Music Banter - Junior ****ing Kimbrough

http://www.danball.com/images/junior.jpg

"Born David Kimbrough in Hudsonville, Mississippi, Kimbrough lived in the North Mississippi Hill Country around Holly Springs. He recorded for the Fat Possum Records label. He was a long-time associate of labelmate R. L. Burnside, and the Burnside and Kimbrough families often collaborated on musical projects. This relationship continues today. Rockabilly musician Charlie Feathers called Kimbrough "the beginning and end of all music." This is written on Kimbrough's tombstone outside his family's church, the Kimbrough Family Church, in Holly Springs.

Beginning around 1992, Kimbrough operated a juke joint known as "Junior's Place" in Chulahoma, Mississippi, which attracted visitors from around the world, including members of U2 and The Rolling Stones. Kimbrough's sons, musicians Kinney and David Malone Kimbrough (two of Kimbrough's rumored to be twenty-eight children), kept it open following his death, until it burned to the ground on April 6, 2000.

Junior Kimbrough died in 1998 following a stroke, at the age of 67."

"Kimbrough began playing guitar in his youth, and counted Lightnin' Hopkins as an early influence. In the late 1950s Kimbrough began playing in his own style, which made use of mid-tempo rhythms and a steady drone he played with his thumb on the bass strings of his guitar. His music is characterized by the tricky syncopations between his droning bass strings and his mid-range melodies. His soloing style has been described as modal and features languorous runs in the mid and upper register. The result is complex and funky, described by music critic Robert Palmer as "hypnotic."

Kimbrough's music defies easy categorization. In solo and ensemble settings it is often polyrhythmic, which links it explicitly to the music of Africa. Fellow North Mississippi bluesman and former Kimbrough bassist Eric Deaton has suggested similarities between Junior Kimbrough's music and Malian bluesman Ali Farka Touré's."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_Kimbrough

Single nastiest bluesman to ever scrape a guitar, and still one of the most underrated. Whole life basically comprised of smoking, drinking, and ****ing every chick within a quarter mile, all the whilst playing broken-glass slide guitar at local jive stops. At a time where a real bluesman was either scubbing his guitar with radio-soap, or buried underneath countless insipid white fantards; Kimbrough stood apart.
He has a very somber, hypnotic style, like Jimmy Dawkins if he dipped his guitar in grease. It can leave most listeners in a trance, myself included.
So to speak frankly, if you want, rusted, dirty, "I'm gonna stick you in the eye when I find you" blues, then I'd say give this fellow a listen. Thank God for Fat Possum Records.