Fruteland Jackson is a Blues Music Award-nominated acoustic player and educator who received raves for his Electro-Fi Records debut, Blues 2.0.
He has followed up in fine style with the critically praised Tell Me What You Say, a fine collection of acoustic blues ranging from the Delta to Chicago to the west and east coasts.
He makes it all his own -- which is a heck of a trick, given that blues music was a late choice for this former Mississippi shrimp salesman- turned blues educator.
Hardline Blues: So let me start by asking you how you came to play blues for a living, as you seem to have come on the scene really quickly, but usually whenever it seems that way there's a lengthy backstory, and in your case it's not just a musical pursuit but a historical one.
Fruteland Jackson: Well, the blues found me. I was taking a foreign language, political science and I was learning to speak Arabic. I wanted to work for the state department and maybe be an interpreter. Then I had a chance to look at the foreign service exam, and that sobered me up a little bit.
I went to Columbia College and I was a theatre major and a music minor, and I wasn't thinking about the blues but it just sort of found me. I went south and was listening to blues in the south, and I moved back to Biloxi, Mississippi to open up a business.
And Fate just sort of nudged me in certain directions, and I was catching hell, so the blues was really relevant, because I was using it holistically, as a healer.
HB: The business wasn't going well?
FJ: The business went fine until Hurricane Elena blew over everything. I had to take my daughter out of a private school, I was working one week out of the month, and I had to get up and hustle again. I thought I was home free until then.
I was selling seafood, and shrimp and oysters are a business based on market quotations; so every day the price changes. And I'll never get into busines like that again, because I was the small guy. I was moving one ton, which is a lot to me, but there are people that move 30,000 tons. And whenever there's a hurricane or something, it takes the shrimpers a
couple of weeks before they can get back out there. Then when they get back out there they've got to find where the shrimp are because they've been all stirred up.
The first shrimp they get, they give to the big guys, so little hustlers like me are standing on the wayside. But it didn't mean that my bills were waiting. I didn't have the money and I didn't have the stock. And then restaurants I was selling to, they needed the same type of shrimp no matter where they are, which means I have to warehouse their size. And
LIFE GAVE FRUTELAND LEMONS, THE BLUES, AND SOME LEMONADE
FRUTELAND JACKSON
C. COLOVER