Bio

Sitting behind the wheel of his pickup truck, James H. “Jimbo” Mathus was crisscrossing America in search of something. Not for anything he could put his hands on, necessarily, and not for anything he could see. But he thought he would recognize it when he found it. At 19 years old, he was looking for a place to begin.

His life to that point—his youth spent in Corinth and Clarksdale; his brief stay at Mississippi State University, where he dabbled in philosophy; and his stint traveling Old Man River with the Merchant Marines—were all preamble to the real Jimbo Mathus, the person he began looking for sometime between thumbing a borrowed paperback of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and dropping out of college.

The ingredients were all there, thanks in part to Mathus’s father, who taught him the ropes of bluegrass, honky-tonk and gospel music. Not to mention the blues he absorbed on visits to Clarksdale where his grandfather, Tony Malvezzi, ran the Conerly shoe store chain. He motored through California, New York and Alaska, using his time off from the river barges to find a place where he fit in. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was funky and Southern enough, he thought, and it had a real music scene supported by local record labels and the University of North Carolina student body.

“I had a vague idea of what my career could be, but it was unformed,” Mathus says. “Chapel Hill just resonated with me. As soon as I found that, just on one of my travels on shore leave, I called back to Canal Barge Company on the pay phone, said ‘I quit,’ and stayed there. It was just one of those instinct things, I guess you'd say.”