These came out in 1999 – or at least that’s when I got ’em. Here’s what I said about them back then (with some minor editing):
In a very real sense, the rural Mississippi Delta bluesman — not to mention the bulk of Fat Possum Records’ artist roster — is a dying breed. Or maybe not, thanks to a handful of new artists stepping in to pick up the torch.
Take singer-guitarist Paul Jones. A welder by trade, he wields his axe like an acetylene torch on Pucker Up Buttercup, the followup to last year’s Mule. Backed only by his drummer Pickle, Jones opens up a can of whupass and goes right upside your head with a dozen tracks of righteously dirty guitar, ruthless John Lee Hooker-style stompers and keep-drinking-till-the-money-runs-out blues. And since he’s still pushing 50, he’s got plenty of years of mayhem ahead of him. As do The Neckbones, a quartet of trailer-trash white boys whose greasy blues-rawk packs all the intoxicating properties of a slug of moonshine. Sure, they’re anything but true bluesmen — the Chuck-Berry-on-speed riffs, pumping piano lines and crazed hoodoo jive are closer to The Stooges, The Dead Boys and The Oblivians than Muddy Waters. But cock an ear to their cover of T-Model’s Nobody Gets Me Down and it seems the Delta blues are a long way from pushing up daisies.
