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Music Maker Christmas Party - Mark Austin |
"If someone calls in and wants some help, it's immediate," says Timothy Duffy about the
Music Maker Relief Foundation's unique approach to meeting the needs of traditional blues
artists. "If we have it, it's a phone call, bang, the check's out." Music Maker has bought
new instruments for musicians, helped secure performance opportunities, provided legal
advocacy, and printed t-shirts for artists to sell at shows. Above all, the foundation has
put a priority on helping its indigent and elderly beneficiaries with more basic needs:
food, heat, health care, and transportation. "We realized it takes more than a guitar to
create art," Duffy says. "If you're just worried about surviving, you're not worried about
playing music." |
"Not the same old blues crap," proclaims the savvy new marketing slogan of Fat Possum Records,
the Mississippi label whose 29-year-old owner, Matthew Johnson, has put a priority on bashing
the blues establishment. In a lengthy article in the May '97 issue of Spin, Johnson took a
verbal poke at Alligator Records' Bruce Iglauer for putting out "shit"; on Fat Possum's
website, he boasts that "there are only two kinds of blues records made today: Fat Possum
Records, which don't suck, and all the others." Johnson's sophomoric posturing may qualify
him as the "Beavis" of the blues world, and his label has been criticized for
sensationalizing-even exploiting-the images of its artists in order to market them to a
younger audience. But there's no denying that Fat Possum, which was co-founded in 1991 by
Johnson and former Living Blues editor Peter Lee, has issued some of the most critically
acclaimed and challenging blues records of the '90s and has succeeded in exposing traditional
bluesmen like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough to the alternative rock scene, bringing
expanded financial opportunities to the artists and a taste of the blues to a new group of
fans. |
"I took a lot of abusing off of people in this life," says Cootie
Stark, sitting in the passenger seat of a station wagon that is taking
him back to the Woodland Homes public housing projects in Greenville,
South Carolina. |