Hailing from Oxford, Mississippi, the cultural center of the South, Wiley and the Checkmates have a lot to live up to. Herbert Wiley formed the Checkmates in 1960 and the group began performing on the chitlin’ circuit as a marquee act and playing behind soul legends like Otis Clay, Percy Sledge, and Syl Johnson.
After a dozen years with the Checkmates, Wiley quit music to run the family business and raise a family. In 2002, Wiley was inspired to reform the Checkmates after watching an Oxford punk band rehearse in a local storefront. Wiley brought together local gospel, jazz, and rock musicians and fashioned a modern take on the sound of the original Checkmates. .. Wiley and the Checkmates released their debut CD Introducing… in 2004.
Wiley began crisscrossing the Southeast with Checkmate regulars like J.D. Mark (Precious Bryant, LCD Soundsystem touring guitarist) and Matt Patton (Paul ‘Wine’ Jones, the Dexateens), playing venues ranging from Alabama frat bars to the annual Ponderosa Stomp festival, where the Checkmates backed unheralded soul pioneers like Bobby Patterson, Harvey Scales, Hermon Hitson, Ralph “Soul” Jackson, and the Legendary Roscoe Robinson.
For We Call It Soul, the Checkmates searched the far corners of the Southeast
to bring together an unlikely cast of aural eccentrics not unlike the inclusion
of Duane Allman or Bobby Womack on classic albums cut in Muscle Shoals and
Memphis. First the Checkmates
met Jim Lancaster, a seasoned engineer that cut his teeth in Memphis and
Jackson, Mississippi, who in 2005 bought an abandoned studio in Valparaiso,
Florida and cleaned up the mess that Hurricane Ivan had left him.