They just needed a third guitarist, but in Jason Isbell, the Drive-By Truckers got a whole lot more.
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After completing their audacious double album “Southern Rock Opera” in 2001, singer-guitarists Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley discovered a young kindred spirit, steeped in Muscle Shoals soul and Southern Gothic literature, to help take their band to the next level.
“They knew going in that I was a songwriter, and I wasn’t going to devote all my time to something where I couldn’t do what I wanted to do creatively,” says Isbell, 26.
The new lineup–now with three accomplished frontmen plus drummer Brad Morgan and Shonna Tucker, Isbell’s wife, on bass–has brought critical raves for the albums “Decoration Day” and “The Dirty South,” high-profile TV appearances and a tour.
Like his older bandmates, Isbell grew up around Muscle Shoals, Ala., where artists like Aretha Franklin and Paul Simon made classic records with a band of soulful white cats that included Hood’s father, bassist David Hood.
As teenagers, Isbell and Tucker got to rub elbows with hometown heroes such as the elder Hood and keyboard ace Spooner Oldham.
Those veterans “were very open to us when we were young musicians and paid more attention to us than probably they had to,” Isbell says.
He left home to study at the University of Memphis. He got a degree in English, focusing on creative writing, but he says he learned some of his most valuable lessons outside the classroom when members of the Memphis basketball team would bring their hip-hop records to his place and get him to play along.
“There’d be, like, 15 or 20 big, huge black guys sitting around in my dorm room, and I’d be sitting in the middle, playing guitar, smoking blunts with them,” Isbell says. “That probably had a lot to do with my musical development right there.”
That love of hip-hop allows him to fit right in with the Drive-By Truckers, whose affection for the genre is evident in the title of their latest CD, “The Dirty South,” on one level a shoutout to the movement that spawned Southern rappers like the Goodie Mob and OutKast.
“If we could make hip-hop music and do it convincingly, we would,” Isbell says. “I think that may be out of our realm. We do like to give nods to it just because we appreciate it so much, but I’m not going to try to rap, you know?”
Isbell got his break when Hood and Cooley, who began playing together in the band Adam’s House Cat in 1985, invited him to fill a sudden vacancy.
“It was good to join a group of people that already knew what they were doing,” Isbell says. “If we’d all been kids, then it probably would have been a whole lot more difficult to make this being on the road work out.”
Isbell quickly made his presence felt by writing two songs, including the title track, for the band’s next album, “Decoration Day,” and four on last year’s “Dirty South,” including the anthemic single “Never Gonna Change.”
Isbell’s solo debut, produced by Hood, is set to come out this summer on the Truckers’ label, New West. “Sirens of the Ditch” will feature appearances by his fellow Truckers as well as David Hood and Spooner Oldham. Isbell says it features shorter, more pop-oriented songs than the Truckers’ work.
If the record becomes a hit, it won’t mean the end of his tenure with the Truckers, Isbell says.
“It’s become such a force in my life that it’s pretty difficult to imagine things without this band,” he says. “No matter what happens, I think it’ll be something that we never quit doing.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Kris Karnopp ([email protected])