Asie Payton

Asie Payton, on the other hand, never did get his due, and in many ways he was a prototypical Fat Possum artist. A dirt-poor Mississippi farmer who spent every available moment on his tractor and at least some of his evenings cranking out his workmanlike blues in makeshift clubs, Payton could never seem to understand the urgency behind Matthew Johnson’s pleas to get himself into a studio and then out on the road to tour. Then he died of a heart attack, still working on his tractor, at the age of 60, having only allowed a recording device to get near him twice — once at Fat Possum’s old studio and once at Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint. In all honesty, the evidence of Worried suggests that Payton would have made few ripples in the blues world — his rough and tumble R&B-influenced blues are unremarkable, although definitely raw, immediate and worthy of some attention — but it’s nice that he at least has left something behind him, which is more than countless other blues relics stomping away in obscurity will ever realise.