Too Bad Jim

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
All Music Guide	[16]
The Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[17]
The Indianapolis Star	[11]
Knoxville News Sentinel	A[18]
MusicHound Blues: The Essential Album Guide	[19]
The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings	[15]
Philadelphia Daily News	[13]
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette	[12]
Rolling Stone	[9]
The Rolling Stone Jazz & Blues Album Guide	[20]

The Chicago Tribune said, "The music is driven by rhythmic thrusts rather than chord changes, and the interplay among the stellar musicians is explosive."^[8] The New York Times noted that "the northern Mississippi blues tradition is pretty obscure, and it's all about repetition and droning, about the subtle colorations of rhythm that trance music needs to be effective."^[21] The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette stated, "A master of the gallows humor and dramatic narrative tradition that runs through African-American cultural expressions like I-70, Burnside embodies the comic and tragic excesses of black music, while critiquing its inability to move beyond the perennially youthful aesthetic that enslaves black radio."^[12]

Rolling Stone opined that "Burnside delivers a searing set of songs anchored in tradition".^[9] The Washington Post said that Burnside "often uses his guitar to hypnotic effect, creating rhythmic vamps that have a churning, mesmeric quality, while singing in a baritone voice that bellows and moans."^[22] The Knoxville News Sentinel concluded that "Burnside learned a lot from Mississippi Fred McDowell, but it sounds like playing tough juke joints provided him with his most important lessons."^[18] Time considered the music to be "of historic import".^[23] The Calgary Herald listed Too Bad Jim among the best albums of 1994.^[24]