Junior Kimbrough's Juke Joint Interview (Video)
Premiere: A 1990 Field Recording by Jas Obrecht and Peter Redvers-Lee
Immediately after we filmed his first set of the day in his Holly Springs juke joint (click here to see this: Junior Kimbrough's Juke Joint Blues), Junior stepped outside and agreed to give an on-camera interview to Peter Redvers-Lee and me. At the time, Peter was the Editor of Living Blues magazine, and I was on a sabbatical from Guitar Player magazine to do field research on blues music in Mississippi. Standing in the parking lot outside his juke joint, Junior described his musical upbringing and the influences that Fred McDowell, Eli Green, Bud Lee Jenkins, and his brother Peter Kimbrough had on his guitar playing. He described his own hypnotic, heavily amplified music as “cotton patch blues” and talked about how he writes songs.
He also offered some sage advice for fellow musicians: “If a woman come in and start flirtin’ with you while you playin’, you don’t know if she got a man with her, got her husband with her, or what. You have to be careful…. So I just tell her, I says, ‘Baby, I don’t care about you comin’ up here. But if you’re married or have a jealous boyfriend, get back.”
As we were speaking, we saw a man selling five-dollar pints of homemade “corn liquor” out of a car trunk. This inspired me to ask Junior about the effects of drinking on musicians. “You can drink too much,” he responded. “You gonna try to perform when you’re drinking a lot, but you can’t do it. You think you doin’ good when you ain’t doin’ nothin’, see what I mean? When you’re going out to perform a show, just drink you enough just to feel it.” His best time for playing the blues? “After 12:00 at night, the music’s startin’ to sound good. You gonna do something.”
For more of Junior Kimbrough’s views on life and music, check out our video.
Thanks to Peter Redvers-Lee for joining me for this interview, to Nik Hunt for his fine production work, to UNC’s Southern Folklife Collection, and to my paid subscribers, who make posts like these possible. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one.
© 2022 Jas Obrecht. All right reserved.