The North Mississippi Allstars bring their Hill Country Blues-infused Rock ‘N’ Roll to Meridian Saturday as the headlining act for the 59Twenty Music Festival.

    NMA front man Luther Dickinson says the band has been in Meridian before, “but not nearly enough!”

    “We’ll be doing Hill Country Blues (in the tradition of artists like RL Burnside and Junior Kimbrough). That’s the tradition that inspires us always. We’ll do some things from our new record, and some Rock ‘N’ Roll,” Dickinson said in a telephone interview.

    The latest album from NMA is “Keys To The Kingdom,” released in February on Songs Of The South Records. It is a celebration of the life of Jim Dickinson — Luther and his brother, NMA percussionist Cody Dickinson’s father — who passed away in 2009.

    “As is our family’s tradition, we gathered in our homemade studio and recorded,” Dickinson says. “We carried on as we’ve been taught and dealt the only way we know, by making music. Our dad used to say that production-in-absentia is the highest form of production. The credits read: Produced for Jim Dickinson. ‘Keys To The Kingdom’ is definitely our finest collaboration.”

    A record producer, singer and musician, Jim Dickinson worked with countless artists throughout his lifetime, including Aretha Franklin, Ry Cooder, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. “Keys To The Kingdom” features one cover — Dylan’s “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again,” a request from Jim Dickinson.

    “We were hanging out in the hospital,” Luther Dickinson said. “I was reading this Bob Dylan article in Mojo Magazine to him.” He said his father got the idea that the song could be done as a one-chord Hill Country Blues song, and wrote it down on a piece of paper.

    “I promised him we would do it. First I had to learn it — and there’s a lot of chord changes in that song — then I had to deconstruct it,” Dickinson said. His father used to cover the song when he fronted the Memphis-based group Mud Boy & The Neutrons.

    Much of Saturday’s crowd at NMA’s show may encounter their first experience with an electric washboard. Cody Dickinson developed the Woogie Board, as it is called. One of the influences for it, Luther Dickinson said, was Memphis artist Jimmy Crosthwait, who plays washboard, was a member of Mud Boy and the Neutrons, and is a close family friend of theirs.

    “Eventually Cody plugged it in,” Dickinson said. The Woogie Board combines traditional washboard sounds with electricity and guitar effect pedals. It’s wild.

    Another close family friend of the Dickinsons is Chris Ethridge of Meridian. A bassist known throughout the music industry, he moved to California at an early age.

    “He was one of the first Southern musicians to make it to the West Coast,” Dickinson said. “And he showed other Southern musicians the ropes when they got out there, whether it was my dad, Duane Allman, whoever. He really is a national treasure.”

    Ethridge went on to join the International Submarine Band with Gram Parsons. He later co-founded The Flying Burrito Brothers with him in 1968, and has worked with numerous well-known artists all these years.

    Dickinson also acknowledges Meridian’s greatest claim to fame, the Singing Brakeman Jimmie Rodgers, as “the man who started it all,” as many have suggested. As Dylan wrote in the liner notes for “The Songs Of Jimmie Rodgers, A Tribute” released in 1997 on his Egyptian Records label: “If we look back far enough, Jimmie may very well be ‘the man who started it all’ for we have no antecedent to compare him. His refined style, an amalgamation of sources unknown, is too cryptic to pin down. His is a-thousand-and-one tongues yet singularly his own.”

    In that same sense the North Mississippi Allstars soaked up the influence of generations of Mississippi Blues men and created the gift of blues-infused rock that they have pioneered, all while taking Jim Dickinson’s advice: “Play every note as if it’s your last because one of them will be.”