The Shack

The Legendary Shack Shakers (originally Those or Th' ) are an American rockabilly/blues band that formed in Paducah, Kentucky in the mid-1990s. They are inspired by rock 'n roll, country blues, old time music, carnival music, swamp rock, and other obscure Southern music genres. The band originally had a traditional rockabilly sound, but later began to rely more on its rock 'n roll and "southern gothic" influences. This punky Southern hillbilly band's secret weapon is its front man, the mercurial "Colonel" J.D. Wilkes, who takes no prisoners with his ferocious harmonica playing and raspy vocals. This live album shows the band in its element, performing breathless high-octane rockabilly filtered through a Southern gothic sensibility. But there's a steely professionalism beneath the seeming chaos, with songs like "Rollin' in My Sweet Baby's Arms" and "Ghost Riders in the Sky" propelled by lightning-fast guitar runs as well as Wilkes's deranged yelling.

Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever.

What would it be like to lose your youngest child to a serial killer? And then to have God invite you out for a conversation at the very shack where the terrible deed took place? And then imagine that the door to that shack of horrors opened….and before you knew it you had been swept up in the motherly embrace of a large African American woman?