Bruce Watson’s Thirty-year journey as a Record Producer and Label Owner began accidentally. “In 1992 I was living in Oxford Mississippi,
playing in bands and running a small recording studio. ” he recalled of his first contact with the then-fledgling Fat Possum label.
“Matthew Johnson asked me, ‘How much would you charge to go out to a juke joint and record for three days?’
I was the only guy around who had any recording equipment, so I got the job by default.”

In the days that followed Watson was struck by the astounding gulf between the moonshine-soaked blues he had captured
and the over-production that so often sapped the soul out of such a spontaneous art form. By 1995, he was the In-House Producer and Label Manager for the company whose irreverent approach brought a healthy stream of the Mississippi’s most talented musical shamen to the forefront of the often staid world of roots music, beginning with R. L. Burnside and Jr. Kimbrough and coming to include Elmo Williams and Hezekiah Early, T- Model Ford and a host of other backwoods blues men. When rockers Jon Spencer and Iggy Pop invited Burnside and Kimbrough to tour with them, it seemed the final piece of the puzzle:
Fat Possum had successfully transplanted the juke joint into the rock club. It all came full circle in 1999, when he was the first to record
Iggy’s recently reunited proto-punk gutter squad, the Stooges, for a Kimbrough tribute album.

In 2003 he co-produced the amazingly ambitious George Mitchell Collection, a survey of field recordings that dynamited Fat Possum’s ambitious reissue program, featured albums by Townes Van Zandt and T-Rex as well as the reigniting of Memphis’s hit-heavy Hi Records catalog, home to eternal R&B hit-makers Al Green, Ann Peebles and Otis Clay. Meanwhile, Watson booked a show for young Fat Possum fans the Black Keys in Oxford, “It was obvious they were great,” he recalled of the band blasting out with full abandon to an empty club. “We signed them the next day”.

The band’s trio of Fat Possum albums were, in Watson’s words, “the bridge that helped us cross over from being “just a blues label.” While the label focused on its newfound success, 2008 found Watson stepping out on his own with the Big Legal Mess imprint, producing a combination of compelling reissues, such as the acclaimed gospel overviews The Pitch/ Gusman Records Story and The Soul Of Designer Records as well as producing and recording albums by A.A. Bondy, Hunt Sales, Jimbo Mathis and a long list of other artists.

Whether working under the Fat Possum or Big Legal Mess mastheads, Watson remained committed to the vinyl format throughout the lean CD years of the nineties and early aughts and in 2012 he opened The End Of All Music, giving Oxford its first record store in a decade. In 2015 he took it several steps further and moved to Memphis to oversee his most impressive project yet: Memphis Record Pressing, the first vinyl pressing plant built in the United States in forty years. By 2018 he’d built Delta Sonic Sound, where he currently works. To focus on his longtime love of Sacred Soul music, he recently established the Bible and Tire imprint, home to new recordings he’s done with the Sensational Barnes Brothers and Elizabeth King, as well as a forthcoming deep dive into the Bluff City’s incredibly prolific D-Vine Spirituals label.