All Night Long

Hill country blues was created for the juke joints. Here's how the new generation is evolving the sound.

- JIM BEAUGEZ

YOU CAN'T VISIT the Y place where hill country blues, the hypnotic strain of blues that developed in the kudzu-wrapped hills of northern Mississippi, had its 1990s heyday. The elders - Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, chief among them - are no longer alive. And the club where they performed outside Chulahoma, Mississippi, is long gone.

There has been no greater embodiment of the rural blues that germinated in the hill country than Junior's Place, the famed juke joint owned by the often-bawdy bluesman Kimbrough. Like the music played within its walls, it was an unpretentious place, a simple, wood-frame building shielded from the elements by sheets of rusted tin roofing, with a dirt parking lot and frontage along a lonesome state highway. Kimbrough’s juke had few rules, and most were scrawled onto white paper signs posted outside the door: No drugs or outside booze were allowed into the club, but patrons could buy cold beer from an upright refrigerator, and homemade corn whisky, once they went inside. The building had been a church and a general store before it became the juke unofficially known as Junior’s Place, ostensibly because it had no formal name. Sunday was the day to be there, usually, and the music went all night.

Of course, it wasn’t the first juke in the area, and it wasn’t the last. But during the ’90s, Junior’s Place hosted countless performances by Kimbrough and Burnside, who often recruited their kids and grandkids to back them on drums, bass and sometimes a second guitar. Cedric Burnside, a grandson of R.L., whose 2021 album, I Be Trying, won a Grammy, started playing drums in jukes before he was a teenager.