362: Most Things Haven’t Worked Out, by Junior Kimbrough

Junior Kimbrough (USA)
Most Things Haven’t Worked Out (1997)
8 tracks, 49 minutes
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I first heard of Junior Kimbrough through the Fat Possum Records’ sampler I wrote about in September, Not the Same Old Blues Crap. It actually turns out that the highlight of that compilation is also the highlight of the album it came from: Most Things Haven’t Worked Out by Junior Kimbrough.

It’s the very first track, ‘Lonesome Road’. The thing that immediately strikes me is that this track is modern American blues at its most African. It’s just Kimbrough and his electric guitar playing a lanky, plodding drone blues. It has a feeling of Lightnin’ Hopkins slowed way down, or Ali Farka Touré if he’d taken an extended stay in the Mississippi Delta. That drone feels so irresistible that I’m sure it could go on for hours, Kimbrough’s fingers picking out understated licks from the deepest wells of the blues all the while. His vocals offer an appropriately mournful cry that bends down to the notes that give the most emotional resonance, even if those notes would be considered horrendously flat by any classical music scholar. The way he moves his voice is with a melisma that could have come direct from the Sahara desert, echoing the muezzin’s call and uniting the dusty roads of Mississippi and Mali. It’s a real shiver-down-the-spine piece, and opening the album with it is Kimbrough’s way of setting the scene. This is what the neighbourhood looks like. With the rest of the album, he beckons you into his jukejoint.

Really. The album was recorded in Kimbrough’s own venue, and after the first track, the mood picks up. His guitar playing and moaning vocals retain their earthy hues that trace a path half-way across the Atlantic to the blues’ first home, but he is joined by drums, bass and lead guitar that push things in a rockier direction. It doesn’t lose its way: this is rock in the direct lineage of the old Mississippi jukejoint players anyway, sometimes literally – the drummer is his own son Kenny Malone, and the bass player is Gary Burnside, son of R.L. The result is a meeting across generations that reaches back even further, with simple punkish blues rock finding a comfortable place to play alongside tones that stretch back to the oldest ancestors, to the enjoyment of all.

Although he’d been playing the blues since he was a child and had recorded his music starting in the 1960s, it wasn’t until the 90s, and the last years of his life, that Junior Kimbrough began to get the level of attention he deserved. By the end he could count Iggy Pop and Keith Richards among his friends, and in the years since he passed (just a year after this record came out), at least two tribute albums have been released of Kimbrough’s songs, one by rock duo the Black Keys whose sound is deeply indebted to the great man. Kimbrough’s music isn’t quite like anyone else’s, in the Mississippi Delta or elsewhere, and to listen to it is to hear links back and forward through the whole of the history of the blues – and it’s all summed up in that one unfaltering drone.