**** Junior Kimbrough

MEET ME IN THE CITY

(Fat Possum)

Junior Kimbrough may eventually become as prolific in death as Jimi Hendrix. This year's second posthumous release by the Mississippi hill-country bluesman was recorded live at his Holly Springs home and at the Sunflower Blues & Gospel Festival in Clarksdale. The sound is raw, even by Fat Possum's standards. At times the buzz of an improperly grounded amplifier and background conversation threaten to swallow his voice.

Yet the lonely beauty of "Done Got Old" and "Baby Please Don't Leave Me," solo performances that make alienation sound as inevitable as it often really is, reaches through the aural minefield. In the corners of these eight songs lies some of Kimbrough's best guitar work. His trademark "All Night Long" uncoils like a charmed snake, notes shifting their slinky way around the mesmeric churn of the African-drum-like rhythms he used for bedrock. And the stumbling cadence and hound-dog cry of Kimbrough's voice in "Junior's Place," with its spoken-word invitation to the juke joint he ran in Chulahoma, makes having a ball all night sound like very lonely business. Deep blues indeed.

-- Ted Drozdowski