Fat Boys

In this age of media overload, it's astonishing that the wilds of America can still conceal outstanding and vital music that remains unrecorded and largely unheard. But Matthew Johnson, a skinny white boy from Mississippi, found a heap in his own backyard. In the early '90s, turned on to blues by a class taught by rock critic and historian Robert Palmer at the University of Mississippi, Johnson was inspired to seek out elderly blues guitarists nearby. Though he flunked the class, the young label mogul went on to meet and record R.L. Burnside (a former cohort of Mississippi Fred McDowell), Junior Kimbrough (a local juke-joint owner, superb guitar player, and father to 28 children), Cedell Davis (a crippled but resolute guitarist), and T-Model Ford (an illiterate former convict, who picked up his first guitar at age 58).

This staple of rockin' senior citizens formed the core roster of Johnson's lauded Mississippi record label, Fat Possum.

"R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough would play on Sundays for $2 admission, and they would just tear it up," Matthew recalls. "I didn't really know what I was doing, but I just wanted to record those two guys. I will never forget the first time that I saw R.L. I asked a buddy to show him to me, and there were all these cows on the road and it was pouring rain. I walked over, and I remember he rolled down the window of his Chrysler station wagon. There was a six-pack in his lap, and he had every fucking warning light on in the car. He had no career ambition, was 60 years old, and drunk as fuck. It was such a pure thing, so I thought we should corrupt it."

The documentary You See Me Laughin': The Last of the Hill Country Bluesmen -- originally released in 2002, and now out on DVD -- tells the hard-luck, murder-and-mayhem tales of Fat Possum's roster of ex-con bluesmen. Take R.L. Burnside. A sharecropper most of his life, he decamped to Chicago to play the blues in his early 20s, only to see most of his family killed off in unrelated incidents. (His father, two brothers, and an uncle were all murdered.) He gave as good as he got, though -- R.L. tells the story of how he shot a man in the back of the head over a $400 gambling debt. (He claims he served only six months.)

Burnside and T-Model Ford look like cuddly grandpas nowadays, but they used to be real badasses: In a bar fight, Ford was stabbed, then he slit a man's throat with a switchblade; he wound up on a chain gang.

The documentary uses pen-and-ink drawings to illustrate the bluesmen's seedy stories, but the storytellers themselves are often more effective. Burnside delivers his tale of shooting a man unemotionally, but you can see the pain in Ford's face when he recalls his rough and often abusive childhood.

Suffering for your art is a blues cliché, but these fucked-up experiences have led to some mean-sounding, entirely authentic regional music -- sometimes out of key and strident, Fat Possum songs nevertheless cut to the core in expressing heartbreak and anger.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the movie's concert footage. Laughin' shows Burnside playing in the 1970s, singing some seductive music with a group of women dancing around him; Junior Kimbrough, meanwhile, is captured in a far more recent performance at his juke joint, effortlessly letting loose with his relaxed, soulful guitar sound.

Who's ultimately responsible for this? Two white boys: Johnson, the pessimistic, articulate redneck, and Bruce Watson, his chubby, bespectacled partner. They provide much of the narrative for You See Me Laughin' and act as a bridge between a still-rowdy southern grandfather like R.L. Burnside and a chic New York act like the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, taking the last true Mississippi bluesmen and plugging them into the outside world of punk rock and hip-hop.

"I'm not a documentarian," Johnson notes (Laughin' is credited to Mandy Stein). "It's important to me that they are treated like real artists and not like a fuckin' butterfly collection. I want to take somebody who hasn't left the rural south -- or the county -- to go to Europe, to make money and then watch all the problems that come of that." Johnson pauses to laugh, wondering aloud whether he sounds like an asshole. "There's kind of a Ringling Brothers thing to that," he admits. "But that's all it is at the end of the day, like getting R.L. to open for the Beastie Boys or Junior Kimbrough opening for Iggy Pop."