Artist: Jimbo Mathus & The Tri-State Coalition
Album: Dark Night Of The Soul
Bitrate: 254kbps avg
Quality: EAC Secure Mode / LAME 3.98.4 / -V0 / 44.100Khz
Label: Fat Possum Records
Genre: Rock
Size: 72.31 megs
PlayTime: 0h 37min 39sec total
Rip Date: 2014-04-08
Store Date: 2014-02-18
Track List:
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01. Dark Night Of The Soul 3:39
02. White Angel 3:33
03. Rock & Roll Trash 2:19
04. Shine Like A Diamond 2:48
05. Writing Spider 3:00
06. Tallahatchie 3:08
07. Burn The Ships 3:21
08. Fire In The Canebrake 3:19
09. Hawkeye Jordan 3:16
10. Casey Caught The Cannonball 2:37
11. Medicine 3:29
12. Butcher Bird 3:10
Release Notes:
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Mathus started his journey in Lafayette County, Mississippi in 1967. Of Italian
and Scottish descent, he was immersed in music from the very beginning. By age
six, he was playing the mandolin with the family band and by his early teens
knew a vast repertoire of Southern folk, blues, gospel and rock and roll. ôMom
and Dad were great dancers, hell raisers, and tireless adventurers,ö Mathus
says.
His father and his fatherÆs family and cronies were all musical. Scottish
immigrants, they were pioneers in Northeast Mississippi after the Chickasas Land
Cession of 1830 and the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The men that were of age
fought in the Civil War and many died at Shiloh, just a few miles to the
northeast of MathusÆ hometown of Corinth, MS. The Mathis clan (Jimbo changed the
ôiö to a ôuö in honor or Mississippian William Faulkner, born ôFalknerö) were
great fiddlers and had paid their way to America as fiddlers on a steamship. The
ôancestral fiddleö was on the high shelf in Mathis house and Jimbo would take it
down on occasion and mess around.
His mother's family was Italian refugees from Piedmont, Italy, recruited by
American interests to come to Mississippi to work the cotton fields. Once in the
States, they became engaged in bootlegging and juke joint operating among the
DeltaÆs black community, running whiskey from Virginia and Kentucky in cars
equipped with overload springs to thwart the law enforcement. Italian was spoken
in his grandfather's house, where they continued their Italian lifestyle there
in Clarksdale, MS. At the same time, Clarksdale was becoming Ground Zero for the
birth of blues music in America, counting Muddy Waters, Sam Cooke, Ike Turner,
John Lee Hooker and many, many more as native sons. Jimbo calls his birth there
in North Central Mississippi "fortuitous."
"I was born in the shadow of the great pyramids, so to speak, in the nexus of
Southern/American culture, from Elvis to William Faulkner,ö he says. ôIÆm
continually amazed that these great accomplishments in the arts were somehow
achieved in this unlikely location. This state is revered by many worldwide for
its arts, culture, cuisine, letters and athletic heroes and abhorred for its
cruelty and racism. It's heroic and cowardly, savage and gracefully civilized by
turns. You can find the depths of ignorance and the loftiest of thinking.ö
Although their home in Mississippi remained a constant, travel was also a big
part of his early childhood. "Dad threw me and the dogs in the back of a pickup
truck one summer and we drove to Alaska sleeping in the truck along the way" he
recollects. " I took his guitar and learned to play and write songs over the
month it took us to get up there and back." This wanderlust continued on into
his early adulthood.
He chose music as his life's pursuit at an early age and found himself caught up
in the miasma of contradictions that make up Southern culture. His response was
to reject ôpoliteö convention and seek out the ôoutsiders, the losers, the
scrap-heap cast-off people." "I was asked to leave my high school early due to
my general lack of concern and smart-ass attitude,ö he says. After a brush with
the law, he was ôencouragedö to enlist as a deckhand on Mississippi river
barges. For a time, Jimbo considered a career in the Merchant Marines. He
enjoyed life on the river.
ôWe pushed and pulled coal, grain and petroleum for America to consume," he
recalls. "Moving massively and slowly, through the night and day, I'd watch the
world go by. We could see life on shore from the decks, but we were separate,
apart from it all, seeing the people start to stir in the morning dawn as lights
came on in the houses, imagining the families at their breakfasts, their coffee,
seeing the cars light up and pull off to the jobs they held down. At night, the
searchlight of the boat would play over the bank, illuminating the people parked
by the river drinking, shooting guns, making love à We'd witness the goings on
and depravities that happen by the river at night. ô
Jimbo also sought travel and adventure by hitchhiking and jumping trains on his
shore leave, meeting and living with the "prostitutes, idlers and gentlemen
loafers; the preachers and junkies who congealed at the bottom on dead end roads
and bus stations of the deep South and beyond." He saw Hopi vision seekers
elevate before his eyes as he tended the sweat lodge rocks of a Sun Dance in
Arizona. Having no health care, he "negotiatedö a gold tooth with a certain Dr.
Sanchez in the jungles of central Yucatan. He met Appalachian vampires who lived
on ginseng and moonshine. At the same time, books were his constant companions
as he studied history and the arts in his pursuit of ôthe real South -- the real
America."
"I wanted to know American music from the inside out, from top to bottom,ö he
says. ôI instinctively knew that there was no fast track to get where I wanted
to go to learn what I wanted to know. I came to discover that American music
started with the people that came here from somewhere else, with all these
cultures contributing something. Stephen Foster first codified this folk music
into songs that America could sing. Horns and strings, borrowed from martial
bands and orchestras, were bastardized into jazz and minstrelsy; guitars,
souvenirs stolen from Mexicans, were turned into blues and country. W.C. Handy,
Jimmy Rogers, Charley Patton, Duke Ellington, Chuck Berry, Phil Spector, and the
Ramones. They all made American music and all it led somewhere û I was
determined to find out where.ö
All these influences ù people he'd meet, music he'd hear; places he's pass
through on his travels ù have fermented in his soul. Jimbo's music, as well as
his characters and narratives, is a potent, high-octane concoction, steeped in
the lore of the Deep South and filtered through generations of American musical
styles.
"Some people think I play blues because of my work with Buddy Guy. Some people
think I play vaudeville because of my time with Squirrel Nut Zippers." Jimbo
says. ôSome people think I play æYou Are My SunshineÆ for tips because they see
me play it at a catfish house. Most people have no idea what I really do. Mostly
I play what I want and right now I play with TriûState Coalition; Matt pierce
from Arkansas, Terrence Bishop from Tennessee, Eric Carlton and Ryan Rogers from
Mississippi. Together we made the White Buffalo.ö