Kimbrough has spent almost his entire life around the small town of Holly Springs, Miss. He started playing a Gene Autry guitar when he was 8; most of what he learned came from his family, the rest from Howlin’ Wolf and B. B. King records. Working as a cotton picker, gravel hauler and tractor mechanic, Kimbrough stayed a beloved local wonder until journalist Robert Palmer discovered him while scouring Mississippi for the 1992 documentary “Deep Blues.” Kimbrough’s second album, “Sad Days, Lonely Nights” (on the independent blues label Fat Possum), opens with stark, shivering guitar notes that immediately place him within the Delta blues tradition. Not only has he got that beat, he likes to climb into it and stay awhile: a single, trancelike groove runs through his entire album. Most of his songs are about women – Kimbrough has 22 children from seven different mothers. “I married just once, in ‘49,” he says. “I was running around too much for her.” Kimbrough loves the blues lifestyle: “I go a lot of places. When you’re married like that, your wife don’t want you gone.”
Hooker also has women on his mind. It’s the one reason he still has the blues, despite his wealth and acclaim, despite Grammy awards and star-studded tribute concerts. “You’ll die with them on your mind,” he says unhappily. After a nearly 50-year career marked by pared-down classics like “Boom Boom,” “Boogie Chillen’ " and “Crawlin’ King Snake,” Hooker should have everything he desires. “I got this big mansion in Long Beach,” he says. “I got chauffeurs. I got a long stretch black limosine. Bar in it, VCRs, telephone, everything. I got a suit for every day of the week.”
But listen once to “Chill Out,” and it’s clear that something still gnaws at him way down deep. A few songs feature nothing but Hooker, his guitar and his foot tapping rhythm; “Too Young” and “Deep Blue Sea” are somber elegies to lost love that verge on spirituals, magnificent in their austerity. Hooker knows where the blues come from. They spill out of a jagged hole in the heart, and there’s nothing pretty or fancy about that.
