Discovered far too late, Mississippi bluesman Charles Caldwell was already dying of pancreatic cancer as he began recording his belated debut for Fat Possum.
Caldwell passed in September of 2003, before label founder Matthew Johnson — who had discovered the startlingly original picker the previous May — was able to get Remember Me on the streets. When it finally arrived, this posthumous triumph of hypnotically insistent north Delta storytelling showed just how important Caldwell might have become as a modernizer of citified country blues.
A lifelong resident of the hill country around Coffeeville, Mississippi, Caldwell worked days at a plant in Grenada that manufactured heating and cooling equipment. At night, he’d sing at parties and local juke joints, but had never previously put any of his work to tape. Johnson brought the then-60-year-old to the Money Shot in Water Valley, where Caldwell performed primarily alone, though a few tracks also feature either Tino Gross or Ted “Zaney” Gainey on drums.
Now, Fat Possum is preparing a vinyl reissue of this underrated side, due on Nov. 22, that hopefully will burnish the reputation of a star-in-the-making that went too soon. Caldwell, playing his first guitar (a hollow-body Gibson 135 given to him at age 14), was undergoing chemo for his illness throughout the recording process — but you wouldn’t know it, so vibrant, rangy and grindingly, scaldingly metallic is his playing.
Think Buddy Guy, but on a much darker night … and much deeper in the woods.
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