys of Alabama, all kinds of things. In retrospect, I realize that Jimi Hendrix would have been called a jam band and the Allman Brothers would be called a jam band. Any band that plays a song that’s longer than 2:45 and takes chances musically on stage would be called a jam band. We all play in our bands where we open up and take chances, and when you do that you can play with anybody anytime.”
Asked if going on stage with three fellow singer-songwriters makes him lift up his game a bit, he says, “No, I don’t think so, because the guys I play with all the time [in Mofro], they bring an A-game too, and even though it’s my own thing, I don’t try to micromanage people, so they do what they do. So, I’m used to that, and playing with these guys, they bring their A-game, too. And by myself, I’m singing all night, so it is cool to sit back and listen to people and be totally inspired and blown away by what they do.”
Down the road, they might record something together, but for now, he says, “We do this for fun and to hang out.”