Junior Kimbrough: A Delta Seen

Smoking the tires of a rental car for 25 hours, my friend Wendell and I reached Clarksdale on a recent Friday night, just in time to see the sky turn that streaked purple that's the color of the early evening in the Mississippi Delta -- before it turns the kind of black that only a deeply rural place can. Downhome blues blasted the humid air from the stage next to the old railroad station, a stone's throw from where Muddy Waters had left home for Chicago some 50 years earlier. The smell of Boss Hog's barbecue smoker was starting to tint the scene, and just two blocks away the Sunflower River -- which the blues festival we'd come to attend is named after -- wove its light-coffee-colored course through town.

Backstage in the station, in a big empty room where mail and packages had been prepared when the trains still carried them, sat Junior Kimbrough. He was holding court for other musicians come to pay their respects to this Mississippi hill-country original, who after some 40 years of playing music has finally reached some measure of renown and financial security in this decade, after making two CDs for the Fat Possum label and embarking on national tours.

Kimbrough was tired but friendly, both of his shovel-sized hands resting on the cane he needs after surviving two strokes. We talked for a while, and then Junior and his party -- including his sons Kent (a drummer) and David (a singer/guitarist who seems ready to make his own mark) -- slowly funneled out into the hot night to play.

For a white-skinned Yankee, seeing the blues played to a mostly African-American audience is a cultural novelty -- a buzz not only because of the responsiveness of the crowd to a local hero, but because it seems to put the music in its right social context. The blues, with its forthright lyrics and relatively unadorned playing, is the music of a community; and Clarksdale is that community. This isn't just music here; it's the local news and gossip and mores and history.

And in Junior's large, capable hands, it's all rolled into a series of nasty one-chord riffs and vamps that bubble over a grinding sex beat unlike anything else played anywhere. His music is primitive, roiling blues with the raw edge of rock, sung in a laconic warble. And it drove the dancers in front of the big stage into a kind of trance step, swaying and spinning as though they were at a Dead gig. Backbeat out front, the guitar slipping in and out of tune, Junior bawling out lyrics about love and break-ups and bad-assed violence like a lonesome calf that hadn't seen its mother in a week. A group of eight women -- teenage to middle-age -- formed a line dance that seemed straight from Africa, high-stepping and clapping their hands in time as Kimbrough sang "Take your clothes off baby" and cranked up the level of suggestiveness from there.

Starting "You Better Run," Kimbrough lazily picked at his guitar's strings, hitting a spindly series of notes that screamed "WRONG." But nobody, including the band, cared. One of those seemingly random notes was taken as a cue, and the group -- including Kimbrough -- all fired into his signature "All Night Long" with the single-minded precision of a group of worker ants. And damned if it didn't sound ragged-but-right -- a soul shot, straight from the gut without even the barest of technical concerns. That's because in the best of blues, only emotions and impulses count. And because Kimbrough's world of hard times, love, joy, heat, dust, whiskey, and sex was the one we were all visiting that night.

-- Ted Drozdowski

(The Fat Possum Review, featuring Junior Kimbrough, plays the House of Blues in Harvard Square tonight, September 5, with Paul "Wine" Jones and Dave Thompson, and this Tuesday, September 10, with Thompson and R.L. Burnside.)