Tomorrow night at Dave’s Dark Horse Tavern the Starkville band Super Star Donkey Donkey will open for Wiley and the Checkmates.
“We’re sort of and sort of not a new band,” said Ming Donkey. Upright bassist Eugene Donkey lives in Memphis, he and Ming work together a lot.
“I would call our sound Gothic Southern Rock,” Ming says. Both musicians origins are garage rock, but they’re heaviest influences are delta and hill country.
Ming said that he likes to pull his sound from Alan Lomax’s recordings. Lomax was an ethnomusicologist known for traveling the Appalachian to record songs by families who lived far out of town.
“He wanted to preserve the songs passed down from higher generations,” Ming said.
He and Eugene have played together in White Trash Superman and The River Baggers, but in their fairly new band they work with almost every genre. Punk, Blues and the energy and desperateness of country stand out the most.
Ming plays the lead guitar, harmonica, and beats on a drum with a cowbell. “When Eugene starts swinging that bass, I start kicking it into high gear,” Ming said.
“We play off each other well,” he added.
Wiley and the Check Mates is an Oxford-based band with 10 of its original songs on its new CD, Introducing Wiley and The Checkmates. This classic soul was recorded with minimal drum amplifying and stereo panning, recorded onto a vintage two-inc tape machine. In the ’60s Wiley wrote the fourth song called, “Eyes of the World.”
In 1960 the band took shape when Herbert Wiley started leading them, touring Memphis bars and Mississippi juke joints. In the early ’70s Percy Sledge took him touring with him from Memphis to Chicago. In the mid ’70s Herbert, like the rest of the band, quit to marry and raise four children, taking over his father’s shoe shop.
But in 2002, he overheard George Seldon playing at the Longshot Bar adjacent to the Wiley Shoe Shop.
He tells journalist Scott Barretta, “I had heard them practicing one day, and I wanted to get back in it.” When Sheldon asked him if he wanted to start a band he decided to return after 25 years.
Now stemming from the sub-blues genres as before, they’ve modernized their sound with a little R&B and funk. With the drums, trumpet, flugelhorn, bass, guitar and keyboards, the band has plenty of dynamic to incorporate such wide variety of types.
Wiley, calling himself the “action man,” leads the band dressed in flamboyant sequins and jewels. Tomorrow night he’ll take the stage with a James Brown-like presence, always moving, always singing.