Junior Kimbrough’s debut was ghostly and vivid, and it would have been even he hadn’t recorded All Night Long in a booming hollow-sounding church.
We’ll never know why the late North Mississippi bluesman didn’t put this to tape at his house. (It became such a popular neighborhood party spot that Kimbrough eventually conceded its nightclub status by putting a “Junior’s Place” sign out front.) Perhaps he worried that a raucous crowd might break this spell.
The surroundings, and the sidemen, nevertheless give All Night Long the mythic American feel of the early Sun Studio work of Elvis Presley or Johnny Cash.
The connection goes deeper. Both rockabilly great Charlie Feathers and Sun sessions player Stan Kesler once said they grew up on Kimbrough, who was from near Hudsonville, Miss. You’ll find these guys’ names on several Presley tunes, and on the liner notes of All Night Long, which arrived in March 1992.
These echoing chords imbued the proceedings with that ageless 1950s aesthetic. Yet this was entirely new, with a brash, insistent (but not fast) back beat. Feathers enthused that Junior Kimbrough was “the beginning and end of music” for him – and, in more ways than one, it might well have been true.
Purpled clouds rolled in during one of Kimbrough’s sessions, and improbably – or, is that … appropriately? – lightning struck while recording was taking place. Kimbrough trailed off on the final track, “Slow Lightnin,'” and you could almost smell the ozone.
This debut was scary good. Where-you-been-hiding good. Buy-everything-damn-thing-you-put-out-from-now-on good. But the sad part was this: All Night Long was released on Fat Possum when Junior Kimbrough was 62 years old, after years of working at a John Deere dealership. It came not at the beginning but too close to the end of things for this nearly lost blues-playing genius.
Kimbrough made a scant four more albums before he was felled in by a January 1998 heart attack while watching TV on his longtime girlfriend’s couch at a Holly Springs, Miss., public housing project. In quick succession over those six years, however, he had put out a series of head-turning masterpieces – starting with this one.
All five of Kimbrough’s LPs are somehow both chilling and rollicking, and always a boundary-bursting surprise. (He continued, for instance, a complex exploration of African polyrhthyms.) There’s no telling how many more albums and sounds Junior Kimbrough had in him if not for the fates. Thankfully, he left a few behind.
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