In the mid-1990s, Keith Richards, Iggy Pop, and members of U2 skipped the arenas and drove into rural Mississippi to squeeze into a sweaty converted church and watch a man in his sixties, who had just released his debut album, play guitar from a folding chair. This episode explores the life of David Malone Kimbrough Jr., known as Junior Kimbrough, the father of 36 children and the accidental inventor of a hypnotic, trance-like strain of the blues.

We leave Chicago and the Delta behind for the isolated Mississippi Hill Country, where Kimbrough absorbed Fred McDowell and Eli Green and mutated their sound into one-chord, modal, polyrhythmic grooves that scholars trace to West African traditions. We follow the 1966 Goldwax session in Memphis that producer Quinton Claunch shelved as too country until 2009, the 1967 Philwood single that misspelled his name as Junior Kimball and printed the title as “Tram?”, his childhood friendship and duets with rockabilly pioneer Charlie Feathers, the marathon house parties that outgrew his living room, and the Fat Possum debut “All Night Long,” recorded by Robert Palmer inside the Chulahoma juke joint with family and neighbors as the band.

• How a thumb-driven bass drone and off-beat treble melodies create a centrifuge-like trance
• Why rejection by the 1960s industry may have protected his music
• The 1992 “Deep Blues” documentary footage from the Chewalla Rib Shack
• The Kimbrough and Burnside families as a Hill Country musical dynasty
• His 1998 death at 67, the 2000 fire that destroyed Junior’s Place, the Black Keys’ “Chulahoma” EP, and his 2023 Blues Hall of Fame induction