Various Artists
Sunday Nights: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough
(Fat Possum)
Few album concepts are as
unappealing as a bunch of irony-fortified, eccentrically coifed
white rockers “paying tribute” to a rural bluesman. No
matter how well-intentioned, such endeavors usually come off as
condescending. (“Hey, kids! You probably think all music
sucked before the Pixies, but we’re here to show you that old
black dudes can be awesome, too!”) Unfortunately, the ability
to enjoy, unmediated, the art of someone from another race and time
is apparently too much to ask of the iPod generation — or,
for that matter, any previous generation. Elvis Presley begat Eric
Clapton, who begat Eminem.
Leave it to Fat Possum, an Oxford, Miss.-based
independent label founded by blues maniac Matthew Johnson, to take
the timeworn tribute concept and turn it into something that seems
not only sincere but also necessary. As Johnson writes on the back
cover of Sunday Nights: The Songs of
Junior Kimbrough, “Though the
world doesn’t need another tribute record, it does need to
know about Junior Kimbrough.” By compiling cover versions of
Kimbrough’s songs by Spiritualized, the Black Keys, the
Ponys, Mark Lanegan, and other idols of the white-belt set, Johnson
seems intent on concocting a kind of musical gateway drug. If just
one Fiery Furnaces fan picks up You
Better Run: The Essential Junior Kimbrough, also on Fat Possum, Johnson’s effort will not
have been in vain.
Kimbrough’s take on the blues was
repetitive, primal, and trancelike, a murky, minimalist meditation
on humanity in all of its grandeur and corruption. Kimbrough, who
died at the age of 67 in 1998, was virtually unknown until 1991,
when the late roots-music historian Robert Palmer featured him in the documentary Deep Blues. Kimbrough
recorded his first full-length CD, All
Night Long, the following year, and put out
four more albums before his death — hardly a massive catalog, but
then again, it’s something of a miracle that he found the time to
release anything at all. He sired 36 children and ran a notorious juke
joint off Highway 4 in Chulahoma, Miss., where he performed every
Sunday night. (It burned down after he died, which seems fitting
somehow.)
For the most part, the artists on Sunday Night tap into
Kimbrough’s scabrous magic, the dark, dirty, Dionysian menace
of his undulating guitar riffs and rough, countrified drawl. The CD
is bookended by two versions of “You Better Run” by
Iggy and a revamped Stooges (with ex-Minuteman Mike Watt standing
in for the late Dave Alexander on bass). Both renditions are
willfully obnoxious — someone needs to inform Iggy that rape
isn’t one big laff-fest — but the band’s feral,
sleazy, no-holds-barred approach captures the amoral abandon of the
original. Spiritualized turns “Sad Days Lonely Nights”
into a druggy, distorted dirge that resembles a lost Velvet
Underground outtake, Thee Shams channel the early Rolling Stones
for “Release Me,” and the Heartless Bastards’
version of “Done Got Old” brings to mind Janis Joplin
fronting Led Zeppelin. The Black Keys are both loose and virtuosic
on “My Mind Is Ramblin’,” a spacey and
transcendent guitar jam that sounds like James “Blood”
Ulmer gone garage; “I’m Leaving,” by the Fiery
Furnaces, pits inspired fret-freakery against Eleanor
Friedberger’s clear-eyed vocals. Not all of the tracks are
equally strong — Pete Yorn’s “I Feel Good
Again” is a well-executed yawn, and Entrance and Cat
Power’s “Do the Romp” seems casual to the point
of torpor — but overall Johnson did a fine job selecting
worthy ambassadors. These artists not only get Kimbrough but want
other people to get him, too.
This article appears in Jan 27 – Feb 2, 2005.
