Blues culture

Requiem for a juke joint

by Ted Drozdowski

Junior Kimbrough

HOLLY SPRINGS, MISSISSIPPI -- Junior Kimbrough has been dead for nearly two years. And with him, I think, died an important part of the blues. At least for me. It was Junior who opened my eyes to the vitality of this music in the '90s, and to the rich creative life that was still pounding through the veins of the rural culture from which it emerged.

Like many who've been numbed by the malling of America, by the cynicism of the urbanized music machinery and the blinding lights of our market-driven culture, I'd believed that nothing so true or pure or untouched by the glitter of the outside world as Junior Kimbrough's music or his club could exist anymore. Then in 1992 they were both rubbed against my nose by the documentary Deep Blues and the late journalist Robert Palmer, who guided that film and produced Junior's debut album for the Fat Possum label. This world that I thought had been snuffed was populated not only by a generation that had grown up on TV and Reaganomics but by actual pistol-totin' men and the sort of kind-hearted women Robert Johnson and Charley Patton sang about.

Until everybody else started to hear his music via All Night Long, that debut CD, and Deep Blues, Junior's world was small -- essentially a stretch between Memphis and Mississippi's Oxford and Clarksdale, where he and R.L. Burnside ruled as the joint kings of Mississippi hill-country blues. But as Junior's popularity grew -- as he toured with Iggy Pop and made trips to Japan and got written about in Rolling Stone and the New York Times, and as his income rose to the point that he could buy cars for all three of his girlfriends -- he did not change. Not in his attitude, which was razor-sharp country, or in his sound.

Fat Possum label chief Matthew Johnson once described Junior as being "like a blind cave fish," because his music had developed so free of outside influence. Junior told me he had learned guitar from his daddy, David Kimbrough Sr., who for a stretch played gospel tunes nearly every Sunday morning with his neighbor, the great "Mississippi" Fred McDowell. But Junior's sound went back well past the 1950s, to a distinctly African place that -- with his passing -- may now be lost to the blues. In the roiling, driving sound of his dirty amplified guitar could be heard the cadences of drumming clansmen. And Junior's drummer and bassist, under his careful tutelage, copied and passed around the core guitar lines beneath his lead improvisations like students of a master percussionist in Mali.

Junior's music made a loud, breathtaking, hypnotic sound. Especially in his juke joint, under the influence of the foreign surroundings of the kudzu-draped Mississippi hills and its people. And maybe a little moonshine, beer, or smoke. Hours would pass in what seemed like 10 or 20 minutes thanks to the music that Junior made when he settled into his club's far corner, beneath a low ceiling across from a right-on-the-wall painting of Oprah Winfrey illuminated by a bare bulb. He'd strike a few reverb-soaked notes and shout in his lonesome-calf's bawl, and the grooves would begin. That was it. Transcendence . . .

My wife, Laurie, and I and our friends spent many hours in Junior's during the mid and late '90s. At first we were interlopers, among the few white faces to venture into the place -- which a waitress in Holly Springs had cautioned was dangerous, referring to it as a "little nigger shack." But we never felt any real danger. Usually there was curiosity. People would stare, then maybe come over to say hello and wonder aloud where we were from. I guess we didn't exactly blend, even compared with local white folks.

And as the years went by and Junior's fame grew with each of the four albums he released toward the end of his lifetime, more and more white faces joined the crowds at his juke on Sunday nights, eager for a final howl before Monday morning or a glimpse of the real, dead-on, unfiltered blues. Junior's was an important place. Important to his neighbors as the best damn club to blow off steam in south of Memphis. Important to lovers of blues from all over the world because of the wonderful, earthy music Junior and friends like R.L. Burnside made there -- as elemental as the mud on which it was built. Important to me because it was my gateway to Mississippi and its music and the lives of the people who made it. On my first trip into the heart of Mississippi blues, I left Boston at 8:15 on a Sunday morning and by 2:30 was among a crowd at Junior's that had been up drinking since the night before. An old man cartwheeled over a corner of the pool table. Couples ground against each other like mating bears in the dirtiest dancing I'd ever seen.

I swore after my first visit to Junior's that I would make it part of my life's work to shed light on his work -- and Burnside's, and that of the other artists still playing electric country blues in this place spared by homogenization. The absence of factories and K-Marts was double-edged. I saw the poverty in which Kimbrough, Burnside, and other musicians of the Delta and north country still lived. And I hoped that as a journalist I could tell people who cared about music that these folks should be paid attention to and -- most important -- just plain paid.

You may well wonder why I am writing this now. It is a eulogy of sorts. Not for Junior, for whom I may well be writing eulogies the rest of my life, but for Junior's Place -- his juke joint. A year ago, in January of 2000, it burned in a mysterious fire -- one of a series of unattributable blazes that have plagued the Kimbrough and Burnside families.

So now Junior is in the earth and his rusty-nailed mecca for true believers is in ashes. And those ashes have turned to gray and black streaks in the red mud. There is no memorial for that place where so much good music was made. Hell, for a year there was no headstone on the grave of the man who made it. That's the blues.

And that's why we need to keep shrines for people like Junior and the things they've left behind in our hearts. So I think about Junior and his music and his friendship every day.

And I remember when Junior's Place burned. Really burned. With life and good blues and the laughter of cheap beer and corn liquor. When the headlights of cars pulling off a country highway were like beacons calling me and people all over the world to hear the powerful rumbling sounds inside. Outside, it was the '90s. But within those walls, illuminated by bare bulbs and that housepaint-on-plywood portrait of Oprah, it was always the 1950s.

Junior's Place needs to be remembered -- even by those who never got a chance to visit -- because it was there that the old men of the Mississippi hills plugged in and passed on the stories of their lives and their neighbors' lives. They spent hot nights shouting out the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and cotton, and the pure joy of drawing breath and being free. Their lessons grumbled and ground out of amplifiers with loose joints and raggedy speakers. And they rang in the kiss 'n' cry of steel on strings. But most often they were heard in the voices, which were heavy with the burdens of lives that a white man like me will never wholly fathom. This music was like a spirit. Or maybe it was the sound of love, flying out the door and the cracks in the unpainted wood of that shack on Highway 4 to a place on high where everything worse or less or meaner would be forgotten. Junior's was a place where gifts were given. And I was grateful to receive. Now, in remembering, I try again to give a little back.