Gravedigger's Blues

You are locked into The Zoo, the listener-supported, commercial-free revival of KZEW, and the next cut is built for people who still believe a guitar can carry a whole weather system. This is Leroy Powell And The Messengers, and the song is "Gravedigger's Blues," pulled off the 2010 album Atlantis. Six minutes and five seconds. Track seven. No filler, no polite fade, no request that you behave yourself in the front row. If you have been riding with us over at thezoorocks.com, you already know the station lives on deep cuts, artist stories, and the kind of album rock that used to own a Dallas dial. File this one right next to the Skynyrd, the Allmans, and the stretches when the Dead wandered off the map and took the room with them.

Powell comes out of California with a guitar in his hands early and a radio that never settled on one station. The official trail he keeps at leroypowell.com sketches the flight path plain enough: campfire songs first, then Waylon Jennings, Black Sabbath, John Coltrane, and Gram Parsons all arguing in the same head. That argument is the whole career. He is a singer, a writer, a guitarist, and a producer, the kind of player who can sit in a country session and still leave a fuzz pedal under the chair. Nashville eventually got him, but the California dirt never quite washed off. By the time Atlantis landed, he had already done the outlaw apprenticeship the hard way, on the road and in the room, not on a press release.

The résumé is the part that throws people. Powell spent the middle of the 2000s as the guitar man in Shooter Jennings and the .357s, the band behind Put the "O" Back in Country. That is Waylon's son, outlaw country with the amps turned up, and Powell was in the core of it, writing and playing, not waving from the side of the stage. Around the same stretch he crossed paths with David Allan Coe and Billy Joe Shaver, and he has been credited on the axe with Lynyrd Skynyrd and Dickey Betts. Later session books put him on records by Sturgill Simpson, Travis Tritt, Jamey Johnson, and Reba McEntire, plus steel, harmonica, and guitar work that does not fit in one bin. One Atlanta writer, sizing up Atlantis, said Powell was so dug into classic rock that he made the Black Crowes sound like a teen-pop act. That is a line with some teeth on it, and the record earns it.

The Messengers are the band that let him stop being the hired gun and start building his own planet. Atlantis is the first full statement with that name on the jacket. Dean Tomasek is the other pillar: bass, co-producer with Powell, and the hand behind the artwork. Tomasek had already done time in Bare Jr. and on Will Hoge records, and he is the kind of bass player fans still mention by name when they talk about seeing this band live. Christopher Williams holds the drums. The album was an independent release, barcode and all, fourteen songs, a little over an hour, produced by Powell and Tomasek and built to be played loud. The sequence runs from "I Ain't Human" and "Tumblin' Down" through "Telluride," "Break It Easy," "It's Our Turn Now," and a seven-minute "Evil," before "Gravedigger's Blues" steps up. After that come "The House Is Rockin'," "Family Tree," "Look Out World (I'm Coming)," and the long walk home through "When The Morning Comes" and "Song For You." Southern rock is the label on the sleeve. The music inside does not stay in the label.

"Gravedigger's Blues" is the one that tells you what kind of record you bought. A German rock desk, reviewing Atlantis, put it simply: where it says blues, there is blues. Heavy rhythm, electric guitars living in the space between psychedelia and twin-lead. That is the whole trick of the track. It does not hurry. The groove sits low and sticky, the kind of pulse that makes a room lean forward before anybody has sung a word. Then the guitars start answering each other, one line thick and a little mean, the other climbing into that twin-lead conversation Southern bands have been having since the Fillmore days. The solos are not decorations. They are the sermon. An Atlanta notice grouped this cut with "Evil" and said both were psychedelic enough, and solo-heavy enough, to pull a Deadhead across the aisle. That is fair. There is a jam-band nerve in the way the song refuses to resolve on schedule, and there is a hard-rock shoulder in the riff that keeps it from floating off into noodling. Six minutes is exactly the right length. Any shorter and you lose the weather. Any longer and you lose the shovel.

The title does the work a good title is supposed to do. A gravedigger is not a poet and not a preacher. He is the man with the practical job at the end of the story, and a blues with his name on it is not asking you for sympathy. It is asking you to stand at the edge of the hole and listen. Powell does not waste the setup on a history lesson. The track sits in the middle of an album named Atlantis, which already tells you the band was thinking in lost worlds and deep water, not in radio formats. Fans who caught the show in Atlanta in the summer of 2011 came away talking about heart, backing vocals, and Tomasek playing bass like he meant to move the building. Years later the band was still dragging "Gravedigger's Blues" out at guitar blowouts, which is the only review that matters: if a song still works when the monitors are hot and the crowd is close, it was never a studio trick.

Atlantis did not close the book. The Messengers kept going, into The Snowblind Moonshine Deathride, then Life And Death, then the 2015 set The Overlords of the Cosmic Revelation, where the country bones and the space-rock nerve finally locked into the same orbit. Tomasek stayed on bass, writing, and artwork. Powell kept the session chair warm and, with Tim Jones, built Whiskey Wolves of the West, a side road that Rolling Stone Country noticed and Stagecoach put on a big stage. None of that later mythology erases the 2010 record. If anything, Atlantis is the door. You can hear the outlaw country schooling, the Sabbath weight, the Parsons ache, and the twin-guitar religion all trying to sit in the same van. "Gravedigger's Blues" is where they stop arguing and start digging.

That is the Zoo argument, same as it ever was. Not the single. Not the trend. The track that shows you who the player is when nobody is counting spins. Powell still keeps the lights on out in public: the page at facebook.com/leroywpowell calls the whole trip Americana acid rock and modern classic country out of Nashville, which is about as honest a tag as a bio box can hold. The pictures and the road notes live at instagram.com/leroypowellmusic, and the short dispatches sit with @leroypowell. No polished fan shrine required. The catalog is the shrine. Turn it up, leave the format at the door, and let the shovel hit dirt.