In just 18 years of existence, Fat Possum Records has recreated the evolution of rock and roll.
The small label began in 1992 as a two-man operation in a former law office just off the town square in Oxford, Mississippi, recording the gritty electric country bluesmen Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside—artists who seemed to have slipped through the cracks of roots music to play a distinctive, hypnotic style that was often described as “rusty tractor music.”
Then—like Sam Phillips and Sun Records well before them—they branched out to include scrappy, primitive rocking white boys like the Neckbones and Twenty Miles.
Today, except for a line of old field recordings by musicologist George Mitchell, blues is in Fat Possum’s past save for its influence in the music of garage rock thunderbirds like the Black Keys, who themselves have now moved on to a bigger label, and the Heartless Bastards. And there’s not even an echo of the genre in the newest Fat Possum artists, art-rockers Colour Revolt.
What’s constant is that Fat Possum remains in Mississippi and is still a two-man operation—although one of the men who founded the label, Peter Lee, moved on early leaving Matthew Johnson in charge. Along with Bruce Watson, who began his tenure at Fat Possum as house engineer and tour manager, Johnson has marshaled Fat Possum through its evolution—a compulsory process triggered by the demise of a generation of Mississippi blues originals, including Kimbrough and Burnside.
Besides, Fat Possum always had trouble paying its bills as a blues label. Except for an occasional bump in sales thanks to a crossover album, like the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and R.L. Burnside team-up A Ass Pocket of Whiskey and Burnside’s radio-friendly remix mash-up Come On In (which in turn got a bump from appearing in a Sopranos episode), sales were less than chart rocking. And some of Fat Possum’s most promising blues signings—Johnny Farmer, Charles Caldwell, Asie Payton—died or became too infirm to tour shortly after they started recording. Even Paul “Wine” Jones, nearly 20 years younger than those men, died of cancer in 2005 at age 59 after making just two Fat Possum albums.
Although Fat Possum still releases many good rock and roll CDs, there are plenty of other indie labels that do comparable work. Fat Possum’s enduring legacy will be its history with artists like Kimbrough, Burnside, Jones, Payton, Farmer, and Robert Belfour —documented in a chain of releases from ’92 to 2004 beginning with Kimbrough’s All Night Long and concluding with Burnside’s collection of leftovers and remixes A Bothered Mind. Burnside himself died the next year—a sadly poetic finale to Fat Possum’s blues era.
Johnson has always claimed he’s no businessman, that he can’t balance a checkbook. But he does know something about marketing. Seeing a correlation between the raw, ragged guitar sounds of Burnside, Kimbrough, Jones, T-Model Ford, and Fat Possum’s other core blues artists and the signatures of punk rock and the modal trance music of the jam band scene, Johnson chose to market to college- and high-school-age music fans instead of the 40-plus males who have dominated the blues CD buying population since the late 1980s.
He didn’t need to sell to the baby boomers. Since the blues market shrunk exponentially after the demise of Stevie Ray Vaughan—the music’s last true crossover hero to date – hard-core blues fans are used to seeking out new music and found Burnside, Kimbrough, and the rest without much trouble.
Johnson’s efforts worked. Burnside and Kimbrough were often played on college and indie-rock radio next to Green Day, Sonic Youth, and the local bands and other lesser knowns south of the dial. And mom-and-pop music shops in college towns everywhere stocked Fat Possum titles.
Johnson had started his operation specifically to win Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside the recognition and paychecks they deserved. He succeeded and did much to further the careers and improve the finances of “Wine” Jones, Robert “Wolfman” Belfour, and others, too.
He also left an imprint on many of those college- and high-school-age fans, breeding a new generation of blues lovers whose tastes run delightfully rawer and rattier than the typical current Chicago sound. And those fans, some of which are now musicians, are just beginning to recast the music in their own image. Bands like the Black Diamond Heavies, Hillstomp, Moreland & Arbuckle, Black Clouds a Risin’, Cedric Burnside & Lightin’ Malcolm, Richard James & the Special Riders and others are pushing a cutting edge blues underground toward the mainstream.
It is like the birth of rock and roll all over again. But the greatness of Fat Possum’s blues albums can’t be understated. For the uninitiated, here are some essentials.
Junior Kimbrough, All Night Long: Kimbrough was a direct link to African drum groups, based on call-and-response and unison lines and ringing with the richest reverb-soaked legato guitar licks south—or maybe just a little north—of B.B. King. This 1992 album, produced by the great journalist and musician Robert Palmer, brought the modern rural juke joint sound to the world.
R.L. Burnside, Too Bad Jim: This is unadorned Burnside, released in 1994 as Fat Possum’s third album. It would take years for him to become the college music world’s favorite bluesman. But Burnside was already the king of north Mississippi’s hill country juke joints—a crunching, fire-and-brimstone guitar grinder whose rhythm and slide style was full of hypnotic joy. This disc captures all of that, as well as displays Burnside’s debt to his mentor Mississippi Fred McDowell.
CeDell Davis, The Horror of It All: With a voice nearly as big as Howlin’ Wolf’s and a playing style that lands somewhere between Elmore James and Sonic Youth, Arkansas’ Davis is a true noisy original. Sadly, age and infirmity has further attacked his already polio-crippled body, which prevents him from performing today. But this 1998 release captures Davis in excellent form.
Johnny Farmer, Wrong Doers Respect Me: This bare bones slide-and-vocal recording from 1998 is contemporary back porch Mississippi blues defined—a howl from the still-beating heart of the land where the blues began.
T- Model Ford, Pee-Wee Get My Gun: Well into his ’80s Ford is still performing in the juke joint duo format: just drums and guitar and a whole lot of stories about violence, crime, and country livin’. This 1997 disc is Ford’s debut and ground zero for contemporary chord-grinding blues-punk.
Paul “Wine” Jones, Mule: Fat Possum’s Johnson once described Jones as “like a blind cave fish.” Indeed, Jones’ music—one chord stomps with hoarse vocal accompaniment—was singular and untempered by any modern influences. It’s a style he learned from his father and carried on in this great 1995 debut.
Asie Payton, Worried: This farmer’s 1999 debut is raw, spirited, and crunching. Even with sax and funky beats gussying up the sound—searching for that college crossover—it’s still Payton’s whip-crack singing and driving guitar that make this a raucous, propulsive gem.
Kenny Brown, Stingray: Burnside’s guitar-slinging partner’s 2003 debut mixes Delta and hill country licks and tics with red clay rock and roll. Before Brown became Burnside’s right hand picker he was schooled by the under-recorded bluesman Joe Callicott, so there’s something of Callicott’s laconic charm in Brown, too.
Elmo Williams & Hezekiah Early, Takes One to Know One: Another juke joint twosome. This remains their only album, but among the young white duos picking up the juke joint torch it is highly influential. Primal, wailing, rude-toned, and butt-rockin’, these Natchez bluesmen bring backwater Delta blues up to date—if that date’s 1963.
Robert Pete Williams, Robert Pete Williams: This previously unreleased ’70s field recording issued in 2001 captures the veteran of the ’60s folk revival on his porch playing great, unadorned acoustic blues—with the accompaniment of freight trains and chickens in the background. This is the first of Fat Possum’s terrific archival releases, which include a set of 45s recorded by Mitchell featuring Jessie Mae Hemphill, Houston Stackhouse, Big Joe Williams, John Lee Ziegler, and other knowns and unknowns.
You See Me Laughing (DVD): This excellent film’s subtitle “The Last of the Hill Country Bluesmen” isn’t accurate, since T-Model Ford is from the Delta and CeDell Davis from Arkansas, but this is nonetheless a great visual ode to the players who were essential to defining the Fat Possum label’s sound and soul. Full of live performances, interviews, and some casually gruesome tales of murder and mayhem, it’s a compelling yarn. And if you missed Burnside and Kimbrough while they were alive, this film and the Robert Palmer narrated documentary Deep Blues are absolutely required for their performances alone—to say nothing of Jessie Mae Hemphill, Booby Barnes, Jack Owens & Bud Spires and a host of others in the latter.