Track Listing

1. Release Me
2. All Night Long
3. Meet Me in the City
4. You Better Run
5. Done Got Old
6. Sad Days, Lonely Nights
7. Old Black Mattie
8. Most Things Haven't Worked Out
9. I'm Leaving You Baby
10. Keep on Braggin'
11. Tramp
12. Nobody But You

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33846 in Music
• Released on: 2002-08-27
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

Album Description
A career spanning collection of tracks from one of the most influential & original blues musicians in the past fifty years, Junior Kimbrough, hailed by such folks as Bono & Iggy Pop as a primal force in American music, Junior never reached the mass audience that he deserved while alive, but his music endures & continues to be discovered by music fans from all walks of life. 12 awesome tracks.

Amazon.com
When Junior Kimbrough died in January 1998, part of the spirit of Mississippi hill-country blues went with him. He was a proud musician, aware of his African roots and his artistic singularity--perhaps the last unique voice in the genre. The sound of his bawling singing and unpredictable, serpentine guitar were as eerie as a warm wind humming through a field of tombstones, as hypnotic as the ancient village drum music it was based on, thanks to his complete command of his rhythm sections. This collection serves full notice of Kimbrough's authenticity, from his first recording, an impromptu-sounding "Release Me" played with rockabilly cult figure Charlie Feathers, through his last '90s albums for Fat Possum. It's in the latter cases that Kimbrough paints a colorful portrait of his hardscrabble life just above the Delta. Rape is wrongly equated with love (in the brutal-but-fascinating title track), and sexual prowess ("All Night Long") is the only true coin of manhood. Finally, "Done Got Old" serves as the best epitaph for this blues hell-raiser, whose decades of bootlegging, boozing, and womanizing seemed to catch up with him in his final years. Nonetheless, that song and the 11 others prove that no matter how tired and worn he became, Kimbrough's crackling music never lost its edge or its feeling of danger and menace. --Ted Drozdowski

Customer Reviews

Essential Blues
You thought Robert Johnson's Hellhound On My Trail was spooky? You haven't heard anything until you've heard Junior Kimbrough's You Better Run. How this brand of blues was overlooked for so many years is inexplicable, yet understandable as the Mississippi delta and Chicago styles of blues dominates what record labels choose to release. But up in the hill country of north Mississippi a different style of blues developed. You can hear echoes of it in Mississippi Fred McDowell and John Lee Hooker. Thank God that Fat Possum Records brought bluesmen like Kimbrough, RL Burnside, and T-Model Ford into the studio and preserved this music for future generations. Start here, then search Amazon for "Fat Possum." You will never listen to blues the same way again.

An Excellent Overview!
You Better Run purports to be "The Essential" Junior Kimbrough and there is no doubt that this compilation of Junior's material is some of his best work and is representative of his limited releases. However, when you consider that Junior released only 6 CD's during his abbreviated career, it seems that the material contained on all 6 discs would qualify as "essential". If you are not familiar with the driving, trance like rhythms of Junior, this is a good place to start. If you like what you hear, buy all 6 of his CD's. You will not be disappointed.

This is one of the places it all started.
A Juke Joint by definition is a Blues & BBQ club in the American South. Junior's Place was a juke joint of national acclaim hosting such local acts as R.L. Burnside, T-Model Ford, and Asie Payton. The building that also served as his home stood for 130 years, and burned to the ground less than month after Junior's Death. As a testament to a forgotten musician, The Essential Junior Kimbrough is a collection of his eclectic blues recordings over the years. Kimbrough released his first full-length album at the age of 62 on Fat Possum Records. From the 1969 45rpm version of "Release Me" to his Fat Possum versions of "All Night Long" and "Sad Days", Junior conveyed pure emotion into every one of his tracks. You can actually feel his pain listening to the music, but you will also embrace it when you come to the realization that this was everything the man truly was. It draws upon the souls of old Mississippi Hill Country Bluesman, and captures a sound truly unique to an area. A sign stood outside of Junior's Place that simply read: "If you can't read this, get someone to help you read this." This pretty much personified everything that he was: If you didn't understand, then you shouldn't be there