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The Bio of Junior Kimbrough David "Junior" Kimbrough didn't release his first album until 1992, when he was 62, but when Fat Possum Records issued All Night Long , Rolling Stone declared that it was "like nothing you've heard before." The Washington Post called it "the best Delta blues album in nearly 40 years." Kimbrough, who died January 17th of heart failure at 67, was actually based east of the Delta, in the north-Mississippi hill country around Holly Springs . He lived in a public-housing project and operated a one-room juke joint called Junior's Place, where locals gathered on Sunday nights to drink and dance. In that rural isolation, Kimbrough and his longtime friend and rival R.L. Burnside created a droning, shivering electric blues so idiosyncratic that it defied comparisons. Though both men had grown up playing house parties with "Mississippi" Fred McDowell, though rockabilly legends Charlie Feathers and Stan Kesler took lessons from Kimbrough and rock bands such as the Rolling Stones and U2 made pilgrimages to Holly Springs, his music remained stubbornly sui generis. On Kimbrough's three albums for Fat Possum, the moaning vocals and herky-jerky polyrhythms resemble the music of slave plantation workers and West African griots far more than blues heard on beer commercials today. "I felt so good to be near this charming man," said admirer Iggy Pop. "His music was the greatest for me. Nobody can hypnotize like Junior." "You have to respect a guy who owed nothing to anyone," says Matthew Johnson, owner of Fat Possum Records. There's no one he sounds like. His chording , his phrasing, his moaning were all his own. That's very unusual in the blues world. That's unusual in anything." - Geoffrey Himes |