Just one look at Kimbrough was to reckon with a powerful image that has quickly vanished in this country. In all of his backwoods, jukejoint glory, Kimbrough was one of the last vestiges of blues history that will not be duplicated in the next century. Unlike most of today's performers on the current circuit, Kimbrough spent most of his life as a laborer, turning to music as a spiritual release amidst the hard physical drudgery and lean fiscal rewards of real life. Listening to his slurred picking style, carving away at some faltering riffs, you can almost feel the ache of incomplete chords where another finger should be, or a solo cut short by hands worn raw by the long days. His rough-hewn voice was like the quiet starkness of an Ansel Adams photograph, capturing the richness of the moment, of the stark white and the deeply mysterious black and all of the articulated grays in between them.

Although he was considered an abstraction by blues scholars (coming from rural, northeastern Mississippi instead of the preferred, purebred Delta), his music was a throwback to the era of Son House and "Mississippi" Fred McDowell. It was very near when the music first began, but more importantly, when the music began to make a difference. Before his death last year, David "Junior" Kimbrough released a handful of albums that were noteworthy for capturing his brutal, but wholly original, blues of betrayal and injustice. Rendered in his own cantankerous, rip-snortin' fashion, Kimbrough told the truth as he saw it, with a rhythm section (bassist Gary Burnside and drummer Kenny Malone) that was so off-the-beat and fatback, it was too hard to be believe they were all in the same room, let alone the same planet.

All of Kimbrough's recordings for the Fat Possum label are indispensable treasures. However, "Meet Me In The City" might be considered a coda for collectors only, a bonus disc of Kimbrough material that never made it to album, which warrants a very awkward recommendation, especially if this is your first Kimbrough release, since the first half of the album contains private, home recordings of Kimbrough playing for his own enjoyment. Though poorly recorded, you hear Kimbrough, offstage and at ease with himself, working through the demons and desires of his music. Like Alan Lomax's field recording for Folkways in the '60s, the moment caught is more vital than the music itself, and that essence is rare.

These tapes are rather hard to listen to for very long, and repeat listens are avoidable. Better off are the selection of live tracks with his backing band, that feature Kimbrough tooling through the loose boogie of "Junior's Place" (during a '96 show), and a trio of intense tunes recorded at the '93 Sunflower Blues Fest that rank as some of his finest playing. Obviously, the best suggestion would be to check out a few of Kimbrough's other titles and come back to this one, as this release is a nice compendium to an all-too-brief recording career. He'll be missed.