Swamp voodoo 2-chord punk blues lovers rejoice...Fat Possum records released a tribute album, Sunday Nights: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough last Tuesday.

The artist line-up is tres cool.

Here's the track listing:

1. You Better Run (version #1) Iggy and the Stooges
2. Sad Days Lonely Nights Spiritualized
3. Meet Me In the City Blues Explosion
4. Done Got Old Heartless Bastards
5. My Mind is Rambling The Black Keys
6. I�m Leaving The Fiery Furnaces
7. I Feel Good Again Pete Yorn
8. Do the Romp Cat Power & Entrance
9. All Night Long Mark Lanegan
10. Release Me Thee Shams
11. Done Got Old Jim White
12. Lord Have Mercy On Me Outrageous Cherry
13. Pull Your Clothes Off Whitey Kirst
14. I�m In Love With You Jack Oblivion
15. Burn In Hell The Ponys
14. You Better Run (version #2) Iggy and the Stooges

Although Fat Possum is only offering short samples from some of these songs (including the Stooges and Furnaces cut), they do have a generous offering of free MP3s from previous Junior albums. Just click here and then click on the individual records to check them out.

My quick pick for y'all

"I'm Leaving You Baby" - Junior Kimbrough (from Most Things Haven't Worked Out)

and an extra bonus rap remix from a previous Fat Possum record, Fat Beats from the Delta, of "I'm Leaving You Baby"


Check out this piece from Patrick Donovan in Australia's Age (bugmenot login/passwd: obfuscator/whome) for some more background on Junior.

Choice quotage:

The crowd would bump and grind away to the psychedelic, trance-like music as the charismatic guitarist grooved on and around two chords, the music stopping only when he needed a drink or fell asleep on stage.

Junior's Place was originally his house, where he jammed with friends on Sunday afternoons. Soon word got out and people started turning up, so Kimbrough charged admission. He may have played on the day of the Lord, but this was the Devil's music: songs about sex, mortality, good times and bad, best experienced in a juke joint or while dancing barefoot in the dirt.

He claimed the songs came to him in dreams, and he wrote music people could dance to on a Sunday night and forget the hardships of the week.

Matt Johnson, founder of the Fat Possum label, for which Kimbrough recorded his four albums, speaks of the bluesman as of a lovable, flawed uncle. He recalls the time Kimbrough threw a car battery into a batch of moonshine.

"It was like he was on The Muppet Show. Junior would kick all the shit out of his house and stick it in the front yard - he didn't care if it was pouring down rain," says Johnson, from Fat Possum's headquarters, a trailer in the nearby town of Greenville, Mississippi. "He would charge people a dollar for a beer - but he would get up to fetch it because he didn't trust anybody. He would get so drunk, he would sit on his amplifier and moan and drool. It was like a tinder box, and they would stoke the fire until it was red-hot in winter - it could have gone up just like that. He was a law unto himself. He wouldn't even play songs, he would just play this sludge stuff - it was like sonic diarrhoea."

And...

Another highlight is the Blues Explosion's version of Meet Me in the City, featuring one of the last performances by the late Elliott Smith.

"Everything Smith recorded, he took to another level. He killed himself pretty much after he did that, which really sucks. Once I got past the labels and managers, everyone else I contacted really wanted to do it."

Cheers from Omaha where the weather forecast is -4 below zero tonight.