Cam Kimbrough laments that Hill Country blues is not what it once was — not like it was when he says God taught him to play the drums. “I just sat down and started playing,” he recalls. Back then, wild house parties were a regular weekend ritual, corn liquor flowed and hypnotic music permeated the air — bodies moving through sweat, smoke and soul. The music was pure and tangible, its primal rhythms offering respite to people who had spent the week working hard in the fields.
But the places where that music once thrived have become harder to find. Across the Hill Country, many of the juke joints and small clubs that once served as gathering places for musicians and dancers have disappeared, leaving fewer spaces for the music to be played and passed down. The crowds, too, have changed, and many of the genre’s legends have passed on.
Kimbrough now feels the weight of keeping his grandfather Junior Kimbrough’s legacy afloat and relevant in the 21st century. Through his own take on Hill Country and Cotton Patch Soul Blues, he is trying to carry that tradition forward, not by simply recreating the past, but by giving the music somewhere to go next.
With time, Kimbrough has grown to accept the responsibility as he has grown as a musician. “The older I get and the more I play the music, the more I’m like, man, I feel like I am really only alive for this,” Kimbrough said. He has come to see himself as responsible for carrying his family’s musical legacy into the future, particularly in an era when preserving that heritage increasingly means navigating YouTube, social media and streaming platforms.
Kimbrough has been releasing his own music since 2014, including the EP Head for the Hills (2016), the Electric Juke Project (2023) and a string of singles. In 2021, he released Welcome to the Land, through his project Memphissippi.
While he points to his uncle Robert as another important artist in the family, Kimbrough said he has taken on much of the work of promoting the family’s history and music online. For now, he balances that responsibility with a 9-to-5 job, limiting the time he can devote to music. Still, he said, he feels a growing sense that preserving and pushing forward the Kimbrough legacy is what he is meant to do.
Kimbrough has turned his online presence into a way to preserve and promote his family’s musical legacy. Under the slogan “Kimbrough Nation,” he uses YouTube and social media to teach Hill Country blues, share performances and behind-the-scenes footage, and introduce new listeners to the music of his grandfather, blues legend Junior Kimbrough. The effort began after a viewer asked him how to play one of his guitar songs, a question that prompted him to devote his channel to carrying the Hill Country tradition forward.
“I’m just now feeling like I’m really just now coming into my own. I have labeled my own music, just recently, as HIll Country Juke Soul,” Kimbrough said. “Because I play juke joint music, it’s not a— it’s not a structured 12-bar blues. And sometimes it’s not just strictly blues. It might be R&B influenced, it might be hip-hop groove influenced, but it’s soul that’s involved and incorporated with my music. I’m juking it all night. Every time.”
Kimbrough defined Hill Country blues as a rhythmic, upbeat, percussive style of guitar that he typically plays in open G tuning, an inspiration from RL Burnside. By contrast Cotton Patch Soul Blues is slower, with a more trance-like rhythm. Kimbrough added that Hill Country is a “constant drive” that “stays in the pocket” and “you can dance to that stuff.”
Kimbrough said he began thinking seriously about the distinction around age 19, after hearing his uncle Robert insist that Junior’s music was better described as Cotton Patch Soul Blues than Hill Country blues. He revisited documentaries featuring his grandfather and found Junior using the term himself.
Cam looked up to his grandfather, Junior Kimbrough, not only as a musician, but as a businessman and person. Cam said that Junior was the only one in the family to run a successful juke joint, noting his work ethic and solid character. Junior instilled in him early the importance of being “a decent human being” and staying true to music. Despite having over 30 children, with multiple women, Cam said that he never heard a woman talk critically about Junior, which he said attested to his good character.
“People thought he was cool,” Kimbrough said. “He [Junior] was a serious guy, but he laughed a lot. And a lot of people ain’t laughing that much. So I try to keep that in mind as well.” With time, Kimbrough encountered the larger-than-life impact Junior Kimbrough has left on blues crowds around the world. Audiences in Spain and the Czech Republic have told Cam that their child was conceived to Junior’s song, and that “I met my wife at Junior’s Juke Joint.”
The blues was a lifelong, family project. Kimbrough’s father Kinny Kimbrough would tell Cam,” Sir, you need to learn the blues.” Kimbrough’s uncle David gave more personal instruction on the guitar, showing him his first guitar chords. Kimbrough compared watching David Kimbrough to watching Michael Jackson or Prince and imitating them. “If it wasn’t for my Uncle David, I really wouldn’t be playing this music.”
Music took hold of Kimbrough early, and he came to experience it as something physical rather than something simply heard. He described music less as something to passively listen to than something that takes hold of the body. “It got on me,” he said. “Like it’s some type of disease or something.” The constant rhythm and percussion, he said, still give him a kind of high.
Kimbrough’s father was his first musical model. At the juke joint, he remembers watching his father play drums tucked away in a corner, focused and almost hidden from the crowd. Unlike his uncle David, who would sit down and actively teach him, his father largely let him learn by watching. “My dad got this — I call him, like, some type of ninja,” Kimbrough said. “The way he plays, it’s so — we’re totally different. He’s more still, and you can tell he’s more focused.”
Kimbrough spoke nostalgically about growing up in the Hill Country, where music seemed to be everywhere. He remembers being dropped off at his grandfather’s or his mother’s house before heading to the juke joint, where he could find his grandfather, other relatives or local musicians playing at any given time. The crowd might number a few people or 20 or 30, Black or white, but there was almost always someone making music. Along the old country roads and Highway 4, jukeboxes played inside dusty rooms, musicians gathered around pool tables and radios blared from cars in the parking lot. “It was always something playing,” Kimbrough said. “It was always music going.”
In the competitive, talented Northern Mississippi music scene, finding your chops can be difficult. According to Kimbrough, the family adopted a sing-or-swim atmosphere, with little recognition for progress or direct assistance as fledgling musicians learn to find the rhythm and melody of the region.
“‘Cam, you should be able to hear it by now.’” That shit drove me crazy. Because I’m like, of course I’m hearing it, but how do you do it?,” Kimbrough said. “Nobody said, “Oh, great job. That’s how you do it.” I never heard that.”
Kimbrough was a quick study on drums, however. After “watching my daddy so much, I just sat down and started playing a simple groove,” Kimbrough said. His first drumming gig was at the REed’s Gift MB Baptist Church, at just 8. Kimbrough grew to be a key part of the HIll Country musical ecosystem in Northern Mississippi.
Kimbrough’s first experience in a recording studio came later, when he began drumming professionally with Missouri musician Lightning Malcolm. For Renegade, he had less than three weeks to learn an entire album after Cedric Burnside’s previously recorded drum tracks were removed. Kimbrough said the band recorded his parts in less than two days. “It was the most terrifying fun thing I had done thus far with music,” he said.
Kimbrough’s first instrument was the drums, though he is quick to downplay his skill. He picked up the guitar in his mid-20s, after losing his commercial driver’s license following a lawsuit involving his trucking company. Around the same time, people began telling him he was destined to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. A guitar shop owner in Holly Springs gave him a reverse-headstock guitar, and Kimbrough began teaching himself to play. “They would always tell me stuff like, ‘It’s in your blood,’” he said. “Everybody said that. ‘It’s in your blood.’ And I started believing them.”
He began posting videos of himself playing guitar on Facebook, gradually gaining encouragement from viewers. The music eventually became so intertwined with his identity that his absence is noticed. If he stops posting or playing for a while, Kimbrough said, people reach out to make sure he is OK.
Sadly, Kimbrough said, the musical scene in Northern Mississippi has lost some of its vibrancy, authenticity, and pervasiveness. “It’s a saddening thing for me to answer, honestly. It’s happening less. There’s nobody that has a juke around in Holly Springs or the Marshall County area. Less of my elders doing it or people that look like me. There’s other people getting paid to do it, and less of us who’re really authentic and really in the family who’s getting the support to do it,” Kimbrough said. “It’s like down on out, man. That’s why I feel like, shit, I got to get on this weird-ass internet and try to stay relevant and keep the people aware. Because there’s not a lot going on here.”
Kimbrough said that while he recently played with his uncle Duwayne Burnside and Uncle Robert Kimbrough at a birthday bash, it was a special event, rather than an every-Sunday occurrence. He added that musicologists like Alan Lomax are not coming down to record artists anymore, and record labels like Fat Possum don’t have the same interest in the music that they did in the 1990’s. While the Black Keys are performing their version of the music, he said, they put their own stamp on it, straying from the authentic.
Ryan Coogler’s 2025 blockbuster Sinners, set in 1930s Mississippi and centered around a juke joint and its musicians, has helped make the blues “cool again,” Kimbrough said. The film’s embrace of Mississippi blues has brought renewed attention to a sound rooted in the region, but Kimbrough wonders whether that interest will translate into enough people showing up to keep the music alive locally. He dreams of someday opening a juke joint like his grandfather did, but isn’t sure there is enough of an audience anymore to make it sustainable.
Yet Kimbrough is doing everything he can to pass on Hill Country blues and make it a household name. While he wants to play this music and go on tour, Kimbrough said he would die happy if he could own his juke joint, where he could be an ambassador for the Northern Mississippi sound. Just as Junior’s music appeared in Porsche commercials and in The Walking Dead TV series, Kimbrough hopes his music can reach similar commercial heights.
“Movies. Songs. Apple products. I want them everywhere. Because everybody should be listening to HIll Country and definitely Cotton Patch Soul Blues right now,” Kimbrough said. “Trying to find them a woman to love on and somebody’s juke joint to sit around in.”
For Kimbrough, keeping the tradition alive is ultimately about recreating the feeling he remembers from the juke joints. He wants audiences to leave his performances energized, euphoric and almost intoxicated by the rhythm. “I hope they feel some shit that they might not even be able to describe,” he said. “Like high off of that stuff. Like medicated, almost. Like recharged.”
Living up to Junior’s legend at times is difficult, Kimbrough said. Kimbrough receives messages online from people who miss his grandfather’s music and he feels the burden of being potentially the last family member to play it.
“Uncle David’s gone. My dad, he’s getting older,” Kimbrough said. “I really do feel a heaviness to continue playing this music and to be successful at doing it. Because I feel like if I don’t, like, it’ll just die out or it’ll just be watered down.”
