Deke Dickerson & The Whippersnappers

Deke Dickerson & The Whippersnappers

“It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it,” claims journeyman musician/singer/entertainer Deke Dickerson. As usual, Dickerson adds dry wit to a serious proclamation of his career intent: keeping America’s roots music alive while interjecting new creativity—a blood transfusion, if you will—into genres of music that flourished in decades previous. Such efforts have rewarded him with the Ameripolitan “Musician of the Year” award, among other accolades. 

Deke Dickerson is 55 years old and has been carrying the torch since he was 13, playing in his first rockabilly band in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. After moving to Los Angeles at the age of 22, he carved out a niche for himself in Tinseltown. In addition to playing in his primary band, Deke Dickerson and the Ecco-Fonics, as well as his newest group, Deke Dickerson and the Whippersnappers, Dickerson has provided rootsy music for a slew of television shows and movie projects (including scoring the music for Johnny Knoxville’s Paramount Pictures film Action Point). 

“This music isn’t a cartoon to me, or some weird retro thing to be laughed at,” states Dickerson. “This is the great music of the American 20th-century experience: rock and roll, rockabilly, Western swing, rhythm and blues, surf music, garage, punk. It’s every bit as vital and important as jazz or classical; it just hasn’t gotten its due yet. There has to be somebody out there waving the flag for this music. Wherever I go, anywhere on the planet, people love this music, yet it’s kept out of the mainstream media simply because it’s considered ‘old.’” 

Dickerson’s new releases showcase his versatility as well as his desire to touch all bases in the roots music pantheon. In recent years he has recorded with such luminaries as Marty Stuart’s Fabulous Superlatives, Canadian wildman Bloodshot Bill, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s original drummer, J. M. Van Eaton (at Sun Studios in Memphis). He released an album of vocal versions of surf instrumentals, Sing the Instrumental Favorites, with the popular surf act Los Straitjackets. He released an all-rockabilly album, Echosonic Eldorado, that sounds as if it could have come out of Sun Studios in Memphis circa 1956. He released an album with the legendary surf group the Trashmen, of “Surfin’ Bird” fame, Bringing Back the Trash, that is every bit as wild and crazed as the Trashmen’s recordings from the early 1960s. And he traveled to Memphis to record the EP Soul Meets Country with blues/R&B sensation Nikki Hill, backed by the Bo-Keys, an all-star group made up of legendary Memphis soul musicians and top-of-the-heap younger players. Such versatility has endeared Dickerson to fans and impressed music journalists as well. 

During the pandemic lockdown of 2020, Dickerson produced a series of more than fifty “quarantine videos,” playing all the instruments in his home recording studio. “This weird time in history gave me the chance to tackle a lot of things I always wanted to do, but never had the time for,” Dickerson says. The videos include Brian Wilson–style productions, Bakersfield country, and four-part harmony gospel numbers, adding to the wide swath of American roots music that Dickerson has covered over the years. “Strangely enough, this period in my life has been really rewarding, and I think my fans have enjoyed seeing this side of me as well. After all, we’ve all been in this COVID-19 thing together, so it’s been a shared experience, and I find myself connecting with my fans on a more personal level this way.” 

Dickerson has his own signature guitar, manufactured by the Hallmark Guitar Company of Maryland. 

Dickerson’s official biography of guitar legend Merle Travis will be in bookstores soon. He also writes for several guitar magazines and had two books published by Voyageur Press, The Strat in the Attic and The Strat in the Attic 2. Dickerson is well known as a historian of roots music and regularly contributes liner notes to reissue projects for such labels as Capitol, RCA, Bear Family, and Sundazed. 

Two of Dickerson’s songs are featured in the Cars Land ride at Disney’s California Adventure theme park. 

“The best part about doing what I do,” proclaims Dickerson, “is that I’ve always been able to do exactly what I wanted to do. People don’t realize that all these acts on major labels have a stylist telling them how to dress, or a guy in a boardroom telling them they should record a disco Christmas song. I’ve managed to call all the shots in my career, stay completely independent and creative, and carve a deep niche for the music that I love. Very few artists in the world can say that.”