In the early 1920s a primal, howling sound shot out of the Mississippi Delta, bound in old-time spirituals and preached by a philandering virtuosi fugitive from divine justice.

In retrospect, much of it runs into a haze of benders and back-porch jam sessions centered on a basket of shared songs, familial heirlooms which offered a standardized reflection in which the tradition could view its evolution.

The result was a collection of intimate music that would come to revolve around communal blues haunts like Junior Kimbrough’s Juke Joint, closets full of sweat and smoke that crushed that collaborative electricity into combustion.

When Junior’s burned down in the late ’90s, as if mourning the loss of its founder, it left a collection of musical moments special enough to bely the usual short life span.

The patriarchs of the scene were bluesmen like Otha Turner, Fred McDowell, John Hurt, and eventually R.L Burnside and Kimbrough – figures that traced their musical roots back to the sound’s primordial ooze, either in spirit or in cases like Burnside learning his chops from Muddy Waters and his neighbor Fred McDowell.

Point is, there was a linear thread that ran through the whole thing, a blues collective with its own insular warmth and identity.

People would eventually call it “Hill Country Blues.” When Fred McDowell died, among those at his funeral was Jim Dickinson – a savvy local producer and session musician who had collaborated with figures like Duane Allman, The Rolling Stones and Ry Cooder.

With him was his wife, Mary, pregnant with their first child, Luther, who was attending his first of what would be many childhood gatherings of the Hill Country elite.

Soon after Luther came Cody. For the eldest of the two, the event was a fitting prelude to a childhood running around among a modernized class of blues icons and listening to Black Flag and Husker Du records.

Soon, the two brothers formed a band – The North Mississippi Allstars.

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Eight years later, Luther Dickinson sits in a cramped dressing room in the back of New York’s Irving Plaza, rolling his own cigarettes with the natural placidity manifested exclusively by therapists and in parts of the deep south. He slinks back easily into his chair, nodding in solemn agreement with a thought he’s just had.

He calls Otha Turner one of his “greatest mentors,” and was able to offer his own thanks in producing the then 90-year-old patriarch’s debut album, “Everybody Hollerin’ Goat.”

While it would take most acts a career to jam that composite pathos of history, innovation, progeny and communal exchange into a meaningfully realized experience, the Allstars managed to come close in their recent Live at Bonnaroo release, detailing the band’s show-stealing 2004 set at the Tennessee music festival, which boasted acts ranging from The Dead and Steve Winwood to improv monarchs Medeski Martin and Wood and Trey Anastasio.

That afternoon saw the band’s original lineup, complete with part-time core member Duwayne Burnside, joined by his father R.L., brothers Gary and Cody, Jim Dickinson, and the Rising Fife and Drum Band, consisting of Turner’s grandchildren.

Widespread Panic’s Jo Jo Herman also joined in, as well as ex Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson. The entire group united under the banner of “The North Mississippi Hill Country Revue.”

“Our dad, it was so hot that day. He fainted right after the show, just passed out,” Dickinson recalls with a grin. “We were supposed to take a group picture, but we just got out of there and took him to the hotel. But he woke up in the pickup truck as we were going down that back road, and he said, ‘Well, I’m not the showman I used to be, I should have passed out on stage.'”

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Later that night the band opens its Irving Plaza set with a bruising treatment of “51 Phantom,” layering the surprisingly coarse growl of Dickinson’s lyrics over the bare-bones hostility of his brother’s drum work. It’s a caustic wakeup call, which segues easily into “Po Black Maddie,” an epic sonic tour through the band’s collective consciousness.

Dickinson might be a rock musician, but he’s a blues guitarist by nature and instinct, necessarily predisposed to constructing an instrumental voice; managing to produce one, as it happens, that you can pick out in a crowd, a call and response dialect that veers from viscous, syrupy drone to kineticized lap pedal steel whine to snapping back a yo-yo solo with the safety of those guttural Hill Country sneerings.

For the encore, The Allstars are joined by lap steel prodigy Robert Randolph, forming a semi-reunion of the trio (Luther, Randolph, and keyboard virtuoso John Medeski) that released the myth accruing sacred steel record The Word, which played no small role in Randolph’s swiftly ascending success. With the elder of the Dickinson brothers sporting his longtime friend’s trademark derby, the two exchange playful, fraternal licks as Cody works through an extended romp on his now infamous “electric washboard.”

“We always say, ‘World Boogie is coming,'” Dickinson had told me earlier, “and what that means to us is that black blues culture and crazy white boys like us just blending in and partying. That’s what Junior’s was like.

In the heyday there would be a room full of beautiful underage girls dancing with these gnarly old country dudes,” he laughed, “and that’s what it’s all about, in a way.” Behind them, The Rising Star Fife and Drum Band beat away ecstatically, as if to reassure the band of an idea they want to remember.