I think most folks are aware of Junior Kimbrough through the evangelization of his work by hipster-darlings the Black Keys. They can hardly let a minute slip by without invoking his name as a major influence on their work. My advice would be to follow their advice and head right to the source (and skip the Keys altogether if you want), and you could far worse than picking up this greatest hits package.
Kimbrough's closest colleague previously featured here is R.L. Burnside. If Burnside's music is a mixed drink that's heavy on the booze, then Kimbrough is a straight up shot of moonshine. Their musical styles ran fairly close together when both were alive and Burnside veered off into greater experimentation as his late-in-life popularity blossomed. Kimbrough died before he had a chance to get his name on to the national scene.
I first stumbled on Kimbrough through the Robert Palmer (critic, not musician) documentary Deep Blues, which was instrumental in uncovering the largely ignored Mississippi hill country blues. The style is distinctly different from the kind of blues that influenced the British Invasion and its aftermath. I would almost describe it as handmade trance music, repeating a short riff over and over for a number of minutes. While I'm no disciple of the Black Keys it isn't hard to see why the music appealed to them so strongly and how they used it to distinguish themselves from the rest of the scene. But Junior did it first.
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