PAUL ''WINE'' JONES, T-MODEL FORD, KENNY BROWN
''LIVE AT WFMU ON DAVID SUISMAN'S SHOW 2004''
RELEASED MARCH 4TH 2004
RECORDED MARCH 4TH 2004
39:10
1. Paul "Wine" Jones - If You Love Me Like You Say (02:33)
2. Paul "Wine" Jones - Nobody But You (03:36)
3. Paul "Wine" Jones - Stop Arguing (02:44)
4. Paul "Wine" Jones - Pucker Up, Butter Cup (01:48)
5. Paul "Wine" Jones - Don't Laugh At Me (02:06)
6. T-Model Ford - I Love My Babe (04:04)
7. T-Model Ford - Chicken Head Man (04:59)
8. T-Model Ford - Wish I Was a Catfish (04:46)
9. T-Model Ford - Somebody Knockin' (03:33)
10. Kenny Brown - Jump On the Line (04:38)
11. Kenny Brown - Laughing to Keep From Cryin' (04:00)
Matthew Johnson has said that he started Fat Possum Records just to be able to put out a record by R. L. Burnside. He did that (Bad Luck City, 1992), but fortunately he didn’t stop there. From that time on, Fat Possum has released many of the most exciting blues discs to appear since the 1960s, revitalizing interest in music that many people (outside the South, especially) had long thought was creatively exhausted.
For a number of years, a handful of artists from the label’s roster toured the country, billed as the Fat Possum Juke Joint Caravan. Back in the mid-1990s the troupe featured R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. Later, its mainstays were T-Model Ford and Paul "Wine" Jones. In 2004, the opportunity arose to bring the Caravan to WFMU for a set on my show "The Inner Ear Detour," and I was thrilled to have them.
For reasons I don’t recall, everyone was packed into Studio A, rather than setting up the musicians in the regular, roomier performance space upstairs, connected to Studio B. It wasn’t intentional, I’m sure, but with everyone crammed in there, the effect when the music started was that Studio A felt an awful lot like a crowded hill-country juke joint. The sound had a lot to do with it, too, of course. Listening to these recordings today, this is not a sound—gritty and dark, loose and groovy—that I generally associate with 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning! It helped too that we had a throng of people squeezed into the room: all the musicians, their handler, engineer Jason Engel, sundry WFMU staffers and volunteers, and, somewhat incongruously, a small television crew doing a story on Fat Possum for the Canadian branch of Bravo.
The late Paul "Wine" Jones played first, with a searing guitar style reminiscent of the rawer recordings of Hound Dog Taylor. T-Model Ford played next, with echoes of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters in his repertoire but with a sandpaper-and-gravel timbre and sparse accompaniment (by his longtime partner Spam on drums) that no one would mistake for Chess Records. "T” (as everyone seemed to call him) was then in his 80s and walked with a cane, but this didn’t stop him from getting up and dancing when the other musicians played. Last was Kenny Brown, best known as a protégé of R. L. Burnside but whose lighter finger-picking on this date was more reminiscent of another of his mentors, Joe Callicott. Cedric Burnside played drums with Paul Jones and with Kenny Brown.
Great musicians, and a great morning.
BIOGRAPHY (PAUL ''WINE'' JONES)
by Richard Skelly
Like Big Jack Johnson, Sam Carr and his other labelmates at Fat Possum/Capricorn, guitarist, singer and songwriter Paul "Wine" Jones grew up with blues all around him. He learned to play guitar at his father's feet at age four, taking his earliest inspiration from his father's playing. Jones' brother, Casey, is the in-demand Chicago blues drummer who's backed Albert Collins, Koko Taylor and dozens of others. Jones played music as an avocation for many years, working farming jobs until 1971, when he became a professional welder in Belzoni, Mississippi. He's been based in Belzoni ever since.
In 1995 and 1996, as part of Fat Possum's Mississippi Juke Joint Caravan, he had the opportunity to perform for the first time outside of Mississippi. His 1995 debut for the Fat Possum/Capricorn label, Mule, is deeply rooted in the rural juke joint tradition of the Delta, and his style is totally original, a combination of synchronized guitar and vocal phrasings and electric country blues. He's joined on the album by drummer Sam Carr and guitarist Big Jack Johnson. Mule was produced by blues scholar/impresario Robert Palmer, author of the book Deep Blues. Pucker Up, Buttercup followed in 1999.
BIOGRAPHY (T-MODEL FORD)
by Richard Skelly
Singer, songwriter, and guitarist T-Model Ford (James Lewis Carter Ford) plays a raw-edged, visceral style of blues from the Mississippi Delta, accompanied much of the time by his drummer, Spam (Tommy Lee Miles). Ford caught a break when he opened up on a national tour for Buddy Guy and his band, playing respectable theaters and some festivals, but he's been chronically under-recorded. He began playing guitar late in life and hadn't really toured much outside the Mississippi Delta until the 1990s and into the new millennium. In recent years he's been well-received at Antone's nightclub in Austin during the South by Southwest Music Festival, at the Chicago Blues Festival, and on tour with Guy and his band. When not on the road, playing mostly blues nightclubs, T-Model Ford and Spam set their instruments and amps up on Nelson Street in Greenville, MS, where they'll play for as much as eight hours straight. Ford's sound is raw, unadulterated Delta blues, and the music on his albums tends to sound sparse but is very rhythmic, given that his sole accompanist is the drummer Spam. His albums, all for the Fat Possum label, now based in Los Angeles, include Pee-Wee Get My Gun (1997), You Better Keep Still (1999), She Ain't None of Your'n (2000), and Bad Man (2002). After a six-year break from recording -- though he toured regularly -- Ford returned to the bins on the Alive imprint with Ladies Man in 2010; he followed it with Taledragger in 2011.
BIOGRAPHY (KENNY BROWN)
by Rovi
Born in 5 July 1953, Selma, Alabama, USA. Raised in northern Mississippi’s hill country, as a child Brown absorbed the region’s rich musical heritage. Largely self-taught on guitar, his guitar-playing neighbour, the under-recorded bluesman Joe Callicott, gave him encouragement and coaching. At the start of the 70s, Brown, who still had a day job in the construction industry, met R.L. Burnside and suggested they team up. Thereafter, he played with Burnside whenever possible, also working with George ‘Mojo’ Buford, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Johnny Woods before his partnership with Burnside filled his working life. At one point, he and Burnside played with Jon Spencer’s punk blues band. By the early 90s, Burnside and Brown were a formidable team, touring the USA, playing everything from juke joints to small festivals.
A gifted slide player, a technique he had developed early in his career but which he insists benefited from Burnside’s tutelage, Brown is a thoroughly accomplished musician. His singing voice is strong and moaning, his interpretations powerful. Many of the songs in his repertoire, some of which he learned from Callicott, come from the past and have matured over generations but which, in Brown’s arrangements, seem freshly minted. These include ‘If Down Was Up’, ‘You Don't Know My Mind’, ‘Wretched Mind’ and ‘Lonesome Katy Blues’. He also performs some Burnside’s songs, such as ‘Miss Maybelle’ and ‘Goin’ Down South’, as well as original songs of his own like ‘From Now On’ and ‘Hold Me, Baby’. For his own-name 1997 debut, Brown’s band, which included some part-time musicians, was Dale Beavers (guitar/vocals), Terrence ‘T-Money’ Bishop (bass), and J. Farrell Bonds (drums). On the 2003 follow-up Stingray he was joined by Takeeshi Imura (bass) and Cedric Burnside (drums), R.L.’s grandson, who had worked with the Burnside/Brown team since he was 15 years old.
DoWnLoAd
''LIVE AT WFMU ON DAVID SUISMAN'S SHOW 2004''
RELEASED MARCH 4TH 2004
RECORDED MARCH 4TH 2004
39:10
1. Paul "Wine" Jones - If You Love Me Like You Say (02:33)
2. Paul "Wine" Jones - Nobody But You (03:36)
3. Paul "Wine" Jones - Stop Arguing (02:44)
4. Paul "Wine" Jones - Pucker Up, Butter Cup (01:48)
5. Paul "Wine" Jones - Don't Laugh At Me (02:06)
6. T-Model Ford - I Love My Babe (04:04)
7. T-Model Ford - Chicken Head Man (04:59)
8. T-Model Ford - Wish I Was a Catfish (04:46)
9. T-Model Ford - Somebody Knockin' (03:33)
10. Kenny Brown - Jump On the Line (04:38)
11. Kenny Brown - Laughing to Keep From Cryin' (04:00)
Matthew Johnson has said that he started Fat Possum Records just to be able to put out a record by R. L. Burnside. He did that (Bad Luck City, 1992), but fortunately he didn’t stop there. From that time on, Fat Possum has released many of the most exciting blues discs to appear since the 1960s, revitalizing interest in music that many people (outside the South, especially) had long thought was creatively exhausted.
For a number of years, a handful of artists from the label’s roster toured the country, billed as the Fat Possum Juke Joint Caravan. Back in the mid-1990s the troupe featured R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. Later, its mainstays were T-Model Ford and Paul "Wine" Jones. In 2004, the opportunity arose to bring the Caravan to WFMU for a set on my show "The Inner Ear Detour," and I was thrilled to have them.
For reasons I don’t recall, everyone was packed into Studio A, rather than setting up the musicians in the regular, roomier performance space upstairs, connected to Studio B. It wasn’t intentional, I’m sure, but with everyone crammed in there, the effect when the music started was that Studio A felt an awful lot like a crowded hill-country juke joint. The sound had a lot to do with it, too, of course. Listening to these recordings today, this is not a sound—gritty and dark, loose and groovy—that I generally associate with 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning! It helped too that we had a throng of people squeezed into the room: all the musicians, their handler, engineer Jason Engel, sundry WFMU staffers and volunteers, and, somewhat incongruously, a small television crew doing a story on Fat Possum for the Canadian branch of Bravo.
The late Paul "Wine" Jones played first, with a searing guitar style reminiscent of the rawer recordings of Hound Dog Taylor. T-Model Ford played next, with echoes of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters in his repertoire but with a sandpaper-and-gravel timbre and sparse accompaniment (by his longtime partner Spam on drums) that no one would mistake for Chess Records. "T” (as everyone seemed to call him) was then in his 80s and walked with a cane, but this didn’t stop him from getting up and dancing when the other musicians played. Last was Kenny Brown, best known as a protégé of R. L. Burnside but whose lighter finger-picking on this date was more reminiscent of another of his mentors, Joe Callicott. Cedric Burnside played drums with Paul Jones and with Kenny Brown.
Great musicians, and a great morning.
BIOGRAPHY (PAUL ''WINE'' JONES)
by Richard Skelly
Like Big Jack Johnson, Sam Carr and his other labelmates at Fat Possum/Capricorn, guitarist, singer and songwriter Paul "Wine" Jones grew up with blues all around him. He learned to play guitar at his father's feet at age four, taking his earliest inspiration from his father's playing. Jones' brother, Casey, is the in-demand Chicago blues drummer who's backed Albert Collins, Koko Taylor and dozens of others. Jones played music as an avocation for many years, working farming jobs until 1971, when he became a professional welder in Belzoni, Mississippi. He's been based in Belzoni ever since.
In 1995 and 1996, as part of Fat Possum's Mississippi Juke Joint Caravan, he had the opportunity to perform for the first time outside of Mississippi. His 1995 debut for the Fat Possum/Capricorn label, Mule, is deeply rooted in the rural juke joint tradition of the Delta, and his style is totally original, a combination of synchronized guitar and vocal phrasings and electric country blues. He's joined on the album by drummer Sam Carr and guitarist Big Jack Johnson. Mule was produced by blues scholar/impresario Robert Palmer, author of the book Deep Blues. Pucker Up, Buttercup followed in 1999.
BIOGRAPHY (T-MODEL FORD)
by Richard Skelly
Singer, songwriter, and guitarist T-Model Ford (James Lewis Carter Ford) plays a raw-edged, visceral style of blues from the Mississippi Delta, accompanied much of the time by his drummer, Spam (Tommy Lee Miles). Ford caught a break when he opened up on a national tour for Buddy Guy and his band, playing respectable theaters and some festivals, but he's been chronically under-recorded. He began playing guitar late in life and hadn't really toured much outside the Mississippi Delta until the 1990s and into the new millennium. In recent years he's been well-received at Antone's nightclub in Austin during the South by Southwest Music Festival, at the Chicago Blues Festival, and on tour with Guy and his band. When not on the road, playing mostly blues nightclubs, T-Model Ford and Spam set their instruments and amps up on Nelson Street in Greenville, MS, where they'll play for as much as eight hours straight. Ford's sound is raw, unadulterated Delta blues, and the music on his albums tends to sound sparse but is very rhythmic, given that his sole accompanist is the drummer Spam. His albums, all for the Fat Possum label, now based in Los Angeles, include Pee-Wee Get My Gun (1997), You Better Keep Still (1999), She Ain't None of Your'n (2000), and Bad Man (2002). After a six-year break from recording -- though he toured regularly -- Ford returned to the bins on the Alive imprint with Ladies Man in 2010; he followed it with Taledragger in 2011.
BIOGRAPHY (KENNY BROWN)
by Rovi
Born in 5 July 1953, Selma, Alabama, USA. Raised in northern Mississippi’s hill country, as a child Brown absorbed the region’s rich musical heritage. Largely self-taught on guitar, his guitar-playing neighbour, the under-recorded bluesman Joe Callicott, gave him encouragement and coaching. At the start of the 70s, Brown, who still had a day job in the construction industry, met R.L. Burnside and suggested they team up. Thereafter, he played with Burnside whenever possible, also working with George ‘Mojo’ Buford, Mississippi Fred McDowell and Johnny Woods before his partnership with Burnside filled his working life. At one point, he and Burnside played with Jon Spencer’s punk blues band. By the early 90s, Burnside and Brown were a formidable team, touring the USA, playing everything from juke joints to small festivals.
A gifted slide player, a technique he had developed early in his career but which he insists benefited from Burnside’s tutelage, Brown is a thoroughly accomplished musician. His singing voice is strong and moaning, his interpretations powerful. Many of the songs in his repertoire, some of which he learned from Callicott, come from the past and have matured over generations but which, in Brown’s arrangements, seem freshly minted. These include ‘If Down Was Up’, ‘You Don't Know My Mind’, ‘Wretched Mind’ and ‘Lonesome Katy Blues’. He also performs some Burnside’s songs, such as ‘Miss Maybelle’ and ‘Goin’ Down South’, as well as original songs of his own like ‘From Now On’ and ‘Hold Me, Baby’. For his own-name 1997 debut, Brown’s band, which included some part-time musicians, was Dale Beavers (guitar/vocals), Terrence ‘T-Money’ Bishop (bass), and J. Farrell Bonds (drums). On the 2003 follow-up Stingray he was joined by Takeeshi Imura (bass) and Cedric Burnside (drums), R.L.’s grandson, who had worked with the Burnside/Brown team since he was 15 years old.
DoWnLoAd