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  It caps a career that started in 1950, when the Mississippi-born son of a preacher played on recordings with everyone from B.B. King to Muddy Waters, served as an A&R man for Sun Records and wrote the first rock-and-roll song in history, "Rocket 88" (he was never credited for this 1951 work). With Tina, he formed The Ike and Tina Revue in 1960. They split in 1976, and his downward spiral began.

• Blues In The Key Of Mississippi

  Kimbrough has spent almost his entire life around the small town of Holly Springs, Miss. He started playing a Gene Autry guitar when he was 8; most of what he learned came from his family, the rest from Howlin' Wolf and B. B. King records. Working as a cotton picker, gravel hauler and tractor mechanic, Kimbrough stayed a beloved local wonder until journalist Robert Palmer discovered him while scouring Mississippi for the 1992 documentary "Deep Blues." Kimbrough's second album, "Sad Days, Lonely Nights" (on the independent blues label Fat Possum), opens with stark, shivering guitar notes that immediately place him within the Delta blues tradition. Not only has he got that beat, he likes to climb into it and stay awhile: a single, trancelike groove runs through his entire album. Most of his songs are about women -- Kimbrough has 22 children from seven different mothers. "I married just once, in '49," he says. "I was running around too much for her." Kimbrough loves the blues lifestyle: "I go a lot of places. When you're married like that, your wife don't want you gone."

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