Essential, indeed. Any lover of blues or primal rock and roll who hasn’t heard the late master of the Mississippi hills needs this collection of knotty, singular genius. Kimbrough, who died in 1998, may well have been the music’s last great inventor. He mixed an absolutely African rhythm-and-melody approach, akin to the repeated patterns of village drum groups, with raw amplification and the unadorned passions of economically repressed ruralites. The result was a haunting, hypnotic music whose guitar notes hung in the air alongside Kimbrough’s lost-calf bawl, the two together sounding like the voices of ghosts in conversation. At times Kimbrough’s songs, like his signature "All Night Long" and the world-weary "Done Got Old," charm like the greatest psychedelic rock. (Hence, perhaps, his appeal to rockers as diverse as Iggy Pop and Widespread Panic, both of whom took him on tour.) But his playing exerted an influence on formative rock-era musicians like Charlie Feathers, who’s heard here in an impromptu take of "Release Me" with Kimbrough in the 1960s, and it continues to hold sway over newcomers like the North Mississippi All Stars.

Through the ’90s recordings for Fat Possum that finally brought him recognition outside of northern Mississippi, and that make up 10 of these 11 tracks, Kimbrough drew an outline of a hardscrabble life in which love and loneliness are the most resonant forces and sexual prowess is the coin of manhood. The title track is an especially raging and complex example, its hard music backing a story in which rage, terror, and rape all somehow become creepily embroiled with romance. Journalist and executive producer Anthony DeCurtis offers a window into Kimbrough’s bloody-knuckled, deep-rooted art, making it clear that this disc is a tribute not only to the last bluesman but also to the great and likewise departed musicologist Robert Palmer, who both recorded Kimbrough and spread his creative gospel.