What’s that smell? The odor’s hard to place because of the dust in my nose. It has a sickly stench that’s telling my nasal cavity to steer clear. Wait, here comes another odor -- a boggy kind of smell that recalls black swamps and untillable earth. Now here come some mournful sounds that make my bones ache. Yet there’s an undercurrent of joy that cajoles me to crack a goofy grin. Downtrodden, euphoric, and raw --sounds like the great Plains of Mississippi to me. The source of the scent came from the “grid map” of the geography and personality of one of the South’s finest -- R.L. Burnside. R.L.’s “housing project,” Fat Possum Records, is responsible for curating voices once riddled with cobwebs. Burnside is perhaps the poster papa for Possum’s effort to revitalize careers.

Record Company owner Matthew Johnson has summoned voices crackled with age, disparity, and a twisted sense of humor. Fat Possum’s top dog tools around the dust roads and quagmires of Mississippi in search of musicians who can spout a tragic tale. These aren’t minstrels that have mixed it up with the big boys all their lives. Instead, they have rubbed shoulders on a daily basis with life in its grittiest fashion. Names like Junior Kimbrough (RIP), T. Model Ford, and Elmo Williams will someday be whispered about in the same sentence as Robert Johnson. The commonality rises in their obscurity and God (devil?) given talent to dually doodle a string and a soul. All these men lived hard. There are no gleaning mansions or limos striding down infinite roads. There are only arid days, rickety porches, and a whole lot of strumming.

When Johnson first found these men, they were willing to play ... as long as it stayed within the confines of the porch. Through camaraderie, ego boosting, and (sometimes) trickery, Johnson has propelled these artists into the studio and, occasionally, on the tour circuit. This is the true blues. If you’re tired of the slick, recycled garb that mainstream has donned, look in the dumpster out back. There’s a possum sniffing around, and it’s got a hold of some fly-infested, raw blues.

The filthiest of the bunch is R.L. Burnside. Count your blessings if you’ve seen R.L. live. He’s bordering 74 years of age, and he only tours two weeks at a time. The only way to corner R.L. for 60 minutes is to either locate him (good luck), or purchase his new album, “I Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down.”

“Every warning light in his car was on and flashing at him, he was totally f***ing drunk, and I was like, ‘Wow!’” Matthew Johnson told Spin’s about Burnside. “He was such a bad son of a b****.”

R.L. was born in Oxford, Miss., in 1926. He moved around the Holly Springs area to do farm work. Neighbors, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Rainie Barnette, had R.L. playing guitar by the 1950’s (“I tried to play the harmonica,” he told Blues Access’s Lou Friedman, “but I couldn’t make it work for me.”). R.L.’s abilities even allowed him to pursue the great blues highways connecting Chicago and Memphis. After a couple of years in those cities, R.L. returned to Mississippi to start a family with his new wife, Alice. The musician would farm in the day and callous his fingers at night.

By 1967, he began recording and earned enough of a reputation to play festivals and many tours. His sons, Joseph and Daniel, have sponged the blues since birth. Along with brother-in-law Calvin Jackson, the siblings became R.L.’s regular back up band, the Sound Machine (an album, “Sound Machine Groove,” was released in 1979). The acclaim reached overseas, and R.L. relished the European acceptance.

“The first time I was there with my sons we did the Blues Festival in London, England,” he told Ed Mabe. “Done the Red Car Blues Festival and come back through Frankfurt, Germany, and the guy was carrying us around, ya know translating for us, I said, ‘How them fellas like the music?’ They hollering and carrying on and 99 percent of’em can’t speak English. He said, ‘Oh they just like the rhythm.’ I got them ol’ words that I use, ‘Well, well, well’ and then and up to now when I go over there anywhere, when they holler ‘R.L. Burnside from Holly Springs, Mississippi. Well, Well, Well ...’”

The 1980s saw the musician parting minds in Europe, but the states had nary a clue. Back home in Northern Mississippi, R.L. was a juke joint deity. His shows were becoming the stuff of legend. Local white faces were becoming a growing contingent in the sea of revelers. In 1990, journalist Robert Palmer and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics came to Holly Springs to film “Deep Blue.” The movie depicted the underground blues scene in Mississippi. Palmer gravitated to the elder statesman and made R.L. a focal point of the film. A couple of years later, Palmer helped produce the debut, “Too Bad Jim” on the infant Fat Possum Records. Junior Kimbrough’s “All Night Long” and “Too Bad” became the infinite yardstick. The north Mississippi hill country had suddenly risen above the man-made peaks of Chicago. Burnside’s music was firmly planted in a grimy ditch with the sound of electric mud wafting through the speakers. R.L. had crumpled and spat upon the modern packaging of the blues.

Post-punk icon John Spencer’s Blues Explosion had salivated over “Too Bad Jim.” They took R.L. on tour and introduced him to a young audience. This led to the recording of “A Ass Pocket of Whiskey” with the Blues Explosion backing him. The album sold well and Mr. Burnside became an indie-rock hero.

“Yeah, them (Blues Explosion) is good guys once you get to know ‘em,” Burnside told Mabe. “Like I told’em, what they playing ain’t the blues, but what they playing puts on a good show, man. And they play more like the blues now since I did their album with’em.”

Hipsters from all over were going to see this gentleman with his soily proclamations and swampy guitar work. Innovation took a bow when Burnside’s downhome grit meshed with modern electronica in 1998’s “Come On In” (masterminded by Tim Rothrock of Beck and Elliot Smith).

There are certain critics of R.L.’s sound. Purists believe Burnside shouldn’t mix the blues with hip-hop.
“A lot of old-timers ain’t happy with what I did,” he told Friedman. “But the blues is the root of all music, including the stuff with the beats.”

“We got so much hate-mail after ‘Come On In’ came out,” Fat Possum’s Bruce Watson told Friedman. “We were getting death threats and stuff like that, but we thought it was hysterical ... maybe some of these purists would realize that if fans of other music liked this disc, they might just take an interest in the blues.”

Just to prove a point, Burnside has once again thrown a little polyester in the mud puddle with “Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down.” This time, the techno interloper is Beck’s turntable magi -- DJ Swamp. The press release for the album presents a comparison that’s hard to rebut -- “The scratching creates the same effect that the washboard created in blues bands of the ‘30’s, giving a strange logic to this blasphemy.”

The blues holy water must have soured when R.L. re-focused on the forgotten Mandolin Blues (popularized by Yank Rachell in the ‘30’s) and set it to an electric beat on “My Eyes Keep Me In Trouble.” The haunts are afloat on numbers like “Hard Time Killing Floor” and “Got Messed Up.” Slide guitars and mixing tables blend with R.L.’s stark, sandpaper vocals. His spoken word takes on a grisly tone in “R.L.’s Story,” a true tale about the repercussions of living in Chicago in the 1940s.

Don’t be dismayed. This is not a clean album. The smudges are all over blues standards like “See What My Buddy Done.” Need heartbreak with the funk attached? “Bad Luck City” has R.L. doing a rare falsetto wail that testifies to his authenticity. The mournful crooner has every instrument around him celebrating. From the slide work all the way down to the mixing (check out “Fife and Drum Piece” on “Too Many Ups”). “Heaven” has created a perfect terrain for Burnside’s raucous artistry to explore.
“We got to try to keep it going,” Burnside told Mebe. “Don’t want to end it right now. There’s a lot of young people going back to the blues once they find out that the blues is the roots of all music. It took’em a long time to find out where the music started from, but once they found that out, it’s good now.”

Drench it out, baby. Kill the old blues conception and throw its carcass out the door. There’s a caretaker up in the northern hills of Mississippi who’s ready to lay a shovel to anything sleek.
(Music writer Hunter Pope can be reached at w.h.pope@worldnet.att.net)

 

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