Mississippi bluesman Junior Kimbrough did not come to fame until he was in his sixties – but made a lasting impression with his Hill Country Blues.

This is such a dark, stark and poignant song. Most great blues tunes it’s drawn from painful personal experience and if this harrowing account of his encounter with a woman fleeing a knife-wielding rapist isn’t taken from real life, well you feel sure it could have been.

It’s all there not just in the distrubing lyric but in the emotion of his world-weary voice.

The hypnotic way bluesman Junior Kimbrough plays that modal guitar always reminds me of the circular style of Congolese soukous players, with its repetitive, trancelike effect. You can draw a line back to the legendary Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure.

Indeed, musicologists think this distinctive repetitive, hynotic style – “Hill Country Blues” from North Mississippi – took root among slaves from West Africa who were forbidden percussion instruments (in case they were used to whip up a rebellion) and instead developed a rhythmic groove using chairs, tin cans and empty bottles.

I can vividly remember discovering Kimbrough when he appeared, playing in his juke joint in the American critic Robert Palmer’s 1991 documentary Deep Blues, produced by Dave Stewart and his brother John, and he reappeared on the subsequent soundtrack.

By then Kimbrough was already in his sixties, having started playing locally in the 1950s, when he also taught guitar to his childhood friend, future rockabilly star Charlie Feathers.

He finally found a wider audience thanks to the Fat Possum label, which specialised in recording previously unknown local bluesmen – R.L. Burnside was another, and his son plays bass on this song – and put out his debut album in 1992.

He was already 62 by then and sadly his recording career would be brief because he died six years later, survived by his 36 children. And no, that’s not a typo.

His influence endured though, with a posthumous tribute album featuring Iggy & The Stooges (Kimbrough had once toured with Iggy), The Black Keys and Mark Lanegan, while three of his sons – Kent, David and Robert – have played together as The Kimbrough Brothers.