Don Heffington Roots-rock drummer BORN 1950
Don Heffington’s résumé is a working musician’s pipe dream: Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne, Dave Alvin, Dwight Yoakam, The Wallflowers and many others. The Los Angeles native was taught drumming by his grandmother and played in a jazz quintet at 15, inspired by seeing John Coltrane live. Reflecting his stubborn diversity, he also fell in love with country music, and in the 1980s was a founding member of the band Lone Justice, the Maria McKee-fronted country-punkers thought to be destined for next-big-thingdom, only to be mismanaged. Heffington moved on, most famously playing with Dylan on the original tracks transformed into the classic Brownsville Girl. Recently he’d been blending folk and jazz, writing and singing originals such as John Coltrane On The Jukebox. “Don always made percussion an integral part of the conversation,” says collaborator and friend Van Dyke Parks. “He wasn’t a slave to genres.”
Michael Simmons