It's the Birthday of Junior Kimbrough and Mike Bloomfield

Today is the Birthday of a couple of prominant blues men.

Up first is Junior Kimbrough, who was born on this day back in 1930. He passed away after having a strok on January 17, in 1998.

Wikipedia states;

Born David Kimbrough in Hudsonville, Mississippi, Kimbrough lived in the North Mississippi Hill Country around Holly Springs. He recorded for the Fat Possum Records label. He was a long-time associate of labelmate R. L. Burnside, and the Burnside and Kimbrough families often collaborated on musical projects. This relationship continues today. Burnside called Kimbrough "the beginning and end of all music." This is written on Kimbrough's tombstone outside his family's church, the Kimbrough Family Church, in Holly Springs.

Beginning around 1992, Kimbrough operated a juke joint known as "Junior's Place" in Chulahoma, Mississippi, which attracted visitors from around the world, including members of U2 and The Rolling Stones. Kimbrough's sons, musicians Kinney and David Malone Kimbrough (two of Kimbrough's rumored to be twenty-eight children), kept it open following his death, until it burned to the ground on April 6, 2000.

Junior Kimbrough "Sad Days, Lonely Nights"


Album discography
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All Night Long
Sad Days, Lonely Nights
Do The Rump
Most Things Haven't Worked Out
God Knows I Tried
Meet Me in the City
You Better Run: The Essential Junior Kimbrough
Sunday Nights: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough
The Black Keys - Chulahoma (Songs written by Kimbrough and performed by The Black Keys)

Check out Junior Kimbrough @ MySpace.

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It is also the birthday of Mike Bloomfield. A blues musician from Chicago who was one of the original members of the Paul Butterfield Band.

Sadly;

On February 15, 1981 Bloomfield was found dead in San Francisco in his parked car. According to his friends, the size of the heroin dose that killed him meant that he probably did not drive to this spot and overdose, rather that the lethal dose had been administered somewhere else and he had been driven to this spot to avoid complications for his drug-ingesting cohorts. The official cause of death was ruled an accidental drug overdose.

Mike Bloomfields If You Love These Blues


Wikipedia states;

Michael Bernard Bloomfield (July 28, 1943, Chicago, Illinois — February 15, 1981, San Francisco California), an American musician, guitarist, and composer, born in Chicago, Illinois, became one of the first popular music superstars of the 1960s to earn his reputation entirely on his instrumental prowess.[citation needed] Respected for his fluid guitar playing, Bloomfield, who knew and played with many of Chicago's blues legends even before he achieved his own fame, was one of the primary influences on the mid-to-late 1960s revival of classic Chicago and other styles of blues music. In 2003 he was also also ranked at number 22 on Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".