Folks had been trying to get Asie Payton of Holly Springs, Miss., to record for 20 years, and he had flat-out refused over and over again. Fat Possum Records honcho Matthew Johnson, undeterred by previous failures and utterly enamored of Payton’s quavering vocals and deep rhythmic groove, kept on trying and finally persuaded Payton to lay down some demo tracks in preparation for the recording of his first real studio album.
Before the album sessions, but after those key demos had been recorded, Asie Payton died of a heart attack while on his tractor. Rather than let this vital musical discovery go to waste, Johnson and his compatriots assembled those demos, added some heavier rhythm (provided both by the legendary Sam Carr and by well-crafted looping), and released Worried, an acclaimed collection of the best of those demos.
Luckily for us, Mr. Payton left more great music behind. It’s collected on Just Do Me Right, his second (and almost certainly final) album. Comprised of the same hard-driving, trance-inducing blues and boogie as his first record, Just Do Me Right is by no means a mishmash of cuts not good enough to be on the “real” record. Rather, these songs are just as interesting, just as powerful, just as good as those that were sent out the first time.
“Back To The Bridge,” which both opens and closes the record, clangs and clatters with the thing Langston Hughes so aptly called “the boogie-woogie rumble of a dream deferred.” Payton, although his music is anything but depressive, gets down deep into those deferred dreams over and over, wrenching out the pain and frustration and making beauty out of the brutality.
“Do Me Right,” the album’s best cut, pairs Payton’s soulful delivery with a drum-and-organ backing straight out of the Memphis soul tradition. It’s not unreasonable to mistake “Do Me Right” for a great, lost Otis Redding or Al Green cut.
Sometimes the instrumentation gets somewhat oppressive in its layering, like on “1000 Years,” which struts effectively but loses the power of Payton’s classic blues truism “Every day just seems like a thousand years” in a over-processed soup of horns and harmonica. It’s by no means a bad track, and it’s a helluva lot better than most anything you’re likely to find on most mainstream blues records, but it doesn’t come close to hitting the emotional power of “Do Me Right” or the solo acoustic “Why’d You Do It?” It doesn’t even rock as hard as “Watch Yourself,” recorded live with the all-star pairing of slide guitarist Kenny Brown and drummer Sam Carr.
Whatever criticisms are levied concerning the “slick” production treatment that Payton’s primitively recorded demos are given should be forever erased by the awesome power of the rocking Mississippi bluesman recorded as live as he ever was. The only other time the production betrays the resonance of Payton’s deferred dreams is on “I Got A Friend,” which threatens throughout its four minutes to dissolve into a sloppy trip-hop mess. Again, Payton’s in fine voice, and there’s no way to deny his moan, but there was surely a better way to frame it sonically.
Fat Possum Records is, quite simply, the best blues label in the country. Nearly every record they release is shocking both in its audacity and its brilliance. Even though Asie Payton is by no means as well known as the company’s “stars” R.L. Burnside or Junior Kimbrough, the two posthumously released records honoring his legacy are just as vital as anything by those two great artists. Payton’s music rages against the dying of the light, pulling the listener down into the big muddy of bad luck and trouble.
