After I saw Junior Kimbrough for the first time, I didn’t see much need to buy blues records by anybody else.

Maybe I’m a bit biased. If I hadn’t lived in North Mississippi and seen Junior on his own turf, I wouldn’t understand as much as I do now.

But it’s what I don’t understand that pulled me into his music and kept me there. For once, a black bluesman had stumped the white scholars, critics and musicians and proved that the blues, at its core, remains a mystery only understood by those who have inherited its spiritual legacy.

Junior Kimbrough was the greatest bluesman who ever lived. I say that because his legend was growing before his death. The legend was, and is, the music, not some tall tale concocted by a folklorist, a publicist or Kimbrough himself, for he rarely spoke to strangers.

White scholars look at most blues people and link them to previous musicians with neat, straight threads, all nicely explained until they get into a blues conference somewhere and tear into each other with venomous fury.

But they heard Junior and hit a brick wall.

Nobody sounded like Junior. Sure, his music was a vital part of the North Mississippi hill country blues, which some have linked directly to similar sounds in West Africa.

I agree. In 1998, I went to a party at Otha Turner’s house in Como, Miss., and ate barbecued goat while he played a handmade fife and marched around the cauldron with his drummers. The 90-something Turner sounds more like music from across the pond than he does anything in America. But I still can’t quite make the connection to Junior.

I do know one thing for sure: Junior paid a horrible price for his originality. His was a life lived close to the bone.

As an Ole Miss graduate student living in Oxford, Miss., I was aware of two rites of passage. One, you had to pour whiskey on William Faulkner’s grave at midnight. Two, you had to visit Junior’s juke joint.
I never did the juke joint thing, but that didn’t stop me from seeing Junior. The first time was at the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Ark., a decaying relic of long-ago cotton prosperity nestled against the levee of the Mississippi River. The free festival attracts thousands of worldwide blues disciples and drunken frat boys, who for one weekend a year, give the town a reason for existing.

Junior performed on a stage across from the jail and facing the levee. It’s a good thing I had the levee at my back or I might have been blown into the river.

Nothing like his music existed on planet Earth. His songs had no beginning. They had no end. The band just searched for a groove, found it and rode it until Junior decided it was time to search for another one. Every groove was driven by an insidious, hypnotic beat that worked like a snake charmer. Festival-goers who had sprawled comfortably on the grass rose to their feet and started writhing and twisting to the beat.

Although Junior sat down while he played, I noticed that he had walked with difficulty. He had a powerful torso and arms that strained against his trademark black T-shirt. His close-cropped hair accented a craggy face, and he occasionally opened his tightly shut eyes to stare off into space.
And he had this voice, a high-pitched, moaning, unearthly thing that drifted atop the beat like a field holler on acid. His guitar leads were abstract and impressionistic, weaving sinuously through the beat like those big snakes I would see along those hot Mississippi roadsides. The music was primitive and progressive. I couldn’t tell if I was listening to music from a hundred years before or a hundred years ahead.

After that show, I began to learn more about him. Junior had been born in 1930 and had lived almost his entire life in Marshall County, Miss. He had been a sharecropper, mechanic and moonshiner, but had been playing guitar since he was eight.

His best-known occupation was proprietor of the hottest juke joint in North Mississippi. Word spread of the legendary jam sessions at Junior’s place, and film crews and rock stars eventually found out what locals had known for years: Nobody sounded like Junior.

He signed his first record deal in 1992 with Fat Possum, a label that has built a reputation on raw, ferocious recordings of previously unknown blues artists. Rolling Stone would reward his first release, “All Night Long,” as Blues Album of the Decade.

Junior lived east of the town square in Holly Springs, Miss., a town off Highway 78 near Memphis that recently served as the location for the Robert Altman film, “Cookie’s Fortune.” Junior’s home was a small, nondescript apartment that I hear did not hint at anything resembling prosperity.

After the festival, I saw Junior several more times. One show was at Proud Larry’s, a popular Oxford student hangout. I didn’t think Junior could top his festival appearance, but that Proud Larry’s show almost burned down Oxford. Junior was on fire, and everybody in the packed bar danced like they were possessed by pentecostal fervor. I couldn’t help but remember that one of Junior’s jukes had been a former sanctified church.

It must have been the spirit that moved me to walk up on the stage during his break and talk to him. Junior never said much to anybody, but I wasn’t thinking about that.

I said hello and sat at his feet. I asked him that stupid blues scholar question, “So, Junior, who are your influences?”

I’ll never forget what followed as long as I live. He put down his guitar, stuck his finger in my face and stared at me without looking away for the next 15 minutes.

I tried to understand his lecture, but that often incomprehensible North Mississippi dialect and the noise of the bar made it difficult. I caught bits and pieces, mainly, “I don’t sound like nobody but Junior.”

He talked rapidly without pausing for breath, and kept stabbing the air with that finger, making sure that I understood that he was an original.

He finished his lesson and I remembered a card in my shirt pocket. It had been included in the “All Night Long” compact disc and featured a photo of Junior in his juke joint. I asked my next stupid question, “Would you please sign this for me?” He smiled broadly as he took the card. He wrote slowly and handed the card back to me.

At least he was proud of what few letters he could scrawl. Junior, as I found out from the card, could barely write his name.

The next time I saw him was in a ragged field in the woods somewhere near Marianna, Miss. I had seen a handmade sign tacked to a post in Oxford advertising a “blues festival” featuring Junior. It provided sketchy directions, but somehow I found the place.

The only person I recognized was Junior, who sat slumped over in a chair away from the slowly gathering audience. He didn’t look well.

After a long period of absolutely nothing happening, I walked up to Junior and said, “If you’re ready to play, I’m ready to listen.”

He raised his head, smiled and muttered something about someone having to go back to his juke joint and get another amplifier. I didn’t say anything else because I had frozen in horror at what I saw.
His left foot was a purple, swollen, rotting thing protruding from a worn-out, too-small leather dress shoe. Junior had cut out the end of the shoe to let his toes through and had sliced open the shoe sides to provide relief for what had to be excruciating pain.

Junior’s son, David, who is also a musician, walked up to me and asked, “What band are you with?” That was a polite way of asking, “What’s a white boy like you doing up here?”

I guess others were wondering the same thing, and I answered that I was just a fan. He seemed satisfied with that, and we talked about his father.

David had developed his musical talents while serving hard time in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Penitentiary. Something about drugs. He had been trying, more or less, to make it as a blues musician ever since his release.

He was worried about his father’s diabetes, drinking and heart problems. He feared that Junior would end up like Chicago blues legend Willie Dixon, who endured amputations due to diabetes before his death.

Junior finally performed that day in the ravaged landscape that looked like it had once been a cotton field. It was, I guess, a Mississippi version of a county park. I thought it looked like an oasis in hell, and the effect was heightened by Junior’s eerie vocals that echoed into the dark, tangled, surrounding woods.

I went back to Proud Larry’s to see Junior several times but he never showed. He was supposed to have played a benefit in Oxford for his producer, blues journalist and filmmaker Robert Palmer, who needed a liver transplant. Swamp rocker Tony Joe White and Oxford resident and former Derek and the Dominoes keyboardist Bobby Whitlock performed.

Still, no Junior.

David came in his place. He walked onstage and tearfully announced, “I’m sorry, folks, but my daddy can’t walk no more.”

Junior died on Jan. 17, 1998. I wasn’t as sad as I thought I would be. I felt relieved that his suffering was over.

I went to his funeral held in the auditorium of Rust College in Holly Springs. I drove through the rolling, bleak, haunted landscape north along Highway 7 and tuned into the blues station in Holly Springs. Locals had been heavily requesting Junior’s songs.

The icy wind almost blew me over as I walked across the parking lot and into the auditorium. The place was packed with hundreds of people, a rarity for a blues musician’s funeral. These were Junior’s people, although I heard at least one member of Widespread Panic was there. I don’t know which one, but I guess he was one of the few white people I saw.

The service was a dramatic one, with Junior’s music performed by friends and family. Individuals stood and testified about the same thing: Nobody sounded like Junior. David, after he performed, “All Night Long,” pledged that he would devote his life to the church and sat down at the piano and sang, “Amazing Grace.” I don’t think anybody believed him, but they understood the spirit of the moment.
As I listened to the music, I read his biography in the service program. Junior had 36 children by many different women. No wonder he had the blues.

Soon after the service, collection jars sprang up around Oxford to raise money for Junior’s headstone. He had 36 children and a record company, but apparently none could afford a grave marker.

Junior had given the afterlife some thought. On “Most Things Haven’t Worked Out,” an album even more powerful than “All Night Long,” Junior and guitarist Kenny Brown discuss the underworld before they launch into a song called, “Burn in Hell.”

“I ain’t goin’ with ‘ya,” Brown said.

“You goin’ too,” Junior said. “You be there. If I die before you, I’m gonna be there to open the door and say, ‘Come on in, mother----.’” Junior’s juke joint burned down recently. I don’t know the circumstances. But maybe it was meant to be. Anyone who thinks they can equal him there is only kidding themselves.

Charlie Feathers, a rockabily cat who grew up with Junior and later recorded on Sun Records, has called Junior, “the beginning and end of music.”

I don’t think anyone could write a better epitaph. Junior’s music recalled a history of pain and oppression but looked forward to the most creative pinnacle that the blues could possibly reach. He made his artistic vision come true, and I’m glad that for a brief time, our paths crossed.
Rest in peace, Junior.
(Karl Rohr teaches history at Western Carolina University.)

 

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