Junior Kimbrough - You Better Run: The Essential Junior Kimbrough
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Artist: Junior KimbroughBrand: KIMBROUGH,JUNIOR
Edition: Music CD
Published: 2002
CD Release Date: 2002-08-27
Music Label: Fat Possum Records
Soundtracks:
- Release Me
- All Night Long
- Meet Me in the City
- You Better Run
- Done Got Old
- Sad Days, Lonely Nights
- Old Black Mattie
- Most Things Haven't Worked Out
- I'm Leaving You Baby
- Keep on Braggin'
- Tramp
- Nobody But You
Music reviews of You Better Run: The Essential Junior Kimbrough
Music Review: This is one of the places it all started.
Rating: 5 Stars
A Juke Joint by definition is a Blues & BBQ club in the American South. Junior's Place was a juke joint of national acclaim hosting such local acts as R.L. Burnside, T-Model Ford, and Asie Payton. The building that also served as his home stood for 130 years, and burned to the ground less than month after Junior's Death. As a testament to a forgotten musician, The Essential Junior Kimbrough is a collection of his eclectic blues recordings over the years. Kimbrough released his first full-length album at the age of 62 on Fat Possum Records. From the 1969 45rpm version of "Release Me" to his Fat Possum versions of "All Night Long" and "Sad Days", Junior conveyed pure emotion into every one of his tracks. You can actually feel his pain listening to the music, but you will also embrace it when you come to the realization that this was everything the man truly was. It draws upon the souls of old Mississippi Hill Country Bluesman, and captures a sound truly unique to an area. A sign stood outside of Junior's Place that simply read: "If you can't read this, get someone to help you read this." This pretty much personified everything that he was: If you didn't understand, then you shouldn't be there
Description of You Better Run: The Essential Junior Kimbrough
David Junior Kimbrough, quite possibly the most important blues guitarists of the second half of the 20th century, redefined blues. Junior s approach to music is so hugely different from anything that came before him that he ranks among the three greatest bluesmen of all: Son House, Bukka White, and Fred McDowell. An originator, Junior did more than build on certain tradition or perfect a certain style. Junior re-imagined the blues; he made a sound for himself. If Junior s sister has been any kind of babysitter he might not have picked up the guitar. When Junior was too small to help his father work the fields his eldest sister stayed home with him. She was supposedly watching him the day he took his father s guitar off the high shelf, where his father kept everything he didn t want his children fooling with. It became routine: when his father left for the fields, Junior carefully took down the guitar. He learned fast and well, well enough to teach a local white boy, Charlie Feathers, how to play.Junior was six years old, and his sister was doing her usual bang-up job of babysitting the day he took a gallon jug of corn off the high shelf. His mother found him in an alcohol-induced coma; she thought Junior was dead. Junior s father recognized the problem and knew the solution: his daughter needed a whipping and Junior belonged in the field. After two years of high school Junior was lured into Holly Springs by a job at the John Deere dealership.
Junior couldn t remember the exact date he deliberately set out to create music but knew the reasons. He was still a young man and had gone as far as he could go at John Deere. If Junior was gonna make his mark in the world, he d have to do it with a guitar. Up until then he d been playing the same country blues standards, as well as the contemporary hits of Little Milton and Albert King, in the same jukes and clubs that his long-time friend and rival R.L. Burnside played. And then Junior stopped playing covers and stopped taking requests. Determined not to become just another entertainer or performer, Junior realized playing covers only helped the composers or the artists who first recorded the song. He wasn t going to help anybody ever again. Junior would only play Junior
He might ve been the first person in his family to work off the farm, but Junior never gave up his rural habits like throwing parties every Sunday night with his furniture dragged out in the yard so more people could fit. Before long Junior had to rent a one-bedroom apartment to get a break from the chaos he d started at home. Junior s old house became more than a club. It was an entity: it was Junior s Place and without help from a sign or telephone locals gathered on Sunday nights to drink and dance. Junior understood music, and had a gift for songwriting, and began developing the music that was first recorded in the mid- 80 s for a Memphis State single.
Unfortunately, David Junior Kimbrough didn t release his first album until 1992, when he was 62, but when he finally made his first album, All Night Long (produced by Robert Palmer for Fat Possum Records), the world took notice. Rolling Stone was the first to acknowledge Junior and awarded the album four stars. In addition to giving his music long overdue exposure, All Night Long gave the Fat Possum label hope. Junior, for the most part, was not physically able to tour, now that he finally had the support of a record company. There were notable exceptions: a string of dates with Iggy Pop and several tours with the Fat Possum Circus (a package deal). But the news traveled- to hear Junior you had to go to Mississippi, Rock bands such as the Rolling Stones, Sonic Youth and U2 made pilgrimages to Holly Springs to experience his club and hear Junior with his son Kinney Malone on drums and Garry Bu
When Junior Kimbrough died in January 1998, part of the spirit of Mississippi hill-country blues went with him. He was a proud musician, aware of his African roots and his artistic singularity--perhaps the last unique voice in the genre. The sound of his bawling singing and unpredictable, serpentine guitar were as eerie as a warm wind humming through a field of tombstones, as hypnotic as the ancient village drum music it was based on, thanks to his complete command of his rhythm sections. This collection serves full notice of Kimbrough's authenticity, from his first recording, an impromptu-sounding "Release Me" played with rockabilly cult figure Charlie Feathers, through his last '90s albums for Fat Possum. It's in the latter cases that Kimbrough paints a colorful portrait of his hardscrabble life just above the Delta. Rape is wrongly equated with love (in the brutal-but-fascinating title track), and sexual prowess ("All Night Long") is the only true coin of manhood. Finally, "Done Got Old" serves as the best epitaph for this blues hell-raiser, whose decades of bootlegging, boozing, and womanizing seemed to catch up with him in his final years. Nonetheless, that song and the 11 others prove that no matter how tired and worn he became, Kimbrough's crackling music never lost its edge or its feeling of danger and menace. --Ted Drozdowski
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