CDVS: Sunday Nights: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough Vs. You Better Run: The Essential Junior Kimbrough

Before he died of a heart attack on his girlfriend's couch in 1998, Junior Kimbrough used to say that his songs came to him in his dreams. It sounds like a silly confession until you first hear "You Better Run," which Kimbrough recorded in 1992 when he was 62. The song, which became a staple of his live set and inspired the title of Fat Possum's outstanding posthumous anthology, conjures a spooky dreamscape with its half-spoken vocals and shadowy guitar thump. Kimbrough, the narrator, encourages an unidentified girl to run because a knife-wielding assailant is about to rape her, but then he turns on the girl and threatens to rape her himself. "Mr. Junior, you don't have to rape me," she says. "'Cause I love you."

Perhaps it's fitting that Iggy Pop and the reformed Stooges cover the song on Fat Possum's new Kimbrough tribute, Sunday Nights: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough. Pop, who billed himself as a "street-walking cheetah with a handful of napalm" on "Search and Destroy," never crafted anything as dire as "You Better Run," but he did date Nico and roll in broken glass, which seems indicative of a certain kind of madness. He and his fellow punk dinosaurs do a serviceable job with Kimbrough's original, reworking it as a stoner-core freakout and even substituting Iggy's name for Kimbrough's ("Oh, Mr. Pop, you don't have to rape me!").

Most of the songs on Sunday Nights follow suit, resurrecting Kimbrough's work in styles foreign to the throwback bluesman. The problem, at least compared to the collected work on You Better Run, is that Kimbrough's songs don't end so much as they trail off. They seem to echo up from the depth of his id and then drift off into a half-conscious daydream--a fact that doesn't make them easy fodder for reinterpretation.

Still, Sunday Nights is a worthy homage--certainly better than Sony's ill-conceived Ramones tribute, We're a Happy Family. The Black Keys, Pete Yorn, the Fiery Furnaces and Thee Shams turn in solid efforts, but none quite captures the subdued menace or wild yearning that Kimbrough lent to his work. There's an oft-told tale about Kimbrough's childhood that illustrates the point. As a youngster, Kimbrough was left at home under the dubious supervision of his older sister. Usually, he used the time to beat on his father's guitar, but one day the elder Kimbrough returned to find his 6-year-old son in a corn whiskey-induced stupor. It seems Junior had mischief in his heart from the beginning, and his collected work holds a cracked mirror to his troubled psyche. Sunday Nights is just a helpful companion--kind of a musical Cliffs Notes--by comparison.--Newt Briggs