The Fat Possum head office is in Water Valley, Mississippi. A dozen years ago, a hard-partying 22-year-old named Matt Johnson founded the company between going to the University of Mississippi part time and writing the occasional reviews for blues magazines ("All these crappy bands from Sweden and New Jersey, doing covers of ‘Sweet Home Chicago,’ as he put it). Hearing the raw power of Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside working a juke joint changed all that. With a $400 student loan and a desire to capture that raw power, Fat Possum was born.

It hasn’t been easy. Fat Possum Records did manage to survive the rage of blues purists who thought the rock and hip hop collaborations Fat Possum was doing with their best known artist, R.L. Burnside, were blasphemous. Fat Possum also managed to survive the deaths of Junior Kimbrough, Asie Payton, and, most recently, Charles "Cadillac" Caldwell. And FPR lived through a financial crisis that saw it at a million dollars in debt in the mid-90s, garnering $14,000 in bounced-cheque fines in a single year. It survived legal wrangling (an expensive lawsuit with their distributor Capricorn Records) and artists who refused to work, ended up in jail, or wrecked their cars.

Johnson, now 34, and his partner, Bruce Watson, 39, have soldiered on when many others would have quit. Come On In by R.L. Burnside was the record that started to turn things around. It sold over 180,00 copies worldwide, and "Ass Pocket of Whiskey," from that album, ended up on the Sopranos’ soundtrack album. R.L. Burnside then collaborated with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and sold more than 100,000 albums. More importantly, that recording introduced the raw North Mississippi Sound to a whole new generation of young white kids who started looking for more. Ironically, the basis of that new "Sound" is raw electrified blues generated primarily by old black men.

Fat Possum now has 33 artists listed on their roster. The diversity is impressive. It encompasses acoustic bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell, who passed away in 1972 shortly after he proclaimed, "I do not play no rock and roll," to the recently signed Thee Shams, whose sound is a mix of cheesy ’60s organ and raw searing guitar. Fat Possum continues to blur the boundaries and open eyes and ears.

You gotta love a record company with this motto: "We’re trying our best." As Matt Johnson says, "I just record blues guys who were overlooked by other labels because they hadn’t toured, or had limited repertoires, or were unreliable or refused to play standing up...guys who sometimes have trouble standing up, yet excel at falling down. But that’s the blues. At least that’s what I call the blues."