GLIDE Premiere: AFTON WOLFE “Dirty Girl” (from ‘Kings for Sale’)

April 26, 2021 by 1888media

In concert with the release of the lead single from his debut album, Kings for Sale, Glide Magazine offered an exclusive first look at the official music video for “Dirty Girl,” an homage to the hallowed plains of spirituality by Mississippi soul singer/soothsayer Afton Wolfe.

Primarily filmed in Clarksdale, Wolfe provided some behind-the-scenes commentary:

“It’s a song about a road trip through Mississippi. The actual identity of the Dirty Girl is confidential but she was in direct harmony with the spirit of Mississippi that was revealed to me in that road trip – a spirit I had grown up in and was in my face all of my life, like the humidity. But it took going away for a long time to see it for what it actually was – the ghosts of American Music. ‘I took the long way home, like I always do.’ That line is the point of the song.

The video was mainly shot driving down to, staying at, and coming back from The Shack Up Inn in Clarksdale, MS, which is just one of the stops on the trip in the song, but it was DIY and COVID by the time I was shooting the video.”

Wolfe continues, “In the song, itself, the first stop on the road trip is Oxford, Mississippi where I reminisce about partying at Proud Larry’s and seeing Jimbo Mathus before having one too many at the Graduate in Oxford Square. Then in Clarksdale, I visit the repass for the recently-deceased King of the Delta Blues, Robert “Bilbo” Walker. The adventure goes through a rainy cab in Jackson down to the Big Easy.”

“Dirty Girl” features Cary Hudson (acclaimed Blue Mountain frontman and Mississippi bluesman) on harmonica and bottleneck electric guitar (he is also heard at the beginning of the album version giving his hypothesis on the reason why Mississippi is so consistently a geographic center of spirituality).

Ben Babylon plays piano, Seth Fox saxophone, Blaise Hearn on trumpet, Joey Dykes on trombone, and Daniel Seymour and Tommy Stangroom round out the rhythm section to take this song from the front porch of a shotgun house in the Delta to the thick spicy air of New Orleans, as the song gets progressively more Bon Temps as the odyssey gets further south down the Old Man.

Glide calls it, “a raw and bluesy southern concoction that romps and rummages with a delta irrigated irritated kick. Wolfe makes like Van Morrison meeting RL Burnside and conjuring up a raw soulful brand of Americana blues.”

Kings for Sale is set for release on June 11 via CEN Entertainment/The Orchard. Summer/fall tour dates to be announced in the coming weeks.