Mississippi Record’s Email Newsletter Reads Like a Passionate Missive From Your Music-Loving Friend

Each could contain calls to action, eulogies, trivia questions, and a whole lot of references to Sun Ra and Dead Moon (but also Michael Jackson, Sávila and Tom Peterson).

Mississippi Records Newsletter
By Jason Cohen

Remember when the email newsletter was gonna save us all from social media? Oh well.

But when the sender is Mississippi Records owner Eric Isaacson—a man who neither uses social media nor owns a mobile phone—an email can still be like a letter from your most erudite and passionate, music-loving, history-minded Portland friend, full of disquisitions and digressions, as well as announcements about nonprofit fundraising, calls to action, eulogies, trivia questions, and a whole lot of references to Sun Ra and Dead Moon (but also Michael Jackson, Sávila and Tom Peterson). In other words, reading his newsletters is a lot like being at Mississippi Records.

“I just started doing them during the pandemic out of desperation to keep in touch with folks, but then got into it as its own means to an end,” Isaacson related to WW via, yes, e-mail. The first missive went out on March 29, 2020, while the most recent, No. 13, dropped in May. There are multiple contributors, and between fans of Mississippi the store and Mississippi the label, there are now almost 10,000 subscribers. Perhaps most impressively, Isaacson says, they “actually open it and click on links!”

Mississippi’s email newsletter platform does not automatically archive the messages online, so subscribing is the only way to read it. For now, that is. Because of course Isaacson would rather do a proper printed zine, and that is actually the plan, starting with a best-of issue.

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