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Mistakes Were Made: Five Years Of Raw Blues, Damaged Livers & Questionable Business Decisions

by Various Artists

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about

Success story? More like a cautionary tale.

A cursory glance at any successful company will reveal some common traits: Strong leadership, a detailed plan for growth, a wealth of industry knowledge and a solid grasp of business fundamentals.

By these or any other rational measures, it's clear that Broke & Hungry Record is not a successful company.

And yet whatever our deficiencies, we've somehow managed to survive for five years during an era of economic freefall in the music industry.

How have we done it? Hubris? Stubbornness? Dumb blind luck?

Yes, yes and yes.

Since forming the label in the fall of 2005, I've been traversing the dusty highways and byways of Mississippi seeking out little-known blues artists and recording them in often less-than-optimal conditions.

Few of the artists I've worked with could accurately be described as professional musicians. Most have spent their lives playing casually on porches or in local jukes with no aspiration to record or tour. A handful have gone on to embrace the attention and career opportunities that their recordings have engendered. Others have elected to return to life as normal, far from the club circuit or festival stage.

Career choices aside, the artists on Broke & Hungry Records share many similarities. Each was born and raised in Mississippi. Each was exposed at an early age to the blues traditions of the Delta. And each has developed a personal music style that embraces the best qualities of their forebears - raw emotion, raunchy good humor and loads of swagger.

Over the past half-decade, Broke & Hungry Records has managed a slow-but-steady pace, releasing seven CDs of raw, primal blues. We also collaborated with Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art to produce the film M For Mississippi and its two accompanying CD soundtracks.

This two-CD set serves as a career-to-date retrospective of this work. Included are 16 songs from our back catalog along with a further 14 tracks that are previously unreleased. Many of these are "outtakes," although in most cases they're as strong as the tracks that made the final cut. A few of the newly released tracks - namely the recordings by Terry "Harmonica" Bean and Bill Abel - were recorded specifically for this release. Taken as a whole, these recordings offer listeners not just a distillation of our label's output but of the larger Delta blues scene as it exists today.

- Jeff Konkel/Broke & Hungry Records

credits

released April 1, 2011

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all rights reserved

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