Junior Kimbrough’s Meet Me In The City, released by the mad blues fanatics at Fat Possum Records, is half a great record and half a record for serious fans. Junior Kimbrough, the late blues guitarist and proprietor of one of the wildest juke joints in the world, played in a style all his own. There is very little traditional song structure. Junior seemed to sing when he felt like it and to solo when he felt like it too. His guitar sound and music have a drone-like tone found often in Indian sitar music or even more exotic far Eastern traditions. It is very different from the Chicago blues or jump blues. Whatever place it comes from, it is some kind of intense. This is music that can put you in a trance and inspire you to do some things that you wouldn’t believe or admit to the next day.

Half this record is field recordings from Junior playing solo at home. You can even hear members of his family coming in and out and hollering obscenities at each other. The sound quality of these songs can be hard to take, but the strange mix of informality yet intensity grows on the listener. The second half of the record is a performance from the Sunflower Blues Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1993. Here the sound quality is much better, and the playing builds on the intensity of the previous songs while pounding on a vicious, relentless groove that a listener could dance to (in the words of one of Junior’s songs) “All Night Long.”

As a record, this is less consistent than some of Junior’s other Fat Possum releases, but it certainly tops some of the more generic blues releases that populate the bins of record stores. Its rawness is refreshing.