Soul Journey
Matt Patton’s musical life has taken him from Curry Church of God to the stage at Red Rocks Auditorium. Now the bass player for Drive-By Truckers opens up about his career, his musical influences, and the people who shaped him.
Words and Images by Al Blanton
The Mississippi-based Southern rock band, Drive-By Truckers, were recording a new album in Memphis a few years ago when they got wind that a pair of rock n’ roll biographers were in town. Not wanting to disturb the recording session, the biographers respectfully asked if they might stop by the studio to look around. The band members of the Truckers, excited because they recognized the names of the biographers, responded with a collective ‘yes.’ The Truckers resumed their session and had almost forgotten about the visitors when lead singer Patterson Hood elatedly stuck his head back in the session and dropped an unexpected thunderbolt: “Mick Jagger is here.”
“It really was like Rock N’ Roll Jesus had walked in,” recalls the Truckers’ bassist and Jasper native Matt Patton from his studio in Water Valley, Mississippi.
After Hood heralded the news, the band stopped playing and walked into the break room, where the biographers had gathered with Mick and his hefty team of security. Patton noted that the English rocker and lead singer of the Rolling Stones was “pleasant” during a quick photo shoot with the band.
If there were a star struck moment in Patton’s musical life, this was it. But there have been many more vignettes across the years that have made a more profound impact on him.
The genesis of Matt’s musical inspiration is the church. He first got into music long ago at Curry Church of God, where he sang in the church choir and played guitar. His transition to bass guitar, however, was perhaps a little more sudden than he’d anticipated. “One morning the preacher walked in and said, “We’ve got to have a bass player this morning,’” Matt recalls. “Everyone looks at me, and I said, ‘I play guitar.’ They said, ‘You play bass now.”
Thankfully for Matt, Miss Tammy Wood was the lovely and talented piano player who helped him along and provided the doses of encouragement a 14-year-old kid needed. “She said ‘Just listen to what my left hand is doing and you try to do that. That’s what the bass does,’” Matt said.
In the end, the combination of Tammy’s heartsease and the church’s musical power served as the primers for Matt’s journey. “That sort of pew-jumping, lively style of Gospel that the Pentecostal churches would play was the foundation for the blues music, the country music, the rock n’ roll music that I would end up playing,” Matt said. “You don’t just go from note to note, you kind of grease your way over there and everything in between like a Gospel player.”
In high school, while Matt might have seemed quiet and reserved to one crowd, his personality flourished amid those who shared a love for music. Many days were spent at the cynosure of Rock N’ Roll aficionados, Sound Shop in the Jasper Mall, leafing through the special order catalog and bugging the workers, or chitchatting with his, as he put it, “ragtag” friends late at night at the popular gathering place, Waffle House.
Besides Tammy, other Jasperites fueled Matt’s yearning for a life among chords. The first was local DJ and veteran of the industry, Woody Wilson, who would often appear majestically on those long nights at Waffle House. “Here comes a guy that’s probably just tiptoed into middle age but he looks fresh as a rose,” Matt recalls of Woody. “He’s got like a ringer tee with stripes and he looks like the Beach Boys and he looks unaffected by middle of the night Jasper—drunks and people nursing hangovers and some ragtag kids. He looks immune to all of this. And I looked at Woody and I was like, ‘There’s a guy who loves music, and he’s figured out a way to make it work for him.’ So I wanted to know about that.”
The second was Van Farris, who lured curious musicians to his coterie with flyers strategically placed all over town. “Me and my friends started seeing those flyers everywhere. They said, ‘Are you interested in seeing world new wave punk exotic rock music?’ and had these drawings on them,” Matt said. “I’d never seen anything like that. And we were like, ‘yeah.’” As a guy 10 years Matt’s senior who’d busted out of the Jasper bubble and had seen a little bit of the world, Farris became a big brother figure, turning the young guitarist on to this exotic crazy music with which he was fascinated. Farris and Matt, along with fellow artist James McCauley, eventually cobbled together a band called Model Citizen. Farris continued to be a keen influencer on Matt until his untimely passing in 2001.
“I never really got over that,” Matt says.
After graduating from the University of Alabama in human environmental sciences, Matt toured with several acts until a period of burnout threatened his musical career. Returning to Jasper to gather himself, he began working for his father’s surveying business. That eventually led to a job with the Walker County Health Department, where he was putting his degree to use by inspecting public health concerns, anything from water percolation to animal bites.
Around that time, he’d become fascinated with soul music and began searching for regional gigs. Eventually he tracked down a group of guys in Oxford, Mississippi, and began performing Stax (Think: Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, et al) and Motown music at wedding venues and dive bars.
One night after a show, the band emptied out at Ajax Diner, and Patton was introduced to a tall brunette named Megan who would eventually become his wife. He then began to feel a supernatural pull toward Oxford, and moved to Mississippi soon thereafter.
Working in water management, Matt was out on the job when he got a message that would change his life. “I got a text that the bass player for the Drive-By Truckers had quit and were going to need somebody new,” Matt said. “We were friendly with their organization, so I got in touch with the band. A week later they sent me their entire catalog on CD and I started learning their songs.”
Since Matt hooked up with the Truckers, the band has released three albums—English Oceans, American Band, and The Unraveling—and has played at America’s top venues, places like Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado; Ryman Auditorium in Nashville; Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia; and 40 Watt in Athens, Georgia. The Truckers have also rocked venues in Canada, the UK, Ireland, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Sweden.
Playing at Red Rocks, the exquisitely-carved auditorium just outside of Denver, did not disappoint. “It’s just the majesty of it in that natural setting,” Matt says. “I’ve been out front a few times to watch other bands…and it does sound great. I don’t really know if it sounds better than other great places, but you look around and it’s so beautiful. It lives up to it from a player’s perspective.”
Since Matt’s history of playing live had been confined to dive bars and house parties, initially there was an adjustment to playing larger venues like Red Rocks. He wasn’t used to the barricades that split the crowd from the band. “If you keep a lion in a cage that’s used to being at a dive bar or a house and you only move in that one little spot on stage, it took me a long time to get used to a bigger stage and a bigger building,” Matt said. “And I found that I didn’t miss the dive bars nearly as much as I missed the houses. I miss that, being able to see folks, feel them run up on you. I don’t like the sheer divide that divides our humanity. It feels like a million miles away.”
Now after years of touring, Matt has become much more comfortable, no matter the stage. He says that just because a venue is large or well known doesn’t necessarily make it a desirable place to play. “A poorly-run venue that sounds bad can be any size. There are a lot of nice looking rooms that are terrible experiences, and there are a lot of dumps that are marvelous experiences,” Matt suggests. (He cites The Nick in Birmingham as a smaller venue that’s as fun as any place—“It looks like a nightmare from the outside, but it might be the best sounding room in Birmingham. They kind of put the money where it counted for their clientele. The beer is cold and the music is loud and it sounds great.”)
But it’s not just playing with the Truckers that fully encapsulates Matt’s musical portfolio. A few years ago, he purchased Dial Back Sound, a recording studio founded by Bruce Watson, co-founder of Fat Possom Records in Oxford. Watson, who once had an idea to bring the regional sound of the blues to the forefront, began inviting homespun artists to the area and investing time and money into them. Along the way, Watson became a mentor to Matt and encouraged him to buy the studio. “He told me if I waited around for everything to make sense, none of this would have ever happened,” Matt said.
Patton has a partner in the venture, Bronson Tew, but says that the financial risk is all his.
And even though it’s an old school concept, Matt is eking out a place in the recording industry landscape from Water Valley, Mississippi. “When home recording is becoming so popular, people will still travel to this spot to do the way that they did it 40 years ago.”
The coronavirus pandemic changed things in 2020 and the band stopped playing live gigs, but Matt hopes the Truckers will begin touring again by 2021. Until then, he continues to record music in his studio and travel back to his hometown of on occasion.
If he is back in Jasper, and you’re wondering where to find him, you might try Waffle House, where he’ll be sitting in a booth, talking music and reminiscing on the old days with a group of ragtag friends. 78