Chickasaw Mudd Puppies :
New York Times Review

This review from The New York Times was reprinted in a full page, color ad for 8 Track Stomp that appeared in Tower Records' Pulse! magazine

"The Chickasaw Mudd Puppies, a duo from Athens, Ga., play a quirky, neo-primitivist version of Delta blues. but the group is actually about much more than playing music. The singer Brant Slay and the acoustic guiiartst Ben Reynolds have taken the idea of Delta blues and blown it into a full-scale, three dimensional enterprise that includes stage props, clothing, specialized instruments, lyric topics and production techniques. The Mudd Puppies do blues as modem-day folk art.

The Mudd Puppies begin by decorating the stage like an old Southern porch or backvard. "Right now we're into clotheslines." Mr Slay said in a recent phone interview from Georgia. "On our last tour, it was quilts hanging from jute twine, and il turned into flannel shirts, overalls and union suits or clotheslines." Mr. Slay sings sitting in a rickety rocking chair, and the duo will bring on different Instruments, like a harmonica and washboard, or found objects to use as percussion. They dress In floppy hats, overalls and clunky work shoes.

On record, the band similarly tries to re-create the atmosphere and spontaneity of a 1930's front-porch jamboree. Mr Slay's voice growls and then jumps in little whoops and hollers, in songs like "Omaha," from the Mudd Puppies' second and latest release, "8-Track Stomp" (Polygram;. he sounds as (though he's singing through a crackly transistor radio. The lyrics are mostly pastiches of details of people and places: wasps, cicadas, waterfalls, crows and other ephemera of Southern living. 'Nostalgic Southern Junk.'

The band came together three years ago while Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Slay were art students at The University of Georgia in Athens. "We started plaving at my house, and I always decorate my house up pretty funky," said Mr Slay. "I was a sculpture major at school and did a lot of installation art. I always had weird rusty objects and nostalgic Southern junk that most people would pass by. It just became our little trademark."

The musical end came from the pair's interest in Delta blues artists like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. as well as "field recordings of real obscure blues artists," Mr Slay said. "I had a professor that ran around recording people who'd never been recorded, pewple that did field hollers and stuff."

NY TIMES
KAREN SCHOEMER

Chickasaw Mudd Puppies : New York Times Review

Chickasaw Mudd Puppies :
New York Times Review