Colonel J.D. Wilkes found the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, but he was less-than-thrilled by what he met.

After hearing enough people tell him he’d love Andrew Douglas’ doc, which followed folk-noir musician Jim White as he traveled through the back roads of the American South, Wilkes, vocalist for Nashville’s Th’ Legendary Shack*Shakers, finally went and saw; he didn’t love it in the least, finding the film’s depictions of rural dwellers a typically clichéd affront–so much so that he’s taken it upon himself to shoot a film of his own about, as he calls it, "Southern-Gothic variables."

"It seems people’s interpretation of what Southern Gothic means is dysfunctional, backwards inbreeds–that the south corners the market on ignorance," says Wilkes, grumbling that from the outset he found the concept of "people from Los Angeles making such a film ‘ridiculous’ and a ‘recipe for disaster.’"

"It’s the legacy of the Reconstruction, the legacy of the Civil War–a constant exploitation and belittling of the Southern white male. It’s born out of the collective white guilt that America has over slavery: the South must pay eternal penance."

Strong statements of that ilk, particularly coming from a man bearing a common initial and surname with Lincoln’s assassin, tend to make some northerners a bit nervous (maybe even more so now with so-called "Red states" bearing responsibility for the presidency of the Son of Bush) but Wilkes says his M.O. first and foremost, be it in his life or in his music, simply means exposing and upholding the grand tradition of Southern art (he offers up literary giants William Faulkner and Flannery O’Conner as just two examples of distinction).

None of which is to say the results are any less dark or bizarre than what you’d expect from the kind of backwoods Bacchanal that the Shack*Shakers have to offer. The quartet, which includes alumni from Hank Williams III band, originally congealed in Nashville’s gritty "lower Broadway" scene where they began a-brewin’ a mix equal parts punk and rockabilly married to a gypsy-carnival polka beat.

(Wilkes, who was born in Texas and raised in Kentucky, attributes the immigrant music of the Germans and Spanish as well as the sounds of Mexico as the root sources of their Gogol Bordello-meets-The Reverend Horton Heat mash.)

Thematically, in lyrics and accompanying visuals (Wilkes also paints), theirs is an aesthetic equal parts sideshow and evangelical tents–a frenzied, electrified secular sermon of his people’s dark, "Christ-haunted" heritage most recently evinced on their third release, Pandelerium.

"Because the South is very agrarian, tied to the soil and dependent upon agriculture, farm life, and hand-to-mouth survival, you get more of a desperate, faith-based culture. This leads to all sorts of disparity. If you get off the beaten path, away from the interstates and the urban sprawl you can still find people who are living in these desperate hand-to-mouth ways," explains Wilkes. "And the best music, folk-art, and writings are still born out of that tradition, [which is] much maligned by those who don’t understand it."

Although the Shack*Shakers need not toil in the fields themselves, Wilkes maintains that their suffering is as real as anyone’s. As for its cause as such, Wilkes peculates that it could be produced by anything from their "fucked-up DNA" to the strain of living in a post-modern world inhabited by "art-damaged" indie bands "practicing their pigeon-toed stances in front of the mirror."

Either way, the catharsis they produce comes as a welcome relief.

"Rock ’n’ roll for us is primal scream therapy. The four guys in this band are birds of a feather. We’re all drawn to create our own three-chord primal caveman music, and there’s just something about it that’s very pleasing to pull off and perform."