Notes taken from fat possum.com back to SPIN
DARKER BLUES
|
Darker Blues is a 100+ page book of photographs of the musicians of Fat Possum Records. For more than a year now David Raccuglia has been travelling the country getting photos of everyone from R.L. Burnside, Kenny Brown, and the rest of the Mississippi guys to the west to get Bob Log III and Solomon Burke. Classic photos of the musicians also appear throughout the book. In addition to the photos, Joe Sacco's now-classic story, "The Rude Blues" is printed here, as a stand alone comic book. It's the first appearance of the story since it showed up in Details magazine several years ago. Barry Hannah and John Barry have both contributed essays to the book as well. A book about music that contains no music just seemed wrong, so we included two CDs packaged into the book as well. The 16 tracks on CD1 show what we're up to at the moment. The 7 tracks on CD2 are something special: Seven never before released tracks of R.L. Burnside music. Several are remixes, and two are from R.L.'s first ever recording, done by George Mitchell in 1968. Currently the book is the only way to get the new R.L. Burnside EP, but that may change down the road. The cost of the book is $40, and that price includes shipping in the U.S. For overseas orders, a shipping charge will apply. |
Click to enlarge.
|
|
|
Darker Blues CD 01
1. Asie Payton - Do Me Right Darker Blues CD 02
1. R. L. Burnside - Boogie Intro |
"We're trying our best."Are things really so bad? In case you haven't noticed, American teenagers, the record-buying public, don't associate blues with anything good. How could they when all they've been exposed to is the cheesy, cigar-smoking, frat-rock and tourist-trap side of it. At the other end of the spectrum, and the other side of the bar, but just as distasteful, are the folklorists and musicologists. What place does Fat Possum Records have in all this? All we care about is capturing that vitality, and the subversive intensity of our artists which are relevant in today's world. We are trying our best, that's our motto, in case you didn't know; and it fits. Try your best-that's all you can do, when you have a job this big. I had a family member accuse me of being a folklorist just because my artists are black, but I'm not. I didn't start Fat Possum to document practitioners of a dying culture with "archival field recordings" that rarely sound good, much less do the artist any justice. It's hard enough to make a good record when you're trying to; it's impossible to make one when all you are trying to do is record something. Fat Possum is alwasy being criticized for being disrespectful, or for not being reverent in our markteting and publicity. Old bluesmen are supposed to be bad people. I didn't find an impressionist painting at a flea market or discover some long-forgotten pharaoh's tomb. I didn't discover anybody, I just record blues guys who were overlooked by other labels because they hadn't toured, or had only limited repertoires, or were unreliable or refused to play standing up. Guys who sometimes have trouble standing up, yet excel at falling down. But that's the blues. At least what I call the blues. -Matthew Johnson |