Album Notes

Not for the faint of heart is Cashman, purveyor of full-frontal downhome blues, as subtle as a tornado funnel or an artillery blast. On Texassippi Stomp, the music arrives courtesy of two guys, Ray Cashman (electric and acoustic guitars, dobro, percussion) and Grant A. Brown (harmonica), with the periodic assistance of the ubiquitous but unfailingly worthy Jimbo Mathus (bass, guitar, snare drum), who also produces. This is rude, raucous Mississippi juke-joint music, much less delta than hill country -- the sort of raw approach whose then-surviving (and some since-deceased) native practitioners (including T Model Ford, R.L. Burnside, Paul "Wine" Jones and Robert Belfour) the Oxford, Mississippi, label Fat Possum famously recorded and promoted. Among our many debts to Fat Possum (in whose Money Spot studio Cashman cut this album), we may thank it -- snark alert -- for encouraging talented young white guitarists to stop trying to sound like Eric Clapton trying to sound like Albert King. Or, to the more knowledgeable, giving them some idea of a living, as opposed to an archival, country blues. Cashman's uncompromising approach renders trivial, even absurd, conventional notions of "authenticity." Who Cashman and Brown are in prosaic fact -- you could call them, technically, folk musicians in the revival sense -- is detail, and, worse, misleading detail, because in the post-traditional early 21st century anybody who decides to carry a tradition has become a tradition carrier. If the music is so felt and true that it rises above rote impersonation, that's as close to a working definition of "authentic" as you're going to get. Cashman is as authentic as all hell. Jerome Clark Rambles.net