David Kimbrough, Jr. follows in father's footsteps

With the death last month of North Mississippi bluesman Junior Kimbrough, his son David Kimbrough Jr. suddenly is staring at the crossroads of his own life.

Although David isn't literally at a crossroads, as was his blues forefather Robert Johnson, David has reached a similar place in his mind. He's determined to not make a pact with the devil, as Johnson is thought to have done. David, after all, has felt the power of the devil's temptations. He doesn't want to again.

David Kimbrough stays at Burnside's Bar & Grill, a restaurant/club that bears a name but little else at the moment. David and his lifelong friend, Duwayne Burnside, son of bluesman R.L. Burnside, are renovating the bar. Among other projects, they're installing a plywood stage that they'll cover later with carpeting.

Burnside's is located in time-worn South Memphis. The streets are quiet. Few venture from their tiny homes. Two children play near their apartment complex, catty-corner from Burnside's, enjoying the reprieve from school given to them by a January snowstorm.

Two men inside the bar are watching a western on TV, which is surrounded by plastic amaryllis plants. Every gas burner on the stove's kitchen is flaming and emitting heat. A pinup calendar hangs on one paneled wall. Jimmy King posters hang on another, with rap posters on a third wall.

Duwayne has owned Burn-side's for about four years, the 33-year-old David tells his visitors. Although its appearance says otherwise, Burnside's has a good chance of becoming a popular joint. David and Duwayne know something about juke joints as they've grown up in and around them. David says most of them were in neighborhood homes, or "house clubs," when he was a child.

Friday nights, Junior would signal the start of the weekend's festivities.

"My dad would go to the porch and start playin'," David says. Everyone working in nearby fields would hear his guitar and come running, after they got paid. Usually, they came in their work clothes.

"People were packed in like sardines," David says. "The whole place was rockin'. I'm serious. I just can't explain it.

"My dad was playing by himself. The place was packed and everyone was jumpin' around. Back in them days he was younger and the amp was dry and it had that reverb and the sound was just, you know..." David says, trading words for action as he sits, tapping the beat on his thighs. "My dad was awesome."

As the sixth of nine children born to Junior and David's mother (Junior had 36 children in all, David says), the young David was entertained by his older siblings on those earth-shaking weekend nights. At age 6, David turned to entertaining others.

"My dad was the first person to bring me to the stage and introduce me to an audience. When I was nervous and scared and didn't want to go out, he made me," David says.

"Back then I had a voice like a bird. I could sing so high it would hurt your ears. I wanted to be like Michael Jackson." As most children of bluesmen did in those days, David would sneak out his dad's guitar and try to imitate his style. "I'd tell myself, 'Man, I'd be thirsty, hungry for the guitar.'"

His impromptu sessions were unproductive, ending when David would tear off the guitar strings. "My dad would come home and shake me up. He'd say, 'You better not mess with this guitar no more because if you do, I'm gonna whup you.'"

"His style, it just didn't look right," David says of his father's unique and deceptively simple guitar playing. "It didn't look right. I was hearing with my eyes and seeing with my ears. What I'm looking at with my eyes, I'm hearing and imagining it in my head how it's played," he adds, reliving the experience as he talks.

Junior helped uncross his young son's wires by introducing him to the Spike family, whose patriarch, Gene Spike, "was an old bluesman, way back before Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters," David says.

"I guess that was his way of letting my eyes see something. He wanted me to see it without telling me about this."

The younger Kimbrough got guitar lessons "on how to deal with the instrument," from a Spike brother, who told David that he'd one day be one of the best.

During that time, David watched and absorbed the work of other musicians. He names James Brown, Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, the Jackson Five and the Osmond Brothers as particular influences.

Around the same time, David's parents separated, which, he says, sent him on a downward spiral. "It messed me up bad," he says. He got in trouble. Quit high school in the ninth grade. Moved to Aurora, Ill., to live with his mother's brother and family. Fathered 11 children over the years.

While living in Aurora, David sang in a band that quickly gained a local reputation and opened for larger-name bands. The band eventually broke up over internal conflicts, which sent David back to the South.

He contacted his dad and started touring with him around Mississippi. It was then that he realized the magnitude of his father's talents. "I ain't ever heard nobody play like my daddy," he says.

Trouble continued to plague David, however. In the early '90s, he was incarcerated at the Mississippi Department of Corrections in Parchman. He's not ashamed to admit that drugs were his downfall; they were what led him to prison.

Since his release from prison, David has tried to resurrect his music as well as his father's. "I didn't realize we had a family jewel," David says of Junior. "If I don't grab hold and try to strip it from the system, than I lose it all."

He's quick to link those thoughts to the Oxford, Miss., label Fat Possum. Although he's not specific about his allegations, David claims that Fat Possum has retained the rights to Kimbrough's recordings, effectively squeezing David and his family out of the picture. "They done took the jewel away from me," David says.

In the past, David recorded with Fat Possum and released one CD on the label. He switched to the Shade Tree label (also in Oxford), where he's been working on his next CD, Dog Affair, to be released this spring.

Of Dog Affair, David says: "Personally, I just wanted to get my point across. A lot of people are mad about Junior and R.L. because they just blew up all of a sudden. But they've been doin' this all their lives.

"Everybody thought they could sneak in and steal from them. Everybody's not only mad but intimidated from the Burnside-Kimbrough family. I hate to be callin' names. But it don't bother me. I will call some names. 'Cause I'm a good person. I respect everybody's motives if they're professional."

Now that one critical link in the Burnside-Kimbrough clan is gone, what lies ahead for David and the next generation is unclear. In some ways, David and his lifelong friend Duwayne Burnside are still floundering, trying to find their place in today's blues world.

The day before Junior's death, David was asked how he'll keep his father's blues torch burning. David answered somewhat prophetically: "It's urgent that I go on and learn everything that I can now because he's not going to be around forever."

Indeed, David suddenly stands at an important crossroads. Which path he'll choose is unknown, but two options are evident: He can falter or fly.