Blues to make you happy

The US label Fat Possum has made its name with contemporary blues for the indie crowd. So why, asks Phil Johnson, is its latest release a blisteringly intense historical recording of Mississippi Fred McDowell?

The meaning of the music called the blues has long been a matter of dispute. To some commentators, what the Marxist historian and jazz writer Eric Hobsbawm called "unquestionably the finest body of living folk poetry in the modern industrial world" is a moving expression of the indomitable spirit of humanity, produced against all the odds by a suffering and downtrodden race. Another view, epitomised by the black jazz historian Albert Murray in his book Stomping the Blues, sees the blues primarily as functional dance music, the soundtrack to having a good time.

Things are complicated further by a dissertation's worth of binary oppositions: rural and urban, agricultural and industrial, acoustic and electric, amateur and professional, historical and contemporary. Poor surviving bluesmen, suffering or not, have also had to put up with their music being press-ganged into ideological service.

In Britain in the late Fifties, visiting performers such as Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters were encouraged to abandon electric guitar and return to the acoustic styles they had given up years earlier, in order to appear more "authentic". Such absurdity is satirised in Colin MacInnes's 1959 novel Absolute Beginners, whose narrator refers to the Communist Party-led ballad and blues movement, "which seeks to prove that all folk music is an art of protest (and) that this art is somehow latched on to the achievements of the USSR, i.e., Mississippi jail songs are in praise of sputniks."

The exaggerated concern with authenticity also affected attitudes to blues recordings, with "commercial" labels such as Chess of Chicago disparaged in comparison with field recordings by academic or government-sponsored folklorists, who in reality may have exploited their artists more and paid them less. Whatever the ultimate meaning of the blues, the issues of poetry vs pleasure and the artifices of authenticity are still with us.

The contemporary blues label Fat Possum, based in Oxford, Mississippi, recently inaugurated a "blues heritage" series with the release of Mama Says I'm Crazy by Mississippi Fred McDowell and Johnny Woods, a field recording from 1967 by the folklorist George Mitchell, whose archive Fat Possum has bought.

It's an absolutely terrific album that could be used as a test case for all future blues-based disputations. There's undoubtedly poetry there if you wish to look for it, but it's the sheer power of the intensely rhythmic music that hits you first. It may be rural Mississippi hill-country blues played on acoustic instruments, but it's as hard and as wild as anything by Howlin' Wolf. McDowell (bottleneck guitar and vocals) and Woods (harmonica) rock their Mississippi-cotton socks off on chugging boogie riffs that go on and on and on. Issues of authenticity are also turned upside down on the best track, "I Got a Woman", which despite its "traditional" credit owes more to popular versions by Ray Charles and Elvis Presley.

The McDowell album will be followed by another 20 or so titles – including work by Sleepy John Estes, Furry Lewis, Eddie Boyd and Gus Cannon – over the next few years, all culled from the Mitchell archive, which runs to more than 80 hours of material.

When I phone George Mitchell at his home in Atlanta, it turns out that he was far from the professorial folklorist-figure one imagines as a Delta version of Indiana Jones. Indeed, when Mitchell first set out in search of bluesmen to record, he was a high-school student who knew very little about the music and absolutely nothing about recording, which he did using an old tape recorder borrowed from his maths teacher and the cheapest possible tape from Radio Shack.

I asked Mitchell about microphones and whether he used anything special. "Oh, no. I just set it up with the mic that came with it," he said. What about microphone placement? "I just experimented. The tape recorder had a little speaker with it, and I would listen to the results and gradually figure out the best place to put the mic. At the end of each song, I'd play back the recording, and we'd sit and listen before going on to the next one."

By the time Mitchell got to Mississippi Fred McDowell in 1967, he'd been recording for six years and had perfected his technique, such as it was. Even at the time, he knew he had captured something special. "I couldn't believe my ears," Mitchell told me. "It was an intense couple of hours." He'd approached the famous bluesman at the gas station in Como, Mississippi, where he still worked. McDowell agreed to do the session but insisted that Mitchell also hire his friend Johnny Woods to play harp.

The only problem was that no one had seen Woods for about eight years, although Fred had heard he was back in town. "Three hours on a dirt road later, we pulled up to a dilapidated shack in a town called Senatobia and found Woods – whom I later found to be a cordial, gentle man, fortysomething, one hell of a harp-player – passed out on the front porch," Mitchell recalled for the album's sleeve notes.

As Woods was in no condition to record, they arranged to meet him at McDowell's house the following night, but he never turned up. A few days later they located Woods again, at a barbecue, where he was swigging corn whiskey from a jug. "There was no telling how long we'd have to wait to find him again, so we decided to record right there and then, at the house of a friend of McDowell," Mitchell told me. As usual, he stopped the tape after each song, rewound and played the recording back for the artists to listen to. "I always considered that an important part of my research; it's real strong positive feedback," Mitchell says.

The rest is history, which for Fat Possum is ironic. The label has made its name releasing contemporary blues records – including those by R L Burnside, McDowell's great rival and successor – whose appeal has crossed over to the worlds of indie rock, grunge and even hip hop (its compilation New Beats from the Delta is the best nu-blues album there is).

Fat Possum's owner, Matthew Johnson, also hates folklorists and field recordings with a vengeance. "Their records sound so horrible; everyone's on a grant or they all teach, and it's all paid for by the state. The first thing they say to the artists is, 'We don't have a lot of money...' It kind of pisses me off in no small amount," Johnson rants from his Fat Possum desk in Oxford. "It's like the stuff on Rounder Records – those folks take the edge off of everything." Johnson grudgingly makes an exception for the George Mitchell recordings. "He's a decent guy and he got a good sound, so he sort of transcended all that," Johnson says. "Or maybe he just got lucky."

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