“It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it,” claims journeyman musician/singer/entertainer Deke Dickerson. As usual, Dickerson adds dry wit to a serious proclamation of his career intent: keeping America’s roots music alive while interjecting new creativity—a blood transfusion, if you will—into genres of music that flourished in decades previous. Such efforts have rewarded him with the Ameripolitan “Musician of the Year” award, among other accolades.

Deke Dickerson is 52 years old and has been carrying the torch since he was 13, playing in his first rockabilly band in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. After moving to Los Angeles at the age of 22, he carved out a niche for himself in Tinseltown. In addition to playing in his primary band, Deke Dickerson and the Ecco-Fonics, as well as his newest group, Deke Dickerson and the Whippersnappers, Dickerson has provided rootsy music for a slew of television shows and movie projects (including scoring the music for Johnny Knoxville’s Paramount Pictures film Action Point).

Dickerson’s new releases showcase his versatility as well as his desire to touch all bases in the roots music pantheon. In recent years he has recorded with such luminaries as Marty Stuart’s Fabulous Superlatives, Canadian wildman Bloodshot Bill, and Jerry Lee Lewis’s original drummer, J. M. Van Eaton (at Sun Studios in Memphis). He released an album of vocal versions of surf instrumentals, Sing the Instrumental Favorites, with the popular surf act Los Straitjackets. He released an all-rockabilly album, Echosonic Eldorado, that sounds as if it could have come out of Sun Studios in Memphis circa 1956. He released an album with the legendary surf group the Trashmen, of “Surfin’ Bird” fame, Bringing Back the Trash, that is every bit as wild and crazed as the Trashmen’s recordings from the early 1960s.