They have sold more records than a lot of pop stars who are much more famous than they will ever be, but they’re still another band from Akron, Ohio.
In early 2020, the Black Keys were coming off a long stretch on the road, playing sold-out arenas in support of “Let’s Rock,” their first album in five years. The duo were reinvigorated by their hiatus, playing live shows with the kind of frenetic energy that had become their trademark. But in the small window after the tour and before the pandemic gripped the United States, they were eager to ground themselves in something more intimate, more familiar. So Dan Auerbach, the band’s singer, whose voice has a distinctive pathos, retreated back to Easy Eye Sound, his Nashville studio. He wanted to play the music that captivated him as a teenager and initially connected him and his bandmate, Patrick Carney: the Mississippi blues.
Auerbach invited the blues players Kenny Brown and Eric Deaton to come up from northern Mississippi to work on a Robert Finley album that he was producing, “Sharecropper’s Son.” After the sessions, the three of them sat in the snug center room at Easy Eye and jammed on some songs by the Delta bluesmen Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside (Deaton and Brown had known and made music with them both). When the songs seemed as if they were becoming something greater, Auerbach called Carney and told him he had to get to the studio. In 10 hours, over two days, the group made what became their latest album, “Delta Kream,” which consists entirely of Delta and Mississippi Hill Country blues covers.
From the outside, Easy Eye is a nondescript building on a street that looks like one you may have seen in your town: gas stations, chain stores, one hectic intersection tying it all together. But inside it’s eccentric, a kind of museum. There’s massive old equipment, a solid-state mixing board, an old drum from an Ohio fire department, historic guitars, like Mississippi Fred MacDowell’s red Trini Lopez. Records line the top shelves along the walls and stretch far, including ones that Auerbach produced by blues legends like Jimmy (Duck) Holmes, established artists like Lana Del Rey, and up-and-coming ones like Marcus King and Yola, whose singing Auerbach couldn’t stop raving about. On a door to the left of the studio’s front entrance hangs a faded orange pennant that reads: AKRON, OHIO, the city where Auerbach and Carney were born and raised.
Auerbach, who is 42, had the now-familiar pandemic-era look of someone who has gone without a cut and a shave for a while, but he wore it with easy nonchalance. He invited me into the studio’s central room, to take a seat on a bench around a circle where the musicians were warming up. They seemed to settle into the reality that they were about to play music for an audience, albeit an audience of one, something that took on an almost holy tone a year into the pandemic. Carney wiggled his 6-foot-4 frame behind a compact drum set, a small logistical feat. Kenney Brown, gray-haired and lanky, quietly tinkered on his guitar — a beautiful old black machine that he later told me has been stolen twice. He’s a sonic and historical bridge. Auerbach and Carney, for all of their admiration of Junior Kimbrough, never got to meet him before he died in 1998.
Auerbach, slouched over an old Telecaster guitar, looked over at Deaton and asked, a little playfully but also not, “How does this one start?” Carney kicked into an opening beat and then stopped and then started again. It was a symphony of loose preparation, driven by spontaneity. When they finally started in on a song, it was R.L. Burnside’s “Goin’ Down South,” a seductive, slow-driving tune about obsession, about love, about leaving and staying. Deaton’s bass was hushed but heavy, like determined feet stomping around on an old floor. Auerbach’s guitar was the loudest, almost exhaling in sharp bursts of sound. Underneath, Carney’s drums poked tiny gaps in the wall of sound for Brown’s steady guitar to slip between with ease. It was miraculous to watch it all come together. The group played three more songs: “Louise,” “Coal Black Mattie,” “Poor Boy a Long Way From Home,” — each of them starting out a little tentative and then growing to an unstoppable swell by the middle.
These songs were the work of studied musicians who understand how the blues has transformed through time, through varied voices and eras. In the documentary “You See Me Laughin’,” Burnside plays an early-’70s version of “Goin’ Down South.” His grin is devilish, and he looks at the crowd as if he knows something they don’t. The song is hypnotic. There are only a few lyrics, and they drone together through their repetition: “you’llbemybabeeeeyoullbemybabeyoullbemybabeeeeeyoullbemybabe.” And then, slower: “I’ll do anything ya say.”
There’s another version of the song, from Burnside’s 1994 album, “Too Bad Jim,” which is fuller — more instrumentation, more pace. Garry Burnside, R.L.’s son, told me over the phone that this was one of his favorites of his father’s songs and spoke of the variation in how it has been played over the years. “Well, it’s got such a funky groove,” he said. “You stay in that groove, and you can do anything you want. You can add anything in that sliding groove you get. And he’s talking about coming home, Down South where it’s not chilly like Chicago.” At Easy Eye, I heard traces of both versions — the groove that Garry Burnside mentioned, and that sense of lyrical movement, words spilling into one another for short runs before vanishing again, letting the instrumentation take over.
To play any cover of any song requires both humility and immense confidence: the kind of precision and restraint that honors the music while building on its legacy. This isn’t the first time the Black Keys have gone down this road. In 2006, they released the EP “Chulahoma: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough.” When I asked Kimbrough’s son Kinney (a well-respected player in his own right) over the phone about the Keys’ new album, I could hear the smile in his voice. “They’re doing pretty good with it,” he began. “Listen, it is hard to play my dad’s music. I grew up playing it with the man, and I still can’t get it sometimes. So they’re doing all right for themselves here.”
The blues was born out of an oral tradition, of passing down ever-changing songs that are tied to previous ever-changing songs. Blues players who recorded enough for long enough often ended up recreating past versions of themselves. These are real, grounded origins, but what happens from there becomes fluid, reshaped depending on the generation of players, where people are from, what they most love about an interpretation of a song. In the Hill Country tradition, there are sons who play the songs of their fathers, for the love of the music they grew up playing, and the hope that some young folks around them will keep playing it. When I called Garry Burnside, there was a bounce in his voice. He’d just finished teaching a blues class to young students. But there are limits to how much and how far he can push his father’s music into the world.
It is hard for a genre, or a tradition, to completely die. Musical genres (like R.&B., for example) have been written off as no longer vital when people simply have not known where to look for them. But with the blues, there is a tangible sense of urgency — legends, keepers of stories and songs, have died. They have never had, and still don’t have, a mass audience. The Black Keys are big enough by now to act as a point of introduction to an entire group of fans who might not otherwise have access to this specific musical lineage.
The day after the band’s impromptu session, sitting around a table at Easy Eye with Auerbach and Carney, I asked about the future of the blues, how it could be maintained and who might maintain it. Auerbach flipped a lighter around in one hand and ran the other anxiously through his hair. He leaned forward in his chair, solemn but urgent. “Honestly, it could die out, and Kenney could be the last time you [expletive] hear it,” he began before pausing slightly and considering a slightly more optimistic angle. “It’s dire — young people don’t really give a [expletive]. But at the same time, were these guys ever truly successful? So what are we arguing about? If they were never successful, then who cares?”
And I get what he means — not “who cares?” as in, if no one cares then we’ll go quietly into the night. It’s the other way. If people think we’re dead and dying anyway, we’ll make as much noise as possible. We’ll rattle the cages of the graveyards and shake the spirits loose.
The Black Keys are familiar with vanishing and rebuilding. Sitting in front of the studio, we found ourselves immersed in a conversation about our shared home state, Ohio, and about nostalgia’s traps. In the early 1970s, Akron was still the rubber capital of the country. The biggest tire manufacturers were headquartered in the city, each of them employing thousands of workers. But Akron’s relationship with its rubber factories was becoming more tenuous. Competition from outside began to rise. There were strikes. The more durable radial tire became common, slowing the manufacture of new tires.
But as one legacy began to fade, another was being shaped. By the mid-1970s, Akron was in the midst of a musical revival. The Akron Sound was born out of an old rubber workers’ bar called the Crypt, which was acquired, after a strike, by the punk band Rubber City Rebels. Ex-rubber laborers and children of rubber laborers made the bar a destination for punk bands from all over the nation, but also for local talent, like the Numbers Band, Tin Huey, the Bizarros and, of course, Devo. Record-label scouts flooded the city, making big promises and plucking up local talent for national tours. Chrissie Hynde left Akron in 1973 and eventually went on to front the Pretenders.
But just as quickly as this musical flourishing began, it ended. By the early 1980s, most of those bands had been dropped by their labels after disappointing sales and tours. The Crypt closed in 1977, and many of the local bands left town. The Akron that Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney grew up in sat at the intersection of dwindling culture and dwindling industry. “All that [expletive] was way gone,” Carney said, waving a long, dismissive arm. Carney is a romantic when it comes to home, Auerbach more of a stern realist. When Carney got a faraway look in his eye mentioning an old Cleveland bar called Speak in Tongues, Auerbach interjected, shaking his head. “Pat talks about that place like it’s Mecca.” But Carney was undeterred, diving into stories of their shared upbringing.
“My father moved into Dan’s neighborhood when I was 9,” he began. “We got a house a couple houses down from where Dan lived. We didn’t know each other superwell, but we’d ride bikes.” From there, their stories spiraled, rebuilding the neighborhood and its cast of characters. There was the neighborhood jerk, the baseball-card hustler. Auerbach was into blues and soul, Carney into Devo and heavier rock, but one artist overlapped for them: R.L. Burnside. Carney found Burnside after falling down a rabbit hole while listening to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and Auerbach through an old blues sampler — the kind you might still see tucked in a discount bin at a record store. Burnside was an appealing player, someone who hid the complexities of his musicianship behind a facade of simplicity. His earliest recordings ignored chord changes and opted for one-chord vamps, which allowed for not only deeper and more flexible grooves but also space for his language, his voice, to be a song’s propulsive force.
After reuniting in Akron after college, the duo released “The Big Come Up” in 2002. It was an introduction to the band’s sonic passions. The first song, “Busted,” is an electric play on Burnside’s “Skinny Woman,” the second a cover of Junior Kimbrough’s “Do the Rump.” It’s the kind of album that might trick a listener into grabbing a friend and picking up whatever instrument is in reach, just to lay something down. It won the band critical buzz, and enough success to send them on a haphazardly arranged nationwide tour, punctuated by small failures and disappointments: getting calls that a venue was closed down the day of show, playing to eight people in Houston, fighting with girlfriends on pay phones.
A detour to Water Valley, Miss., to the headquarters of Fat Possum Records, changed the fate of the road-weary band. The label made its name in the early ’90s, seeking out blues players from northern Mississippi, some of whom who had never recorded before, including Burnside. In an office that was once an ersatz Taco Bell, the band met with Matthew Johnson and Bruce Watson, the label’s founders.
“They looked so young, young visitors to a bad planet,” Johnson told me. “Bruce was able to find them a show at the Long Shot in Oxford. I think one of the old cobwebbed deer heads fell on Dan. I remember the owner walking down downstairs from his apartment into the bar and saying something like: ‘They kinda suck. A bass player would help a lot.’”
Fat Possum still wanted to sign them. “Within two hours, they’re negotiating if we would take a 1982 Mercedes with bullet holes in it as part of our record contract,” Carney said. “Because they were trying to get the money down. They’re like, ‘How about maybe five grand and that car?’”
Carney and Auerbach left without signing a deal, but within a few months, despite being approached by high-end rock producers, they went with Fat Possum. “We’ve made a lot of accidentally smart decisions,” Carney said, “but one of them is to not sign to the label that would’ve given us more money than we’ve ever seen, or even imagined, and signed to a label run out of a Taco Bell in Mississippi.”
They recorded at a rapid pace, with 10 total releases between 2002 and 2011 (seven albums as a band, one collaborative album and two EPs), their sales creeping up with each release, crossing the platinum threshold in 2010 with “Brothers.” Their songs are regularly featured in car commercials and the N.C.A.A. tournament and have soundtracked any number of TV shows. Fame was sometimes distressing. Auerbach dealt with it by committing himself to nonstop work. Carney tended to speak intemperately and get into feuds (with Justin Bieber over comments made after the 2013 Grammys, and with Jack White, with whom the band has since reconciled). They had periods of tension, months when they would need to cool off and not speak. Their success and supposed rivalry have made them the butt of jokes — a recent meme from the satirical website “Hard Times” suggested they name their new song “Ford Commercial”; headlines during their five-year hiatus questioned whether they even liked each other.
But spending time with them, I sensed that their relationship was rooted in an affectionate but complex brotherhood. Wading for thoughts during silences in conversation, they looked to each other to supply language and fill in gaps. Now, older and perhaps more inward-facing than they once were, they joked about their conflicts, both internal and external. It’s clear that they take the crafting of their work seriously but are a little looser about how seriously they take themselves.
In the belly of the studio, Carney reflected on what brought the band full circle from the “Big Come Up” to “Delta Kream,” an album that to my ear has a similar sense of freedom, of experimentation, of feeling itself out as it unfolds. We were back at the table in the studio, back dwelling on the various traps and mercies of nostalgia. “When you come from a place like Akron, which is culturally vaporized, and you’re growing up in the shadow, even the jobs were vaporized.” He paused slightly here, and it was a pause I knew well, loving a place that is no longer like the place I heard it was, and is not even like the place I remember from my own youth. It can feel like holding a photo as it fades, a reverse Polaroid.
There’s an idea Carney returned to repeatedly, talking about the Black Keys as though they were still underdogs, still the band living out of cars and driving to already-canceled shows on hastily arranged tours. From the outside looking in, this feels materially untrue. The Black Keys have had chart-topping albums, have played sold-out shows domestically and abroad and have built up so much creative and social capital that they can do almost anything they want.
But it gradually became clear that Carney was engaging in a kind of anti-mythologizing, an attempt to keep the band close to their roots. He laughed very genuinely when telling me about the “Hard Times” meme, and some of the dust-ups the band has gotten into. He’s not ashamed of their ambitions. They’re in the odd cultural position of having sold more records, by now, than a lot of pop stars who are much more famous than they will ever be — which seems to fuel Carney’s eternal striver’s mentality. Carney talked about their pursuit of a No. 1 record, with the release of “Turn Blue” in 2014. For a few days it looked as if they’d be beaten to the top slot by Michael Jackson’s posthumous album “Xscape.” The idea of being outdone by a pop star who was no longer living frustrated Carney at the time.
“For me, it was like the underdog band from Akron trying to accomplish this,” he told me. “That’s where it came from.” But his perspective has softened somewhat. “We were up against Michael Jackson’s estate. But really what we’re up against is, like, the dude from Gary, Ind., who once had the same aspirations we did.”
There’s an old idea about how someone doesn’t play the blues, they have the blues, and through that possession, the music arises. To have the blues is not necessarily about being sad. It is about an understanding of what the world is capable of, just exactly how bad things can get. I’ve always believed that to have the blues is simply knowing how intensely you must barricade your door to keep the demons out. But you must first become intimate with the demons.
This is why within blues songs, there is an immense weight, but even more than that — particularly in the Hill Country — there is a sense of celebration, of praise. These are songs that get people moving out of their seats, songs not just about lost love, but about the glory of love’s returning. When Junior Kimbrough sings “Stay All Night,” the language drips with ache, but the ache is not sadness. It is the exhaustion of joyful longing, the same thing that settles deep into Marvin Gaye’s voice at the end of “Let’s Get It On,” when he’s pushed his pleading to its limits and he’s breathless with desire. Kimbrough, at the doorstep of desire and searching for the keys to the kingdom, moans, “Love me baby, love me girl.” And this is a song not about sadness, but about celebration of the potential for what might come, what might rest on the other side of a long night. These are the great blues songs. Suffering is the marathon; pleasure is the short sprint that happens during the in-between moments.
I’ve known elders or friends who will drop the needle down on some old blues records at the start of a party, to warm people up. Because you can dance to the blues just as well as you can sink into the thick and immovable nature of them. You can sob along to the blues, though you can also pursue a more joyful route, peppered with laughter or kissing or swinging on a porch swing with your legs pushing up against the night air. The logic, as I’ve always understood it, is that the blues is something you get through first in order to get to everything else. It lives inside of you, so that you might be lucky enough to see the world better, more honestly, with more dexterity. This, too, is why so many of the great blues songs are about leaving one place and arriving somewhere else. About seeing something that, in a moment, seems impossible to see and then carrying it with you for the rest of your life.
When people talk about the spontaneity of the blues, or how it has a type of freedom underneath it, it is in part because the blues had a long history before recorded music. It had a history of traveling from one person to the next to the next, like good gossip, bending along the way. “It’s like how diamonds never lose their value,” Auerbach told me, still twirling the lighter on his fingers. “Because all these musicians — the really good ones — they’re never the same. They always put their own stamp on everything.”
This was a sound and tradition forged by working-class players, playing songs after their days of labor, sustained by the people who would show up and nothing else. R.L. Burnside was a farmer, a fisherman. He would have gone on playing the music whether anyone came and recorded him or not, satisfied with sustaining a tradition in a place he loved. Most of the early recordings of Hill Country blues musicians were made by musicologists who had heard stories of jukes bursting with sound way past typical closing hours and wanted to come down and see what all the fuss was about. Artists like Mississippi Fred McDowell managed to capitalize on some of those field recordings and land record deals and touring opportunities. But even modest commercial success was rare, and it often hit late in the lives and careers of the artists, who would fall ill or die shortly after becoming better known. McDowell’s first album was released in 1964, and he was dead by 1972.
When Fat Possum was formed and went looking for bluesmen who hadn’t been properly recorded for decades — like Kimbrough, Burnside and the sonically versatile Greenville player T-Model Ford, among others — it seemed like a correction of the record. The Hill Country and Delta blues mini-revival swept through the 1990s and held until the early 2000s, translating into record sales, documentaries, festivals and traveling juke-joint revues. This revival afforded a place for living legends to record and release music later in their lives. But it also rendered the question of the value of an American archive. Alongside Fat Possum’s recordings — which were embraced by listeners all over the country — is another archive that lives in the people who were there, from whatever the beginning was for them, hearing these songs and telling people about them. That archive is less glamorous but still valuable.
When Dan Auerbach was 17, he took a road trip to Mississippi with his father, in that moment in the ’90s when the blues scene was gaining more mainstream attention, in part because of the work of Fat Possum. They started in Akron, stopped in Nashville and then Memphis, where they got a small guidebook to Mississippi blues, and then they drove straight to the heart of Hill Country to see some of the players and the places that they’d only heard stories about. Auerbach went straight to Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint. Kimbrough was known for his live shows, which stretched long and got people dancing for hours (Fat Possum’s release of his 1992 album, “All Night Long,” took him to the national stage). But by the time Auerbach made his way to Mississippi, Kimbrough was at the end of his life. Kinney Kimbrough, Junior’s son, told Auerbach that Junior wouldn’t be by the club and wouldn’t be playing that night, which presented another issue entirely: Kinney’s brother played, but was locked up at the moment. He needed a loan to get him out. “He told my dad they’d pay him back once they sold some drinks that night,” Dan says. “It was like $24 or something.”
“Davy Kimbrough” — another of Junior’s sons — “came over,” Auerbach continues. “They all sang the [expletive] out of Junior’s songs. I saw them that night with Garry Burnside on bass, Kinney on drums. They played all the [expletive] I wanted to hear. Everybody was dancing.”
Auerbach, needing to see more, took a second trip down to Greenville shortly thereafter. On that second trip, Auerbach slept on the floor of T-Model Ford’s double-wide trailer. He was still a teenager when T-Model Ford invited him to join him onstage, first at a house party and then at a juke joint. It was a crash course — not just in how to play the music but also in how to play to a crowd, how to keep people excited, invested in what was happening both on the stage and in themselves. “It was just like in the middle of a field. Just absolutely in the middle of nowhere in a cinder-block building,” Auerbach told me, with a grin of disbelief. “I played all night there.”
After loving the music and connecting to it from afar, this up-close interaction with the songs and the people who made and were still making them imbued Auerbach with a deeper sense of gratitude. A sense of debt to this specific musical community. That gratitude comes through in the joyful returns and homages on “Delta Kream.” Each song on the record puts the listener in the room with the band, watching smiles spread across their faces as the music they have studied and loved flickers into life through them, effortlessly.
Around a table populated with limp, greasy fries and half-eaten burgers, Patrick Carney was in the mood to negotiate.
“There’s only 5,000 records worth owning, ever made.” Before I could challenge him, he put it higher himself. “OK, just to be devil’s advocate or whatever the term is, 10,000. Final offer, no more.”
I considered that this was possible, though Dan insisted we were both out of our minds, which sent Carney into another adjustment. “OK, 10,000 records specifically made from 1962 to now.” And then, after a brief pause: “OK, how about this: 10,000 rock ’n’ roll albums worth owning, and that’s it?” When I countered with a clarification of just rock ’n’ roll albums, Carney dipped back down to 5,000. And then he again altered himself and jumped back up to 10,000 post-British Invasion albums. “I mean, is every Talking Heads album worth owning?” he said, and when I suggested that was quite possibly the worst band to hang the argument on, as yes, I think every Talking Heads album is worth owning, he was already on to the next point of negotiation.
The moment was particularly wonderful to watch — Carney, happily talking himself in circles with a wide grin on his face, and Auerbach, stoic at first but then slowly unfolding into quiet laughter. It was a marker of how much the two men have grown. Carney has become self-aware and self-deprecating, and Auerbach pensive and gentle. The combination of these impulses, it seems, is how the band has ended up here. Not far from where they began. Recording blues covers in a small room, with just as much freedom and exuberance as they had when there were no expectations beyond the ones the set for themselves. Because they know that saving a history or keeping it alive is beyond their control; they’re simply playing the songs they love with the people they respect while they can still do it.
After sitting in some silence, Carney again charted a path back to the band’s home. “Listen, where we’re from is the polka capital of the world,” he began. “And when we were kids, there was still polka [expletive] everywhere. Accordions, it was a whole thing. And that [expletive] doesn’t exist anymore. It is [expletive] gone, like zero. If you are a polka band, you’re the only polka band left in northeast Ohio. So I think of course there aren’t many teenagers that want to play polka-inspired music. But there’s always going to be some teenagers who hear Captain Beefheart or Led Zeppelin or maybe hopefully the Black Keys or White Stripes or whatever and then they go and they get deeper.”
I was reminded then of something Kenny Brown and Eric Deaton said a day earlier, around the table in the studio’s front room. About how the work of this album isn’t actually about them, but is about being a bridge to Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside. While Deaton was talking enthusiastically about this, Brown gently interrupted. “Well, hopefully it’ll bring them to our music, too,” he said. “They’re dead and gone.” To which Deaton replied, “We’re still kicking.”
Brown, nodded and grinned solemnly. “Not real high, but we’re still kicking.”
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, an essayist and a cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He last wrote about Black intimacy at the card table.
Gioncarlo Valentine is an American photographer and writer from Baltimore who attended Towson University in Maryland. His focus on issues faced by marginalized populations is informed by his seven years of experience as a social worker.
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