R. L. Burnside

musician

Personal Information

Born Robert Lee Burnside on November 23, 1926, in Harmontown, MS; died September 1, 2005, in Memphis, TN; married Alice Mae Taylor, 1949; children: eight sons, four daughters.

Career

Sharecropper in Mississippi, early 1940s; worked in a Chicago foundry; played blues guitar at small venues in Mississippi and Chicago; recorded for Arhoolie Records, 1967; toured Canada, 1969; performed with Sound Machine, 1970s-80s; signed to Fat Possum Records, recorded Bad Luck City, 1991; recorded and toured with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, mid-1990s.

Life's Work

An era in American music ended when legendary blues guitarist R.L. Burnside passed away in 2005. A fixture on the Mississippi Delta blues scene for decades, Burnside and his gritty, growling musical style was a living link to the black musicians who originated the Delta blues back in the 1920s and from whom he first learned how to play. In the early 1990s Burnside gained fame when he was "discovered" by new generation of blues aficionados and rock and rollers. One of them, Judah Bauer of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, told Guitar Player's Jas Obrecht that Burnside was "devoted to the blues.... Hanging out with him, you really feel he's from another time and place. The past in him is big--he's a direct connection to it--and you hear it in his storytelling and phrases."

Born Robert Lee Burnside in 1926 in Lafayette County, Mississippi, Burnside spent much of his life in the northern section of the state, just outside of the unofficial borders of the region known as the Delta. A triangular basin between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, the Delta was long an impoverished, rural place, with an economy dominated by an unfair system in which whites owned the land and black sharecroppers worked it for meager wages. The blues was a musical style that emerged as a key element of African-American culture in the twentieth century, and was born in the 1920s out of the Delta's pervasive injustice and racism. "Working for the man, you couldn't say nothing but you could sing about it, ya know," Burnside told Ed Mabe in a 1999 interview that was published on the Web site Perfect Sound Forever, when asked about the starting point of the blues. "Couldn't tell him what he done wrong."

Burnside was himself a sharecropper in his earliest working years, and did not begin playing the guitar until the age of 16. He came under the influence of a neighbor, "Mississippi Fred" McDowell, who was one of the pioneers of the blues genre. (The Rolling Stones paid tribute to McDowell with a cover of his "You Gotta Move" on their 1971 LP, Sticky Fingers. ) In the 1940s, lured by the promise of well-paying factory jobs, Burnside headed north to Chicago, where his father had settled. He found a thriving black musical subculture there, and often hung out with Muddy Waters, another Mississippi transplant who would come to dominate the Chicago blues scene. Waters, a legendary guitarist who was one of the first blues musicians to use an electric guitar, married Burnside's cousin.

Burnside dabbled in music when he lived in Chicago, but most of his time was devoted to a job in a foundry. He married Alice Mae Taylor in 1949, with whom he would have twelve children. Life in Chicago changed, however, when in the space of one year, Burnside's father, uncle, and two brothers were slain; his brothers were murdered on the same day in unrelated incidents. He fled the urban violence and headed back to Mississippi, where he drove a farm tractor by day and at night traveled around to play guitar in the juke joints near his home in Holly Springs, the seat of Marshall County.

In 1960 Muddy Waters played the Newport Jazz Festival, which incited widespread interest in the blues across America and Europe. Some years later, a folklorist came down to Mississippi to record Burnside and other obscure musicians who had learned from the original players back in the 1930s and 1940s. Burnside was included in this compilation record, simply titled Mississippi Delta Blues, which was issued on the Arhoolie label in 1967. He was invited to play at the occasional folk festival, and even made a tour of Canada in 1969. A few of Burnside's sons eventually followed him into a musical career and formed an act called Sound Machine. Burnside recorded with them in the late 1970s, and they occasionally performed at blues festivals in Britain and West Germany.

Burnside remained mostly unknown, however, until New York Times music critic Robert Palmer came to Mississippi to make a documentary film with Dave Stewart of the Eurhythmics. The project grew out of Palmer's 1982 book, Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta. Palmer interviewed Burnside in 1990, and the guitarist was featured in the film version of Deep Blues released the following year. Palmer also recommended Burnside to Matthew Johnson, whose Fat Possum Records out of Oxford, Mississippi, had recently been launched. Palmer wound up producing Burnside's first solo LP, Bad Luck City, also released in 1991. This was followed three years later by Too Bad Jim, which music critics deem one of the most important blues records of the decade. Burnside's raw playing style, often built around a single guitar chord, and equally gritty vocals showcased the original style of the Mississippi Delta blues in all its unvarnished glory.

Too Bad Jim racked up terrific sales for Fat Possum, and one of its fans was Jon Spencer of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. He invited Burnside and his sons' act, Sound Machine, to open for them on tour, and then Spencer and bandmates Russell Simins and Judah Bauer traveled down to Mississippi to record with Burnside. The result was A Ass Pocket of Whiskey, produced by Spencer and released on the indie-rock label Matador in 1996. A review in the Austin American-Statesman by Michael Corcoran called it "a conspiracy of overamplified boogie and drunken epithets that ended up on many critics' top 10 lists for 1996."

Burnside had been initially wary about collaborating with a group of post-punk New York City rockers, and was skeptical about the commercial viability. "When I first heard the final mix, I said to Jon, `It ain't gonna sell nothin,'" Burnside told Obrecht in Guitar Player. "He said, `Oh, you don't know, man!' Now it's outselling the rest of my albums." Burnside had less success with 1998's Come on In, a studio remix of some of his best-known tracks, with samples and electronic rhythms dubbed in. One of its tracks, "It's Bad You Know," earned a spot in the hit HBO mob drama The Sopranos in a third-season episode and received substantial radio airplay.

The year that Burnside turned 74, he released Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down on Fat Possum. On a couple of its tracks he revisits the tragedies of the year in which so many of his family members died unnecessarily. Subsequent issues include Burnside on Burnside, a live recording, and A Bothered Mind, which includes a track, "My Name is Robert Too," co-written with another famous fan, Robert "Kid Rock" Ritchie. On his occasional tours, Burnside played to sold-out audiences, and his family's musical heritage stretched into a fourth generation when he brought along grandson Cedric as his drummer. In mid-2005, Burnside was hospitalized in Memphis, where one of his sons ran a blues club, and died on September 1, 2005. "He never really wanted a career," said Johnson of the Fat Possum label in an interview with Spencer Leigh of London's Independent newspaper. "We just gave him one."

Works

Selected discography

Albums

Bad Luck City, Fat Possum, 1991.
Deep Blues (soundtrack), Atlantic, 1992.
Too Bad Jim, Fat Possum, 1994.
A Ass Pocket of Whiskey, Matador, 1996.
Mr. Wizard, Fat Possum, 1997.
Come on In, Epitaph, 1998.
Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down, Fat Possum, 2000.
Well Well Well, M.C., 2001.
Burnside on Burnside (live), Fat Possum, 2001.
A Bothered Mind, Fat Possum, 2004.

Biography

North Mississippi guitarist R.L. Burnside was one of the paragons of state-of-the-art Delta juke joint blues. The guitarist, singer and songwriter was born November 23, 1926 in Oxford, MS, and made his home in Holly Springs, in the hill country above the Delta. He lived most of his life in the Mississippi hill country, which, unlike the Delta region, consists mainly of a lot of small farms. He learned his music from his neighbor, Fred McDowell, and the highly rhythmic style that Burnside plays is evident in McDowell's recording as well. Despite the otherworldly country-blues sounds put down by Burnside and his family band, known as the Sound Machine, his other influences are surprisingly contemporary: Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Lightnin' Hopkins. But Burnside's music is pure country Delta juke joint blues, heavily rhythm-oriented and played with a slide.

It wasn't until the 1990's that he began hitting full stride with tours and his music, thanks largely to the efforts of Fat Possum Records. The label has issued recordings made by a group of Burnside's peers, including Junior Kimbrough, Dave Thompson and others.

Up until the mid-'80s, Burnside was primarily a farmer and fisherman. After getting some attention in the late '60s via folklorists David Evans and George Mitchell (Mitchell recorded him for the Arhoolie label), he recorded for the Vogue, Swingmaster and Highwater record labels. Although he had done short tours, it wasn't until the late '80s that he was invited to perform at several European blues festivals. In 1992, he was featured alongside his friend Junior Kimbrough (whose Holly Spings juke joint Burnside lives next to), in a documentary film, Deep Blues. His debut recording, Bad Luck City, was released that same year on Fat Possum Records. Burnside has a second record out on the Oxford-based Fat Possum label, Too Bad Jim (1994).

These recordings showcase the raw, barebones electric guitar stylings of Burnside, and on both recordings he's accompanied by a small band, which includes his son Dwayne on bass and son-in-law Calvin Jackson on drums, as well as guitarist Kenny Brown. Both recordings also adequately capture the feeling of what it must be like to be in Junior Kimbrough's juke joint, where both men played this kind of raw, unadulterated blues for over 30 years. This is the kind of downhome, backporch blues played today as it has been for many decades. In 1996, Burnside teamed with indie-rocker Jon Spencer to cut A Ass Pocket O' Whiskey for the hip Matador label; he returned to Fat Possum in 1998 for the more conventional Come on In. As Burnside had been recording intermittently since the late '60s a spate of re-issues and live recordings began to appear in the 2000's. Chief among them were Mississippi Hill Country Blues, largely recorded in the Netherlands in the 1980s; First Recordings, which gathered 14 of George Mitchell's 1967 field recordings of Burnside in Coldwater, MS; a live set documenting a west coast tour Burnside on Burnside appeared in 2001. His next studio album Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down appeared in 2000 but it would be another 4 years before the next new R.L. Burnside recording Bothered Mind was released. That same year Burnside suffered a heart attack and underwent bypass surgery. He never fully recovered from the attack and in 2005, at the age of 79, R.L. Burnside passed away in a Memphis, TN hospital. ~ Richard Skelly, All Music Guide

Discography: R.L. Burnside

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First Recordings Buy this CD	Sound Machine Groove Buy this CD	Mississippi Hill Country Blues Buy this CD	Mississippi Hill Country Blues Buy this CD	Heritage of the Blues: No Monkeys on This Train Buy this CD
Raw Electric 1979-1980 Buy this CD	Bothered Mind Buy this CD	Come on In Buy this CD	My Black Name A-Ringin' Buy this CD	Too Bad Jim Buy this CD
Bad Luck City Buy this CD

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Wikipedia: R. L. Burnside

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R. L. Burnside
R. L. Burnside in Redcar, England, 1992. Photo by Phil Wight
Background information
Birth name	Robert Lee Burnside
Born	November 23, 1926(1926-11-23)^[1]
Origin	Oxford, Mississippi, USA
Died	September 1, 2005 (aged 78)
Genres	Delta blues Juke Joint blues Punk blues Folk blues
Instruments	Guitar, vocals
Years active	1960s — 2005
Labels	Fat Possum
Associated acts	Calvin Jackson Jon Spencer

R. L. Burnside (November 23, 1926 – September 1, 2005), born Robert Lee Burnside, was a North Mississippi hill country blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist who lived much of his life in and around Holly Springs, Mississippi. He played music for much of his life, but did not receive much attention until the early 1990s. In the latter half of the 1990s, Burnside repeatedly recorded with Jon Spencer, garnering crossover appeal and introducing his music to a new fanbase within the underground punk blues music scene.

1 Early life and career
2 Later life and career
3 Death
4 Style
5 Selected albums
6 Films
7 In popular culture
8 References
9 External links

Early life and career

Burnside was born in Harmontown, Mississippi, in Lafayette County. He spent most of his life in North Mississippi, working as a sharecropper and a commercial fisherman, as well as playing guitar at weekend house parties. He was first inspired to pick up the guitar in his early twenties, after hearing the 1948 John Lee Hooker single, "Boogie Chillen" (which inspired numerous other rural bluesmen, among them Buddy Guy, to start playing). He learned music largely from Mississippi Fred McDowell, who lived nearby in an adjoining county. He also cited his cousin-in-law, Muddy Waters, as an influence.

During the 1950s, Burnside grew tired of sharecropping and moved to Chicago in the hope of finding better economic opportunities. But things did not turn out as he had hoped. Within the span of one year his father, brother, and uncle were all murdered in the city, a tragedy that Burnside would later draw upon in his work, particularly in his interpretation of Skip James's "Hard Time Killing Floor" and the talking blues "R.L.'s Story", the opening and closing tracks on Burnside's 2000 album, Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down.

Around 1959, he left Chicago and went back to Mississippi to work the farms and raise a family. Burnside was convicted for murder and sentenced to six months' incarceration (in Parchman Prison ^[2]) for the crime. Burnside's boss at the time reputedly pulled strings to keep the murder sentence short, due to having need of Burnside's skills as a tractor driver. Burnside later said "I didn't mean to kill nobody ... I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head. Him dying was between him and the Lord."^[3]

His earliest recordings were made in the late 1960s by George Mitchell and released on Arhoolie Records. Another album of acoustic material was recorded that year and little else was released before Hill Country Blues, in the early 1980s. An album's worth of singles followed, released on ethnomusicology professor Dr. David Evans' Highwater Records record label in Memphis, Tennessee.

Later life and career

In the 1990s, he began recording for the Oxford, Mississippi, label Fat Possum Records. Founded by Living Blues magazine editor Peter Redvers-Lee and Matthew Johnson, the label was dedicated to recording ageing North Mississippi bluesmen such as Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. Burnside remained with Fat Possum from that time until his death, and he usually performed with his friend and understudy, the slide guitarist Kenny Brown, with whom he began playing in 1971 and claimed as his "adopted son."

Burnside at the Double Door Inn in Charlotte, N.C. in 1998

In the mid 1990s, Burnside attracted the attention of Jon Spencer, the leader of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, touring and recording with this group and gaining a new audience in the process.

After the death of Kimbrough and the burning of Kimbrough's juke joint in Chulahoma, Mississippi, Burnside quit recording studio material for Fat Possum, though he did continue to tour. After a heart attack in 2001, Burnside's doctor advised him to stop drinking; Burnside did, but he reported that change left him unable to play.

Members of his large extended family continue to play blues in the Holly Springs area: grandson Cedric Burnside tours with Kenny Brown and most recently with Steve 'Lightnin' Malcolm as part of the 'Juke Joint Duo', while his son Duwayne Burnside has played guitar with the North Mississippi Allstars (Polaris; Hill Country Revue with R. L. Burnside). Duwayne's solo career began when "Duwayne Burnside and the Mississippi Mafia" recorded "Live At the Mint" in October 1997. Members included Cedric Burnside, Eddie Batos, Joe Hill from Alien Ant Farm, and David Kimbrough, Jr. (Junior Kimbrough's son) with Duwayne's father sitting in on a few tracks. Duwayne and the Mississippi Mafia released "Under Pressure" in March 2005, which was recorded at Delta Studios in Clarksdale, Mississippi featuring Jimbo Mathus, rhythm guitar (Squirrel Nut Zippers), Roy Cunningham on drums (Stax Sessions), and Burnside's son Garry Burnside on bass guitar. In 2004, the Burnside sons opened Burnside Blues Cafe, located 30 miles southeast of Memphis at the intersection of U.S. Highway 78 and Mississippi Highway 7 in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

In January 2006, Garry and Cedric released The Record under the moniker "Burnside Exploration".

Death

Burnside had been in declining health since heart surgery in 1999. He died at St. Francis Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee on September 1, 2005 at the age of 78.^[4] Services were held at Rust College in Holly Springs [which is also where services were held for his friend, Junior Kimbrough, who died in 1998]^[5], with burial in the Free Springs Cemetery in Harmontown. Around the time of his passing, he resided in Byhalia, Mississippi and his immediate survivors included:

His wife: Alice Mae Taylor Burnside (married 1951) ^[6]; died November 16, 2008^[7]
Daughters: Mildred Jean Burnside, Linda Jackson, Brenda Kay Brooks, and Pamela Denise Burnside;
Sons: Melvin Burnside, R.L. Burnside Jr., Calvin Burnside, Joseph Burnside, Daniel Burnside, Duwayne Burnside, Dexter Burnside, Garry Burnside, and Rodger Harmon
Sisters: Lucille Burnside, Verelan Burnside, and Mat Burnside
Brother: Jesse Monia
35 Grandchildren
32 Great-Grandchildren ^[8]

Style

R. L. Burnside performing at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, Oregon in January 2004

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2009)

Burnside had a powerful, expressive voice and played both electric and acoustic guitars (both with a slide and without). His drone-based style was a characteristic of North Mississippi hill country blues rather than Mississippi Delta blues. Like other country blues musicians, he did not always adhere to 12- or 16-bar blues patterns, often adding extra beats according to his preference. He called this "Burnside style" and often commented that his backing musicians needed to be familiar with his style in order to be able to play along with him.

His earliest recordings, like those of John Lee Hooker, sound very similar in their vocal and instrumental style. Many of his songs do not have chord changes, but use the same chord or repeating bass line throughout, giving his music a hypnotic feel. His vocal style is characterized by a tendency to "break" into falsetto briefly (usually at the ends of long notes).

Like the bluesman T-Model Ford, Burnside utilized the stripped-down element of his music, playing up the rawness, emphasizing his image as a lifelong hard-drinking man, and singing songs of swagger and rebellion. Burnside collaborated in the late 1990s with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on the album A Ass Pocket of Whiskey. Consequently, he gained the attention of many within this underground music scene, cited as an influence by Hillstomp^[9] and covered on record by The Immortal Lee County Killers. Burnside's "Skinny Woman" was also interpolated into the song "Busted" by fellow Fat Possum musicians The Black Keys, a band associated with the punk blues scene in their early years.

He also knew many toasts (African American narrative folk poems such as "Signifying monkey" and "Tojo Told Hitler") and frequently recited them between songs at his live concerts and on his recordings.

Selected albums

First Recordings (recorded in the late 1960s by George Mitchell; re-released by Fat Possum Records in 2003)
Too Bad Jim (produced in 1992 by Robert Palmer)
Well, Well, Well (songs and interviews from 1986-1993, released in 2001 on MC Records)
A Ass Pocket of Whiskey (1996, featuring the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion)
Mr. Wizard (1997)
Acoustic Stories (1997)
My Black Name A-Ringin' (1999)
Burnside on Burnside (a critically acclaimed 2001 live album recorded in the Crystal Ballroom on Portland, Oregon's Burnside Street)
Come On In, Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down, and A Bothered Mind (three albums of remixed material, often featuring guest artists, released in 1998, 2000 and 2004, respectively)

Films

Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads (1991). Directed by Robert Mugge
American Patchwork: Songs and Stories of America, part 3: "The Land Where the Blues Began" (1990). Written, directed, and produced by Alan Lomax; developed by the Association for Cultural Equity at Columbia University and Hunter College. North Carolina Public TV; A Dibb Direction production for Channel Four. This is a lightly re-edited version of "The Land Where the Blues Began" (1978) made by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long in Association with Mississippi Authority for Educational Television
You See Me Laughin': The Last of the Hill Country Bluesmen (2003; released by Fat Possum Records in 2005). Produced and directed by Mandy Stein. Oxford, Mississippi: Plain Jane Productions, Inc; Fat Possum Records.

In popular culture

The 2007 Samuel L. Jackson / Christina Ricci film, Black Snake Moan is infused with countless Burnside nods, including: the Reverend R. L. character and when Jackson plays the blues toward the end of the film, he thanks "Ced" and "Kenny" - Cedric Burnside (Burnside's grandson) and Kenny Brown (Burnside's "adopted son"), who were primary sidemen through the 1990s and early 2000s. Cedric and Kenny are also part of Jackson's band in the juke joint scene.

"It's Bad You Know," and "Shuck Dub" were featured in the HBO series The Sopranos.

"Got Messed Up" was featured in the FX series Rescue Me during an opening montage on Season 5 Episode 18, "Carrot".

A Burnside poster can be seen on a wall in brothers Drake and Josh's room in the Nickelodeon sitcom, Drake & Josh.

References

^ Allmusic biography
^ McInerney, Jay. "White man at the Door: One Man's Mission to Record the 'Dirty Blues" - before Everyone Dies." New Yorker (February 4, 2002): page 55
^ Telegraph.co.uk on-line newspaper
^ “R.L. Burnside.” The South Reporter (September 15, 2005) http://www.southreporter.com/2005/wk37/obits.html (accessed: May 21, 2008)
^ Johnson, Greg. "Junior Kimbrough."BluesNotes (April 2002) http://www.cascadeblues.org/Histor/JuniorKimbrough.htm (accessed: May 24, 2008)
^ McInerney, "White man at the Door")
^ http://realdeepblues.blogspot.com
^ "R.L. Burnside.” South Reporter“R.L. Burnside.” South Reporter(2005).
^ http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:kzfexqw5ldde

External links

Allmusic.com artist page
Fat Possum artist website
Mabe, Ed. R. L. Burnside: One Badass Bluesman. Nov. 1999.
Slade's R. L. Burnside page
Juke Joint Music
http://www.nmallstars.com/

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