By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
Staff Writer

For Charles Walker, the soul shouter who cut his teeth at the New Era Club on Jefferson Street during the late '50s, the recent Night Train to Nashville festivities at the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum proved more than just a chance to wax nostalgic.

The Nashville native known to his friends as Wigg got a whole new band out of the deal, a churning, vamping funk ensemble called the Dynamites.

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Less than a year after they came together, the nine-piece combo was opening arena shows for jam-band perennials Widespread Panic. Next weekend, they'll go on after the reunited Police at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tenn.

"I really can't believe it," Walker said, sitting in Edgehill Studios Cafe, talking about the resurgence of the funk and soul music that his bands performed at New York landmarks such as Small's Paradise and the Apollo Theater back in the 1960s.

"When the Dynamites played our first gig at the Basement, the place was jam-packed. I looked out into the crowd and could see that people were really into it."

In addition to opening for Widespread Panic, the group has also headlined a series of dates with fellow funkateers Galactic; after Bonnaroo, they'll embark on a tour of big cities in the Northeast.

With the release Tuesday of Kaboom!, an album that fairly lives up to its incendiary title, the group is primed to secure a foothold in the burgeoning deep funk movement alongside Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, Breakestra and The Poets of Rhythm.

'Ready to call it quits'

None of which might have happened were it not for a series of events that turned out to be as synergistic as the Dynamites pressing polyrhythms.

"I was getting ready to call it quits," said Walker, now in his 60s, alluding to his career plans when the funk ensemble first congealed.

Musically speaking, things were going fine for him. Since moving back to Nashville from New York after his wife's death in 1993, he had been nurturing a following in Europe as part of the thriving Northern Soul scene over there. Beyond that, Leavin' This Old Town, one of a trio of albums that he recorded with Nashville producer Fred James, had earned him Comeback Blues Album honors at the W.C. Handy Awards.

Nevertheless, as he explained, "I wasn't into just traveling around and playing gigs unless I had something that I thought could really make it."

Enter Bill Elder, a veteran of what he describes as "funky as opposed to funk bands." Inspired by the deep grooves that he heard on Doyle Davis' D-Funk radio show on Vanderbilt's WRVU-FM, Elder was intent on assembling an ad hoc revue for a series of "five or six funk and soul nights the likes of which Nashville hadn't seen since the late '60s."

The trouble was, he needed a front man — a singer with enough grit and command of a groove who could actually deliver on that promise.

Elder mentioned his quandary to Davis, who, in addition to his popular radio gig, is the managing partner at Grimey's New & Preloved Music and who now also serves as the Dynamites' manager. (His new imprint, Outta Sight Records, will release their debut album on Tuesday.)

Davis urged Elder to contact Michael Gray, co-curator of the Night Train exhibit and co-producer of its accompanying CD series, the second volume of which included Walker's late '50s recording (with the Daffodils) of "No Fool No More."

"Michael raved about Charles' performances at the Night Train events and gave me his number," Elder said. "So I called him and we got together. I brought some records along, stuff like the Dap Kings, and we talked things over.

"I think he was pleasantly surprised to discover that this genre of deep funk and super soul had caught on and that he might have a chance to do some Wilson Pickett and James Brown moves."

Gotta do more than sing

Elder, who as producer, arranger and guitar-playing bandleader for the Dynamites goes by the name of Leo Black, wasn't kidding when he namechecked Pickett and Brown.

"I toured with James back in the '60s," Walker said, referring to the late Godfather of Soul. "I traveled with a lot of acts. It would seem like namedropping if I mentioned them all."

Etta James and Sam Cooke were just two of the other luminaries with whom Walker worked during that era, a period in which he was fronting a "straight-up soul and R&B" combo called Little Charles & the Sidewinders. Thanks to a push from saxophonist King Curtis, another big name on the scene, Walker and the band went on to become mainstays at Small's Paradise in Harlem. With the Sidewinders, he also released a number of singles for Decca Records.

"A lot of guys in that band had a jazz influence similar to the Dynamites," said Walker of the Sidewinders. "But I think the Dynamites are a little more on top of it than they were. With their arrangements and everything, I think the Dynamites are a little bit more together."

Jackie Wilson was another legend Walker toured with back in the day. "Jackie was maybe the best performer I've ever seen," he recalled. "One of the best vocalists, too — just outstanding.

"I learned a lot from James and Jackie about stage performances. I learned that you can't just stand up there and sing. You have to have this presence. You have to get the people involved and put moves in the songs. I don't dance as much as I used to, but every once in a while I turn it loose."

Back to the future

For a neo-funk band like the Dynamites, the tricky thing about turning it loose, to borrow from Walker, is to do it in a fresh way. This is especially the case when your touchstones include James Brown, Hank Ballard and Dyke & the Blazers, pioneers who patented their styles the better part of 50 years ago.

"The idea was to make a record that didn't sound like it was made in 1962," Elder said. "We kept that in mind at every point during the making of our album.

"Our goal was to have one foot planted in the funk and soul of the late '50s and '60s and yet also to give the music a new twist."

As a result, the Dynamites avoided using certain microphones because the sound they produced was too readily identifiable with that of one or more of their forebears. They kept away from certain recording techniques for much the same reason.

It was crucial to Elder that the sound not be too slick or clean. "Throughout the session I kept saying, 'Make it sound worse, make it sound dirtier,'" he said with a chuckle. "Swampy" is how he describes the Dynamites' roiling, gutbucket sound.

Some of the tracks on the album, he added, employ effects that are more commonly heard on hip-hop rather than funk records.

"There's this alternating horn line with this crazy delay," he explained. "It sounds like a marching, New Orleans brass band that hasn't gotten around the corner yet. The notes the guys are playing sound like they're booming off buildings."

Yet another place where Elder, as the group's principal songwriter, sought to keep things fresh was in his lyrics.

"In traditional funk, people write about a fairly narrow range of topics," he said. "You've got your group of tunes about sexy women, you've got your tunes about having good times, and you've got your socially conscious tunes."

The goal, he said, was to make each track of the album "stand on its own," and nowhere does he feel he did a better job of doing that than on "Way Down South," a lament for his adopted hometown of New Orleans.

Singing in an urgent rasp on one of the song's more poignant stanzas, Walker moans: "We got Hurricanes with beautiful names/287 years gone up in flames/Now the soul of a nation (is) flooded in tears/Half of a city just disappears!"

Music leads to higher ground

People often to turn to soul and funk music — and to the gospel wellspring from which both flow — in times of social and political turmoil. Given the dire things that have happened and are continuing to happen in places like New Orleans, Sudan and the Middle East, it's hardly surprising that large numbers of people would be turning to them again.

"The foundation of soul music in all its forms is the desire for a better, stronger community," said Craig Werner, chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "People want to connect, and that's what the music has always told us."

Davis agrees. "You can go to a soul or funk show and everybody gets it, from the young kid to the grandpa or grandma and everybody in between," he said, sitting in his LP- and CD-lined office above Grimey's.

"They just completely identify with it. The songs are about things that everybody can relate to."

Walker, too, weighed in on the resurgence of soul music within the pop mainstream, which includes everything from specialty record labels and Web sites like Funky 16 Corners and soul-sides.com to the sampling of obscure soul 45s by megastars like Beyoncé and Christina Aguilera.

"It's ironic, because every time I do an interview, it's about the old days, but as they relate to present," Walker said. "It's what's happening now."

"It's not nostalgia," said Werner, the author of A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America, talking about the current soul renaissance. "It's not about wanting to go back to something. It's about wanting to establish communication with something that, if not quite lost, is subdued in the culture.

"I think people are fed up with a lot of today's music," said Walker. "They're looking for something real, and that's what we're trying to give them."