Charlie Starr on Cornbread Jazz, Rain Dogs, and Why Perfection Is Boring

A Bathroom Break, a Bucket List Moment, and 25 Years of Blackberry Smoke

Some of the best musical moments happen because somebody had to leave the stage. At DelFest 2026, Charlie Starr of Blackberry Smoke found himself onstage with Del McCoury, Ronnie McCoury, and Rob McCoury while Marcus King stepped away for a quick break. Rather than let the silence hang, Charlie did what any lifelong player does: he started something.

I thought, well, we can't just stand here in silence. So I started to play Sitting on Top of the World. And of course they came on and sang it. And it was a bucket list moment for me.

That instinct, the willingness to just start playing and trust that the music will hold everyone up, is one of the quiet themes running through this entire conversation. Charlie sat down with Spencer Handley at DelFest to talk about Blackberry Smoke's silver anniversary, the Toy Factory Project supergroup, his ongoing jazz obsession, and the production advice that changed how he hears his own recordings.

Musical Lineage: A Bluegrass Dad and a Rock and Roll Mom

Charlie's ear was shaped by a split household. His father is a traditional bluegrass guitar player and singer, deeply religious, no rock and roll allowed. His mother, in his words, is a self proclaimed witch ("Glinda the good witch," he clarifies) and was all rock and roll. His parents divorced when he was two, so his childhood was a constant back and forth between two completely different musical universes.

That is not a bad model for how to build a personal style. If you only ever swim in one pool, your playing tends to sound like the pool. Charlie's first Del McCoury memory is probably Del singing with Bill Monroe on something like True Life Blues, and that traditional foundation still shows up in how he approaches phrasing and song structure even in a hard rocking band.

He is now passing that same thing down. His 29 year old son plays guitar, sings, writes, and has his own band, and joined Blackberry Smoke onstage at the Ryman. His 12 year old is a fearless theater kid who will sing a cappella at full volume in front of a packed room. Charlie's read on it is refreshingly unsentimental: it feels normal. If they had no interest, that would be the strange part.

The Toy Factory Project: Reopening the Marshall Tucker Songbook

Before they were the Marshall Tucker Band, they were called the Toy Factory, named for guitarist and songwriter Toy Caldwell. The Toy Factory Project is a supergroup founded by Paul Riddle, the original Marshall Tucker drummer, built around reimagining that catalog with a new set of players. Charlie, Marcus King, Oteil Burbridge, and keyboardist Josh Gilling are all in the mix.

The project started as studio time at Peter Frampton's Nashville studio. Paul had floated the idea of re recording Tucker material as a passion project roughly a decade earlier. Once the sessions happened, the conclusion was obvious.

We were like, why are we not a band? This feels wonderful.

They have played seven live shows so far. The record may or may not ever surface.

Deconstructing Toy Caldwell's Cornbread Jazz

This is the section every guitar player should sit with. Toy Caldwell described his own harmonic approach as "cornbread jazz," a blend of Bob Wills western swing sensibility with rock and roll delivery. Charlie points out how unusual Caldwell's chord choices were for the era.

Who else would have taken that D7 to G major 7 right there? What other rock and roll guitar player is going to write a song like that using the sort of 2 5 1 pages?

That is the whole lesson in one sentence. Most rock songwriting in the seventies leaned on dominant seventh and straight major or minor triads. Caldwell was routinely dropping major 7th chords and functional 2 5 1 movement into songs that otherwise sat comfortably next to Skynyrd on the radio.

Practical takeaway: steal the harmony, keep the grit

• Take a blues or country progression you already know and replace one target major chord with a major 7. Notice how the whole emotional temperature shifts.
• Learn what a 2 5 1 sounds like in a major key (in G: Am7, D7, Gmaj7) and try landing on it as a turnaround inside a rock tune instead of a jazz standard.
• Play a Bob Wills tune. Western swing is the missing link between country, jazz, and southern rock, and it will teach you chord voicings your rock vocabulary does not contain.
• Go past the radio singles. Charlie tells a story about playing the Marshall Tucker album Where We All Belong for a friend who had no idea the catalog went that deep. Most great bands have their real harmonic ideas buried on album cuts.

The Open Meadow: A Song Structure Lesson

Charlie describes Tucker's song architecture as a beautiful blank canvas. A simple, well crafted verse and chorus, and then, in the middle, what he calls an open meadow.

That is a useful way to think about arranging if you play with a band. You do not need every song to be a jam vehicle. But building one wide open section into a tight song gives improvisation somewhere legitimate to live. The verse and chorus earn the audience's trust, then the middle gives the players room to actually say something. His one warning from playing with that caliber of musician: keep an eye on the clock, because with that many improvisers on stage it can go forever.

Volume 1, Brit Turner, and Blackberry Smoke's Next Chapter

Blackberry Smoke recently released a compilation titled Volume 1. The open ended title was guitarist Paul Jackson's idea. More importantly, the collection functions as a marker.

We wanted to put a stake in the ground. This was the Brit Turner era of the band. He was a founding member and my brother. This is where his participation in the music stopped. It is a thank you to him, really.

As for what comes next after 25 years, Charlie is not planning a reinvention. The band knows what it does. They will push themselves, but they are not going to chase a trend.

We wouldn't have any aspiration to change the music. We always push ourselves, but we never would be like, we're going to make a pop record. We're just going to do what feels natural. Maybe it's not always comfortable, but what feels natural.

Why the Southern Rock Bands Hated the Label

Ask Charlie about southern rock as a genre and he immediately points out the obvious problem: none of those bands sound alike. Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker, Skynyrd, the Outlaws. It was a kaleidoscope, and the tag flattened it. The bands themselves hated it, until they realized it gave listeners a handle to hold onto.

Genre loyalty cuts both ways, and Charlie has felt it from his own audience. Blackberry Smoke has been telling fans since the MySpace days not to get locked into one lane, because the band might get funky, gospel, bluesy, or jazzy on any given record. He sees the same rigidity in metal, jazz, and bluegrass crowds. His friend Mark Morton of Lamb of God made a solo record full of country and gritty southern material that will surprise metal fans, and Charlie admires the fearlessness of it.

Rain Dogs: Tom Waits' Trick for Breaking Muscle Memory

This might be the most immediately useful idea in the entire conversation. Charlie credits Tom Waits with a metaphor about why players get stuck.

Tom Waits said your hands are like dogs. They want to go to places they've sniffed before. That's what Rain Dogs is about. When the rain comes it washes away all the familiar smells, and the dogs don't know what to do.

The prescription is to deliberately wash away your own familiar smells. Pick up a different instrument. Try a different genre. Play a song style your hands have no map for. Charlie is blunt about the cost: it is scary, and you will feel like you suck. That feeling is the point. Surrender is the hard part for any experienced player, because your hands have spent years building efficient routes to the same six or seven ideas.

How to run this experiment this week

• Learn a melody, not a lick. Charlie starts with songs and melodies when he enters unfamiliar territory, not scales.
• Learn a horn solo. Charlie transcribes horn players, and notes that Duane Allman and Dickey Betts famously worked through Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme the same way. Horn phrasing forces you off guitar shapes.
• Accept that some things need to be shown to you. He admits he cannot figure out Wes Montgomery's chord solo on Round Midnight by ear alone. Getting help is not cheating.
• Set a low bar and celebrate it. His example: learning Autumn Leaves and being genuinely thrilled about it.

Jazz Rabbit Holes: Kenny Burrell, Coltrane, and Sun Ra

Charlie's jazz listening runs from the accessible to the outer limits. Kenny Burrell and Grant Green are the guitar touchstones, both players whose blues vocabulary makes them a natural bridge for rock and southern players. From there he goes further out, into late Coltrane like Interstellar Space and into Sun Ra, music that sits right on the edge of atonality.

It'll get so atonal that it's like, am I enjoying this now, or is this starting to get under my skin?

He calls it a guilty pleasure rather than a discipline. He is not tackling jazz, he says, he is scratching at it. There is something freeing in that framing. You do not have to become a jazz musician to let jazz harmony and phrasing reshape what you hear. His late drummer Brit used to ask him what he was doing, since he is not a jazz guy. Charlie's answer: nobody is born one.

Dave Cobb's Studio Rule: Stop Trying to Make It Too Good

Blackberry Smoke has worked with producers including Dave Cobb and Brendan O'Brien, and Charlie self produced a handful of records. The single biggest lesson from Cobb was to stop chasing perfection.

He's like, stop trying to be so good. Stop trying to make it too good. Those are his exact words. Because perfection is boring.

Cobb's method of proving it was to pull out his phone. Charlie was worried a word he sang was slightly flat. Cobb agreed, and said he was singing it like he meant it. Then he played Otis Redding's I've Been Loving You Too Long, pointed at a flat note, and asked Charlie if he wanted his money back.

For anyone recording at home with unlimited takes and pitch correction sitting one click away, this is worth tattooing somewhere. Intonation and timing serve emotion. When they start competing with emotion, emotion wins.

The Closing Idea: Correct, Not Finished

Asked why he does any of this, Charlie's answer was one of the more honest descriptions of a creative life we have heard.

It feels correct. Playing music, writing songs. It never feels finished, but it just feels correct. There's a feeling like you're accomplishing something, but you're not finishing it. My philosophy is I will never be finished. My plate will never be clean.

If you are a player who feels behind, or who keeps moving the goalposts on yourself, that is a healthier frame than the one most of us carry around. The work is not a checklist. It is a direction. Learn the major 7th chord. Play the tune your hands do not know. Leave the slightly flat take alone if it means something. Keep going.

Your Practice Plan From This Episode

• Learn one Marshall Tucker deep cut and identify every chord that is not a plain triad.
• Write a song with a wide open instrumental meadow in the middle, and set a timer for it in rehearsal.
• Spend one practice session a week in a genre your hands have never lived in.
• Transcribe a horn melody instead of a guitar solo.
• Record something and keep the imperfect take that has the most feeling in it.