Afton Wolfe is Mississippi. Born in McComb, and growing up in Meridian, Hattiesburg, and Greenville, Mississippi, the roots of American music are in his DNA. Mississippi is the birthplace of at least three American art forms: country music, blues music, and rock and roll. Meridian is the birthplace of Jimmie Rodgers, while the Mississippi Delta is the birthplace of the blues, and the first rock n’ roll notes ever played according to intelligent music historians, came from Hattiesburg. Spending his musically formative years in and around New Orleans, where the humidity of the Mississippi combined with the Cajun seasonings, the jazz, zydeco, creole, and gospel music, his Mississippi roots coalesce to add resonance and depth to his blues/country/rock influences.
Wolfe’s first band experience was back in the late 90s with Hattiesburg post-alternative pop outfit Red Velvet Couch (1998 to 1999) where he developed his stage presence and production finesse while releasing his first album. After a short break, Wolfe returned with the avant-garde, instrumentally diverse Dollar Book Floyd (2001 to 2002), which featured Amy Lott, Tim Keith, and Mike Stokes on the pivotal album, Red and White. During this period country music and delta blues seeped into his musical playbook. After Dollar Book Floyd ended, Wolfe moved to Nashville and formed The Relief Effort, a rock power trio, with whom he recorded two records, Don’t Panic (2004) and At Your Mercy (2005).
After a hiatus from performing and recording, Wolfe wrote, composed, and sang all of the songs contained in Petronius’ Last Meal. Recorded in 2008, alcohol, academia, the quest for a better mix, a perfect album cover, and a voyage across the country to live in Washington kept this project on hold for over a decade. Finally, after a dozen years, the project was released in the throes of 2020. Dark, tense, and moody was the flavor of the 2020 summer season, and the EP, along with its two singles, “Slingshots” and “Interrogations,” fit the season too perfectly.
Using the momentum of Petronius’ Last Meal and the tension of the pandemic and surrounding climate to fuel his creativity again, Wolfe’s upcoming release Kings for Sale is the product of that. Defying genres while still being distinctly Afton, the new record was produced by Oz Fritz (Bill Laswell, Tom Waits, The Ramones, Bob Marley, Ginger Baker) and features an enviable assortment of great musicians, including Cary Hudson (Blue Mountain, Taylor Street Grocery Band), Daniel Seymour (David Olney, Tommy Womack), Adam “Ditch” Kurtz (Great Peacock, Carrus & Kurtz), Ben Babylon (SpoBro, Sir Please), Laura Rabell, Kristen Englenz, Blaise Hearn, and Rebecca Weiner Tompkins.
Glide is premiering the video for “Dirty Girl,” a raw and bluesy southern concoction that romps and rummages with a delta irrigated irritated kick. Wolfe makes like Van Morrison meeting RL Burnside and conjuring up a raw soulful brand of Americana blues.
“Dirty Girl” is a song about a road trip through Mississippi where the first stop on the road trip is Oxford, Mississippi where Afton reminisces about partying at Proud Larry’s and seeing Jimbo Mathus before having one too many at the Graduate in Oxford Square. Then in Clarksdale, Afton comes across the repass for the recently-deceased King of the Delta Blues, Robert “Bilbo” Walker. The adventure goes through a rainy cab in Jackson down to the Big Easy.
The song features Cary Hudson (acclaimed Blue Mountain frontman and Mississippi bluesman) on harmonica and bottleneck electric guitar (he is also heard at the beginning of the album version giving his hypothesis on the reason why Mississippi is so consistently a geographic center of spirituality. Ben Babylon plays piano, Seth Fox saxophone, Blaise Hearn on trumpet, Joey Dykes on trombone, and Daniel Seymour and Tommy Stangroom round out the rhythm section to take this song from the front porch of a shotgun house in the Delta to the thick spicy air of New Orleans, as the song gets progressively more Bon Temps as the odyssey gets further south down the Old Man.
“The song is about a road trip through Mississippi. The actual identity of the Dirty Girl is confidential but she was in direct harmony with the spirit of Mississippi that was revealed to me in that road trip – a spirit I had grown up in and was in my face all of my life, like the humidity. But it took going away for a long time to see it for what it actually was – the ghosts of American Music. ‘I took the long way home, like I always do.’ That line is the point of the song,” says Wolfe.
“The video was mainly shot driving down to, staying at, and coming back from The Shack Up Inn in Clarksdale, MS, which is just one of the stops on the trip in the song, but it was DIY and COVID by the time I was shooting the video.”
Still Photo by Anana Kaye.
Live pic by John Partipilo.
