Guys like Chris Cotton, yelping, facile acoustic blues guitarists, perpetual borderline unknowns, are tough musical survivors. Every region of the US has got one. Every blues society dusts them off a couple of times a year. They're in the small pavilions at every blues festival. Thank goodness. They are the heirs of the people who took America's music out of the deep, Southern countryside and onto the paved roads in the late '20s through the Second World War. It is indisputably powerful, legitimate, authentic music. Supported on the disc I Watched the Devil Die (Yellow Dog Records) by the Jas. Mathus “Knockdown Society” circle of active Mississippi players and singers, it is particularly jumping and syncopated, at the same time, fun and dark. You, the listener, will find few strict lines between rhythm and lead in these 12 cuts, which, like all good, joyful, acoustic blues, sound as if they are teetering on the edge of error throughout, but never quite fall.