Next best thing to a Mississippi juke joint

The atmosphere inside the Echo nightclub Friday wasn’t as sweaty ‘n’ dirty as a Mississippi juke joint, but an appreciative audience did dance, drink and sway to the Fat Possum record label’s Mississippi Juke Joint Caravan, a sampler of raw funk, blues and R&B; from its artists Paul “Wine� Jones, T-Model Ford, and Kenny Brown and Cedric Burnside.

Fat Possum brought such modern-day blues traditionalists as Ford and R.L. Burnside to broader attention, if not exactly mainstream fame. Now, the company seems surprisingly in sync with the pop zeitgeist, considering that all three of Friday’s acts were guitar-and-drums duos -- shades of the very hot White Stripes or the Black Keys, whose current album is a Fat Possum release.

The skilled players wrung a remarkable array of simple, hypnotic grooves from their seemingly limited instrumental combinations. Yet although the variations yielded lots of hip-swinging pleasure, the music eventually began to feel repetitive.

Singer-songwriter and guitarist Jones loosened up the crowd with slippery R&B-flecked; songs. Backed by drummer Burnside (grandson and bandmate of R.L.), he put much energy and flair into tales of hard romantic luck and other travails that were never so bad that they couldn’t be fixed with a drink or two.

Ford followed with an agile blend of Southern, Chicago and Texas blues from such albums as 2002’s “Bad Man.� The eightysomething performer played guitar while seated in a folding chair, and fingered the strings with balletic effortlessness -- a sharp contrast to the songs’ guttural earthiness. Beneath his mesmerizing sound were age-old themes of struggles with love, illicit deeds, persevering despite adversity, etc. Yet ultimately, his music felt celebratory, and its primal pull was hard to resist. (One woman was apparently so moved that she had to leap onstage and hug Ford, who just smiled and kept playing.)

Brown and Burnside closed with selections from Brown’s album “Stingray� and other works that cleaved to juke-joint tradition with their mixture of smooth and rough. A driving Burnside number reflected the singer-drummer’s time with contemporary Southern-rock boogie-blues act the North Mississippi Allstars, while Brown’s slide guitar made even the more shambling material smolder.