Tag: Robert Kimbrough Sr

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North Mississippi Blues Legends at Mattie B’s

As a state, Mississippi has largely chosen to avoid the stricter lockdown measures that other states have imposed during the pandemic; although many blues events have been cancelled this year, some live music has been ongoing in the state, especially in the Hill Country region. Mattie B’s, located in the rural areas between Independence and Holly Springs has been a bright spot in that regard, sponsoring blues on Sunday nights with greats such as Duwayne Burnside and Robert Kimbrough Sr. , who are children of the North Mississippi legends R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough respectively.

On a recent Sunday night, Robert Kimbrough took to the stage to play selections from his new album The Pain Won’t Stop, which is out now and available from his website. Robert calls his music Cotton Patch Soul Blues, which is a reference to a community at the intersection of Highway 7 and Highway 72 in Benton County where his dad Junior Kimbrough and the rockabilly musician Charlie Feathers once played a small juke joint in the late 1960s. Robert’s music, although unique, shows points of similarity with his father’s music, and the music of his late brother, David Kimbrough Jr.

Robert’s appearance on stage was followed by Duwayne Burnside, whose style involves many separate influences, including his dad’s music, as well as the guitar styles of Jimi Hendrix, Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

As for the venue, Mattie B’s has the true ambiance of a rural juke, with pool tables, a bar, and a large baseball field out back. Occasionally, it is the site of car shows and rap shows, but recently, the emphasis has been on blues. Beginning in December, Duwayne Burnside has moved his weekly blues shows from Sunday nights to Friday nights.

Mattie B’s

1911 Wall Hill Rd

Byhalia, MS 38611

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Duwayne Burnside Live at Mattie B’s in Marshall County

One of the worst things of 2020 was the cancellation of nearly all live music events, gigs, festivals and parties. It was understandable, in the light of COVID, but it was still disappointing. Having not played a gig since August, I was thrilled when the great blues guitarist Duwayne Burnside called me to play his birthday party out in the rurals between Independence, Mississippi and Holly Springs. With the weather unseasonably warm, I imagined there would be a fairly good turnout.

Duwayne chose to have his party at a rural club and baseball field called Mattie B’s along the Wall Hill Road east of Independence in Marshall County. The place has the look and feel of a real Mississippi juke, complete with pool tables, but it has a surprisingly ample stage. When I arrived, there were a lot of cars in the back near the baseball field, and a food truck had set up there selling plates. The inside was not drastically crowded, but there was a good number of people inside, among them the blues musician Robert Kimbrough, and the DJ was playing good blues and southern soul inside.

Duwayne took the stage at about 8 PM, and we played until around 10:00 PM, with Pinkie Pulliam on bass and Artemas Leseur on drums. Perhaps the highlight of the evening was when Duwayne played the late David Kimbrough’s song “I Got The Dog In Me,” which was the first time I had heard him play that song. Blues musician Kenny Brown and his wife Sarah also made an appearance, and Kenny briefly joined Duwayne on the stage. The crowd especially took to the more upbeat Hill Country tunes, filling the dance floor in front of the stage. It made a nice throwback to how things were before the pandemic.

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Celebrating The Legacy of the Mississippi Hill Country Blues at Waterford

Last year, the North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic took a one-year hiatus, but most years, in June, a large two-day picnic is held at Betty Davis’ Ponderosa in Waterford, Mississippi to celebrate the past and current legends of the Hill Country style of blues.

Founded by Hill Country bluesman Kenny Brown, the event features performances from people like Duwayne, Garry and Joseph Burnside, Robert Kimbrough, Sharde Thomas and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band and the Eric Deaton Trio. The weather is usually hot, but this year a fairly large crowd came out to enjoy the performers.

As the afternoon progressed however, dark clouds developed, and soon a fairly steady rain began over the festival grounds. As there was no shelter outside of the VIP areas, I decided it was time to go, as I didn’t have my camera bag, and my Nikon D3200 didn’t need to get exposed to water. I decided to head South to Oxford and get something to eat.

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All Day and All Night At the Kimbrough Cotton Patch Blues Festival: Day 3

Sunday is always the biggest day for the Kimbrough Cotton Patch Soul Blues Festival in Holly Springs. The day of live blues starts early in the afternoon, and really doesn’t stop until the wee hours of morning. The day of music featured appearances from Duwayne Burnside, Robert Kimbrough, Eric Deaton, Garry Burnside and Lucius Spiller, but the real highlight was David Kimbrough Jr, who had been in and out of the hospital with cancer all year. Although weak, his performance was as strong as ever, and afterwards he made a short speech, telling his fans that he had at least made it this far. We couldn’t know that day that it would be the last performance David would ever give us. David Kimbrough Jr, son of the late Junior Kimbrough, died on July 4, 2019. His loss is not merely a loss to Mississippi or the blues, but a loss to the world at large.

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First Night of the Kimbrough Cotton Patch Soul Blues Festival at The Hut in Holly Springs

Holly Springs, Mississippi is a town in the center of the region of Mississippi known as the Hill Country, a place known for both Hill Country blues and the unique variant of it which the Kimbrough family calls Cotton Patch Soul Blues, after a community called Cotton Patch which existed near the intersection of Highway 72 and Highway 7 in Benton County during the 1960’s. This crossroads, between Michigan City and Lamar, was the scene of at least one or more juke joints, where rockabilly legend Charlie Feathers and blues legend Junior Kimbrough played together at one time. The extent of their collaboration must be left to conjecture, but it is undoubtedly true that Feathers recommended the man he called “Junior Kimball” to Tom Phillips, the owner of Select-O-Hits and Philwood Records in Memphis, and the small label recorded a 45 single of Kimbrough. Feathers also told an interviewer that Junior Kimbrough was “the beginning and end of all music,” a quote that now graces Junior’s headstone. Of such a legacy is greatness built, and that legacy is now celebrated annually at the Kimbrough Cotton Patch Soul Blues Festival held at The Hut in Holly Springs.

The Friday night opening of the festival is a time for the students in the daytime workshops to show off what they learned, playing with the mentors who were teaching them during the day. This year, the mentors included drummer J. J. Wilburn, Robert Kimbrough and Duwayne Burnside, but Garry Burnside and David Kimbrough also performed.

The venue was a perfect one for the occasion, as The Hut, a former American Legion building on Valley Avenue in Holly Springs, has the ambiance of an old juke joint, made all the more by the smell of barbecue being smoked outside, and the crowds of people gathered around cars in the gathering dusk. Inside, the small room was packed from one end to the other, with barely enough room for people to dance. Yet they found a way.

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Celebrating The Legacy of Otha Turner at Coldwater

    Back in 1950, Othar Turner, of Gravel Springs, a few miles east of Senatobia in Mississippi’s Hill Country region, decided to hold a picnic for his friends and neighbors in the community. He killed and barbecued goats, and he and his friends ate, drank and danced to fife and drum music, a rural pre-blues form of Black music that had once been found across the South. By the time musicologists like David Evans visited Tate County in 1970, the event had been going on for 20 years, and eight years later, the famed musicologist and documentarian Alan Lomax visited the Turner Family Picnic as well. Othar, whose friends called him “Otha”, went on to make two full-length record albums, and contribute a song to the soundtrack for Martin Scorsese’s The Gangs of New York , and by the time of his death on February 27, 2003, he had passed the tradition of his Rising Star Fife and Drum Band on to his granddaughter Sharde Thomas.

    Unfortunately, last year, a family dispute within the larger Turner family led to the eviction of the annual picnic from Otha’s old homestead, as well as the demolition of most of the structures that had been used for the event. While there was something different about this year’s picnic due to the necessity of relocating it from Gravel Springs, it is also true that Sharde Thomas chose a location in Coldwater that greatly resembled the old location, with a number of old wooden structures. Attendance was somewhat light at the beginning, as the weather had been quite hot on the Friday of the first night, but the crowds soon grew larger, as bands like blues-rockers 78 (named for a major highway in the Hill Country) and artists like Joyce “She-Wolf” Jones and Robert Kimbrough Sr performed on the stage under a tent. The Thomas family’s stand was selling catfish and goat sandwiches, and RC’s Soul Food Restaurant from Como had a stand as well. A large, full moon (some said a “blue moon”) shown overhead. But the high point of the evening, at least for me, were the interludes between stage acts when Sharde Thomas, alternately playing djembe or fife, performed with her Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, marching across the picnic grounds. Occasionally, these processions developed into djembe vs. bass drum battles between Sharde and Chris Mallory, one of her drummers, and on other occasions, dancers came and got down low to the ground to the rhythms of the bass drum. Despite the new location, the 68th Annual GOAT Picnic was a success.

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    Celebrating the Kimbrough Family’s Blues Legacy at The Hut in Holly Springs


    For the second year, fans of Mississippi blues came to Holly Springs to celebrate the legacy of Junior Kimbrough and his sons David, Robert and Kinney at the Kimbrough Cotton Patch Blues Festival. Held over a three-day period, the festival was primarily centered around a former VFW hut known simply as The Hut, which suitably has the ambiance of an old Mississippi juke joint. Set in a hollow down from a higher street, it sits behind some trees which hide a spooky old Masonic lodge which has been abandoned, but inside on Friday night, the atmosphere was bright and cheerful, despite the failing air conditioner and the incredible heat. The great David Kimbrough Jr was on stage, with his brother Robert on bass and his brother Kinney on drums, and a small crowd was listening attentively in the chairs out in front of the stage. As the night progressed, the event turned into a jam session, with other artists and students from the earlier workshops joining in, and an even larger crowd milling around outside where it was cooler. Among the other cool things was that an Okolona beer company, 1817 Brewery had introduced a new variety of beer called Kimbrough Cotton Patch Kolsch in honor of the Kimbrough family, and it was being sold at the event.





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    Robert Kimbrough Brings His Soul Blues to Oxford’s Rooster’s Blues House


    Robert Kimbrough Sr. is one of three musician sons of the legendary bluesman Junior Kimbrough, and in recent years he has been the most prolific and ambitious of the three, releasing several albums, performing frequently with his band the Blues Connection, and helping to organize an annual Kimbrough Cotton Patch Soul Blues Festival each May in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Recently, on a Friday evening, he brought out his new band to Rooster’s Blues House on the square in Oxford, Mississippi, for a night of what he terms “cotton patch soul blues.” Although Kimbrough can play his father’s hits, and usually obliges the crowd’s desire for the seminal “All Night Long”, much of his shows are given to his original compositions, which straddle the fence between the style that many musicologists call “hill country blues” and a more modern southern soul. Songs such as “Battlefield” are typical, with a strong driving beat provided by drummer J. J. Wilburn, formerly of the band Old Grey Mule. The club was filled to the rafters, despite the chilly and foggy weather outside, and the sizable crowd enjoyed themselves immensely, until the early closing time, that apparently was precipitated by it being spring break week. On the other hand, the utter desolation of the square after the clubs closed was remarkable and unexpected. We were told it was due to the students being out of school for the break.
    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzK-uvHfDoU

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    Robert Kimbrough and Lady’s Night at The Hut


    Authentic blues in an authentic environment is hard to come by these days, and when the Memphis juke joint Wild Bill’s closed in December, it became just that much harder to find. But in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on the occasions when The Hut is open, great blues musicians hold forth for a local crowd in the kind of rough, non-descript setting that is appropriate.
    The Hut is a former American Legion post in the Black community of Holly Springs. Located near the intersection of West Valley Avenue and Boundary Street, it is a small, white building set down in a ravine far from the street, a structure which looks as if could only hold about a hundred people. Yet it is cozy, has a kitchen, has ample graveled parking, and on a recent Friday night was full to the rafters, with the great Robert Kimbrough Sr. on stage as I walked in.
    Robert, a son of the late Junior Kimbrough, is a favorite musician around these parts, but despite all the enthusiasm for his performance, the order of the night was to highlight female blues performers, an event organized by Fancy! Magazine owner Amy Verdon called “Lady’sNight at The Hut.” The original band consisted of Robert Kimbrough, J. J. Wilborn and Artemas Leseur, aided occasionally by Johnny B. Sanders, who had come up from Jackson. These men backed singers Iretta Sanders, and Lady Trucker, whose performances brought many dancers out, including R. L. Boyce’s daughter Sherena. There were also a number of visitors from other parts of the country who traveled to Holly Springs to see the show. Robert Kimbrough came back on stage to close out the first set with a version of his dad’s song “You Better Run”, and then the band took a break.
    Unfortunately, during the intermission, two women in the crowd got to fighting, which led to the police being called, and an early end to the evening, as a lot of people chose to leave. But that too has always been part of the blues. Authenticity is not for the squeamish.

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    The Kimbrough Blues Legacy Lives On At Rooster’s Blues House in Oxford


    Robert Kimbrough Sr. calls his style of music “cotton patch blues”, but he is the son of one of the biggest legends of what blues scholars often call Hill Country blues, Junior Kimbrough. The Hill Country is generally considered to be Marshall, DeSoto, Tate, Panola, Lafayette and Benton Counties, and perhaps the most important city in the region is Oxford, the home of the University of Mississippi. Music fans in Oxford love the cotton patch or Hill Country styles of blues, and they often go to Rooster’s Blues House when regional blues artists are booked, so there was a large, enthusiastic crowd on a Friday night in September when Robert Kimbrough performed with his band the Robert Kimbrough Sr Blues Connection. Kimbrough treated the crowd to a mix of original compositions and Junior Kimbrough standards like “All Night Long”, and the dance floor in front of the stage stayed full. It was a great way to kick off a big Oxford football weekend.