music of Fat Possum Blues’ clients may be viewed as an original art form. Although their approach to blues was original and unfettered by outside influence, it was not a new art form. Blues or music is anything but recently discovered. The impression to those that the music of Burnside, Davis, Ford, or Kimbrough was unlike anything that hit the art world can be explained by what surrounded the music: its ambiance (blues being of secondary importance) was isolated with no technological communication, characterized by shanty juke joints, and makeshift instruments or instruments not professionally used before. What becomes most extraordinary about Fat Possum Blues musicians is that there music managed to stay removed from modern exposure for so long a time, given the expansion of technology at the time. Their discovery was to Matthew Johnson, I imagine, like finding a rare jewel.Johnson allowed for the dilution and homogenization of a pure art form with a popular (therefore clichéd and dissolute) form of blues music. Music of the Hill County Bluesmen would not be able to sustain both its originality in popular culture if being preserved by Fat Possum Blues recording artists, archiving and distributing CDs into the mainstream. At the same point, Johnson’s project saved a dying art form. The musicians were historical relics. This cross-cultural collaboration of rural isolation and urban expansion fused together with a money incentive. The merging is seen in real time as young musicians surround Burnside onstage and he haplessly listens as his style is consumed and reinterpreted (You See Me Laughin’: The Last of the Hill Country Bluesmen). That music is blunted duplicate of the gem Johnson found. To hear the original art form and unfiltered sound, you would have to be in the juke joint and not listening to a CD. Juke joint blues changed once it went outside of the small Oxford, Mississippi circle and became about the money and not just about jamming on the front porch for free, “Ain’t never been out of the area and it don’t change the music.”
IHRTLUHC
Ian Wallace
