Mississippi blues-as opposed to Chicago blues—is supposed to be acoustic and folky, but the Fat Possum sound is grungy, repetitive, and amplified, more back alley than front porch. In many ways, it seems closer to punk rock than to, say, the jazzy virtuoso riffs of B. B. King, or the polite homages of Eric Clapton. Some have called it “dirty blues,” although that phrase is almost laughably redundant.

Fat Possum artists seem to share a background of sharecropping, illiteracy, poverty, alcohol abuse, and prison time. Burnside is a convicted killer, as is T-Model Ford, the crudest and most exuberant of the Fat Possum lot. T-Model Ford’s drummer, Spam, lost several fingertips to a girlfriend with a box cutter. Seventy-four-year-old Cedell Davis, crippled with polio as a child, was crushed and nearly killed in a barroom stampede set off by a police raid. Paul (Wine) Jones, a part-time welder, is the only Fat Possum artist who’s young and fit enough to play an entire set standing up, although he is sometimes not sober enough to do so. Johnson is suspicious of all blues clichés, including the one that says you’ve got to suffer before you can sing the blues, but he concedes, “My artists have all had hard lives, and that’s reflected in the music.”

-The New Yorker, Jay McInerney, 2002