With the Dirt Daubers, J.D. Wilkes shifts his focus from shock to family

There are many roles that J.D. Wilkes plays onstage with the Legendary Shack Shakers: carnival barker, fire-and-brimstone preacher, cowpunk wild man. But things are different in his new Kentucky-based string band trio, The Dirt Daubers. He's shelved those personae and given up stalking, flailing and fuming across the stage like he's spirit-possessed, in favor of standing at a microphone, playing his banjo, singing more or less earnestly and offering congenial commentary. Meet "Paw" Wilkes.

"I've always had this kind of guilt, like I'm just jumping around on top of this song," he says. "I just wanted to be kind of a fundamental part of the music, more so than in the Shack Shakers.... I just feel like that's what a real musician is—it's like a balladeer, someone that stands and delivers. It's not just the frantic song-and-dance man."

As you'd imagine, the overall aesthetic of this new group is quite different. It's all acoustic, for one thing, built on banjo (clawhammer and two-finger style), mandolin and washtub bass. Then there's the matter of just who—besides Wilkes—is playing those instruments. Hint: It's not his stage-seasoned Shack Shakers band mates. The other two Daubers are none other than Wilkes' wife Jessica—"Maw" Wilkes to his "Paw"—and his best friend, a blacksmith named Layne Hendrickson. What the three of them do together has a rustic, even domestic, air to it. There's a series of recent YouTube videos of the Wilkeses picking and singing in the corner of their kitchen—she's clad in an apron.

The band exists at all thanks to an invitation Wilkes received to screen his film Seven Signs at London's Raindance Film Festival. "That was the deal," he says. "'If you wanna come, if you want it to be free and want us to put you up, you've got to come play music because we've gotta have that. They were fans [of the Shack Shakers]. I said, 'Well, I can't get the whole band over there. What if I just kind of came over and did a little jam thing?' And I just kind of went ahead and said, 'Me and my wife could do it,' without consulting her. I had to ask and beg Jessica to come over there. She'd never played in front of people, really. We'd just kind of played around the house just for fun."

According to Les Claypool—who was in the audience that day—the Wilkeses' brief set was a success. "He was the first one to his feet to say, 'Hey, that was great' after we were done," says Wilkes. "And so we had this shot in the arm of confidence and adrenaline. We thought, 'Well, why don't we keep going?' So it made sense for...me to ask my old buddy Layne if he'd want to play in some capacity."

The material on which the Daubers are building their repertoire—and "building" is the right word, considering this is their first professionally booked tour, and their only recording to date is essentially a 10-song demo—spans raw-boned Appalachian folk (Doc Boggs and Roscoe Holcombe are favorite sources), old-time romps, genteel parlor songs and a few devilish hot jazz originals. "It's a lot of what inspires the Shack Shakers songs," Wilkes says, "but those just get turned into rock 'n' roll."

Gathering songs and stories for Seven Signs—which features its share of colorful Southern characters—stirred nostalgia for a simpler life, generations removed. And nostalgia isn't exactly a sentiment the Shack Shakers are known for.

"That's not wrong, to have fun and put on a good show and amp it up a little, blow off some steam," says Wilkes. "That's not wrong. That's as old as time itself. But there's kind of a more traditional, genuine side of things [that] can get—especially these days—can get overlooked and shouted down. And I think that when I was interviewing some of the old-timers in the movie, I was realizing there's something missing from modern times, that we're totally missing out on in this post-post-modern apocalypse that we live in nowadays."

Email music@nashvillescene.com.