Meet Me in the City

Junior Kimbrough played every weekend at his juke joint in Holly Springs, Mississippi for decades — a converted wooden church with a dirt floor where the music went all night and the dancing was the point. The music he made there was not the Chicago blues that had become internationally famous. It was something older and stranger: hill country blues from the region between Memphis and the Delta, built on one or two droning chords, hypnotic rhythms, and a guitar tone that seemed to come from somewhere outside the twentieth century.

“Meet Me in the City” was recorded live at that juke joint in 1992 for Fat Possum Records, a label that had been founded specifically to document this vanishing music. Kimbrough’s guitar is detuned and processed in a way that gives it a quality that is simultaneously ancient and alien — not the sweet guitar of Robert Johnson’s recordings, but something rougher, modal, more Sub-Saharan in its relationship to pitch and rhythm.

What Kimbrough does across six minutes and fifty seconds is not build in the conventional sense — the song doesn’t develop harmonically or melodically in ways that Western musical analysis can fully account for. What it does is deepen. The repetition of the groove becomes trance-inducing rather than monotonous; the vocal, appearing and disappearing in the mix like something phase-shifting in and out of consciousness, creates a sense of the human voice as one element among equals rather than the primary instrument.

“Meet me in the city / When the sun goes down.”

The feeling of driving toward distant city lights at dusk — the specific geography of rural Mississippi, the specific quality of that twilight — is what this music contains. Nothing else sounds quite like it. Junior Kimbrough died in 1998. The juke joint burned down after his death.

This is some of the most important American music ever recorded. Most people will never hear it.