He plays hypnotic, repetitive, sometimes atonal blues on a pawnshop guitar. His songs are simple, loose, unstructured, cantankerous, and happily unenlightened when it comes to the fairer sex. And his life story is completely fucking frightening. In retrospect, it not only seems inevitable that Little Freddie King would make the trip to Water Valley, Mississippi to record for Fat Possum, it seems like an idea whose time should have come long ago. But then, neither King nor Fat Possum do things like “normal” people, which is what so many blues fans love about them.

It’s a testimony to the perfect fit of these two entities that neither gets changed much on You Don’t Know What I Know. You’re hoping that “Crack Head Joe” is as shabby as its title, and it is; you want “Walking With Freddie” to be a tight little strut, and it is; you expect “Chicken Dance” to feature some barnyard-scratch guitar licks, and it does. “Tough Frog To Swallow”—twice as long as anything else here—looks like a prime candidate for one of Freddie’s legendary rambles, and it is, although what that story entails, exactly, is tough to pin down. Fat Possum has let Freddie be Freddie, and the label’s money means that he’s never sounded better than ever.

FP are allowed to be themselves, too, which is why two tracks here benefit (?) from the label’s insistence on retooling these grooves for the dance floor. As usual, it works about half the time: “Looking For My Woman” seems rather pointless, mining a hook that’s not quite there, but the “Chicken Dance” remix, built around a sinister piano figure, brings King into focus the way his regular recordings almost never do. None of this accounts for why a particularly grouchy cover of “You Rascal You” is credited to Freddie, but never you mind. Lovin’ Sam Theard is long gone. And if Little Freddie King never fixes another broken TV for pocket money, it’ll be too soon.