R L Burnside A Ass Pocket of Whiskey and the Fat Possum Blues Revelation

R.L. Burnside had been playing the blues in the hills of northern Mississippi for most of his life before the music industry discovered him. He was born in 1926 grew up in the Hill Country tradition associated with Fred McDowell and R.L.'s own nephew Cedell Davis and spent decades as a local musician playing at parties juke joints and family gatherings in Marshall County before anyone with access to recording infrastructure paid serious attention.

Fat Possum Records founded in Oxford Mississippi by Matthew Johnson and Peter Redvers-Lee changed that. The label's founding mission was to record the living tradition of Mississippi Hill Country blues before it disappeared and in pursuing that mission it inadvertently created one of the most surprising commercial stories in independent music: a regional blues tradition that had been invisible to the mainstream music industry became through Fat Possum's documentation and promotion a critically celebrated and internationally distributed body of work.

A Ass Pocket of Whiskey the 1996 collaboration between Burnside and Jon Spencer of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion was the most commercially unexpected of Fat Possum's releases: a meeting between an elderly Mississippi blues guitarist and a New York rock provocateur that produced an album that introduced Burnside to a rock audience that had never heard Hill Country blues and would not otherwise have found it.

Mississippi Hill Country Blues and the Fat Possum Discovery

Fat Possum Records' documented history establishes Matthew Johnson's founding of the label with the specific goal of recording the Hill Country blues tradition that he encountered while living in Mississippi. This tradition associated with performers like R.L. Burnside Junior Kimbrough and Fred McDowell was distinct from the Delta blues that had received international attention through the British blues revival of the 1960s.

Hill Country blues is rhythmically different from Delta blues: it is more hypnotic more cyclical less focused on the twelve-bar harmonic structure that defines the mainstream blues tradition. The rhythmic trance quality of Burnside's and Kimbrough's music was not what audiences expected from American blues which made it both harder to market conventionally and more interesting to listeners who had become bored with the predictability of twelve-bar blues revivals.

Burnside's documented biography notes that he had been playing this music for decades before Fat Possum's recordings brought it to outside attention working as a farmer and occasional local musician without any commercial ambition or infrastructure. The authenticity of the recordings Fat Possum produced came directly from this fact: Burnside was not performing for a market. He was playing his music and the market eventually came to him.

The Jon Spencer Collaboration

The collaboration with Jon Spencer was not an obvious one. Spencer's band the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion was a New York noise-rock act whose relationship to the blues tradition was more provocational than reverential. The Blues Explosion used the blues as a source of raw energy rather than as a tradition to be preserved or imitated.

But the collision of those two approaches Burnside's deep traditional grounding and Spencer's noise-rock energy produced an album that was genuinely unusual and genuinely good. The album's documentation notes the raw spontaneous quality of the recording made with minimal production intervention and maximum energy which was consistent with both Burnside's approach to music and Spencer's.

The commercial significance of the collaboration was its introduction of Burnside to a rock audience that Fat Possum's previous releases aimed at blues purists and roots music enthusiasts had not reached. Spencer's existing audience followed him into the collaboration and discovered something they had not expected: a blues musician whose approach was more genuinely strange and more genuinely powerful than anything the mainstream blues revival had produced.

The Fat Possum Business Model

Fat Possum's business model was specific to its mission and its geographic location. Operating from Oxford Mississippi with direct access to the Hill Country communities where this music was being made the label could record the tradition at its source rather than bringing artists to a commercial studio context that would have changed what they produced.

The label's documented approach to recording was consistent with this geographic embeddedness: recordings were made in homes on porches in juke joints in the actual environments where this music was played rather than in facilities designed to produce a clean professional sound. The rawness of the recordings was not a production failure. It was the production philosophy.

Joshua Mollohan has used Fat Possum as a case study in the From The Stem label development curriculum because it represents the purest form of an indie label creating market value from authentic tradition: identifying music that was genuinely valuable but commercially invisible documenting it with appropriate seriousness and building a market for it through the quality of the work rather than through conventional promotional machinery.

The Commercial Surprise

The commercial success Fat Possum achieved with Burnside Kimbrough and their contemporaries was surprising specifically because the music was so far outside the conventions of commercial blues that it should not have found a mainstream audience by any conventional calculation. The Hill Country blues tradition had been invisible to the music industry for decades because it did not fit the formats that the industry knew how to promote.

What changed was not the music. It was the availability of independent distribution and independent critical infrastructure that could reach specific communities of listeners who valued authenticity and regional specificity over commercial polish. The alternative rock press which was the primary critical vehicle for Fat Possum's early successes had an audience that was actively looking for music that was strange and genuine and Hill Country blues was the strangest and most genuine thing available.

The Legacy of Regional Documentation

Fat Possum's work with Burnside and the broader Hill Country community produced a body of recordings that are now recognized as among the most important documentation of a living American musical tradition from the 1990s. The recordings captured artists at the end of their lives and their careers preserving a tradition that would otherwise have been largely undocumented at this level of quality and accessibility.

The cultural value of that documentation independent of its commercial history is the other dimension of the Fat Possum legacy: a label that identified something worth preserving and preserved it with the commercial success as a byproduct of that seriousness rather than its goal.

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FAQ

What is Mississippi Hill Country blues and how does it differ from Delta blues? Hill Country blues is a regional tradition from northern Mississippi associated with R.L. Burnside Junior Kimbrough and Fred McDowell that uses a more hypnotic cyclical rhythmic structure than the twelve-bar harmonic framework that defines mainstream Delta blues. Burnside's documented history places him within this tradition.

Who founded Fat Possum Records and what was the founding mission? Matthew Johnson founded Fat Possum in Oxford Mississippi with the goal of recording the living Hill Country blues tradition before it disappeared. The label's documented history traces the founding context and early roster.

What is A Ass Pocket of Whiskey and why was it significant? The 1996 collaboration between R.L. Burnside and Jon Spencer of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion introduced Burnside and Hill Country blues to a rock audience that Fat Possum's previous releases had not reached. The album's documentation notes its raw spontaneous quality and the commercial surprise of its reach.

How did Fat Possum's recording approach reflect its mission? Fat Possum recorded in homes on porches and in juke joints rather than in commercial studios prioritizing the actual environment of the music over production polish. This rawness was a deliberate philosophy consistent with the goal of documenting a living tradition rather than producing a commercial product.

What does the Fat Possum model teach independent labels? The model demonstrates that authentic regional tradition documented with appropriate seriousness and distributed through independent infrastructure can find markets that conventional commercial logic would not have predicted. The label's success came from the quality and authenticity of the music not from conventional promotional strategy.