Got the Weird Mississippi Blues Real Bad

T-Model Ford is a 77-year-old resident of Greenville, Miss., who walks with a crutch and enjoys bragging about his extensive criminal deeds. He also plays some of the meanest, most primitive blues you’ve ever heard.

“You Better Keep Still,” his new album out today on Fat Possum Records, combines the gutbucket intensity of delta blues with the roar of an unruly electric guitar. It’s raw, it’s weird, it’s funny, and it’s about a million miles removed from what passes for the blues at contemporary nightclubs and record labels.

Matthew Johnson wouldn’t have it any other way. The 30-year-old proprietor of Fat Possum, whose product is manufactured and distributed by L.A. punk label Epitaph, specializes in combing the back roads and juke joints of his native Mississippi for musicians like Ford--older men who, in Johnson’s opinion, are the only ones left playing the blues the way it was meant to be played.

“The further the blues gets from Mississippi, the worser it all seems to get,” says Johnson in his soft drawl. “The whole concept of ‘the blues’ has just been so cheapened by the music that’s out there now. Jonny Lang and Kenny Wayne Shepherd? Man, if they were my kids, I’d beat ‘em in the yard in front of all the neighbors. And meanwhile, all these guys down here are getting neglected.”

In business since 1991, Fat Possum hardly racks up the sort of sales figures associated with Eric Clapton records, yet the label has inspired a rabid underground following, thanks mostly to alternative rocker Jon Spencer.

Since 1996, Spencer has been Fat Possum’s most ardent champion, recording various high-profile collaborations with Fat Possum artist R.L. Burnside and inviting several of the label’s acts to tour with his band, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

“Jon put us on the map,” Johnson says. “Jon went to the mat for us, and he did it all with good spirits.”

Not everyone has been able to grasp the Fat Possum mission with the same sort of enthusiasm, however. A recent review in Rolling Stone slammed Ford’s “You Better Keep Still” as being little more than a smug practical joke perpetuated by bored hipsters.

Though this sort of criticism obviously stings, Johnson tries to shrug it off, and get on with bringing the music of Ford, Burnside, Cedell Davis, Johnny Farmer and the late Junior Kimbrough to an unsuspecting world.

“It’s not smug,” he insists. “It’s not studied. I like strangeness, and if a record is studied, it’s going to lose its strangeness. We’re just trying to make records that give you a reason to listen to ‘em. And I think that’s a lot nobler, and a lot more honorable, than trying to dig up the next Stevie Ray Vaughan.”