R. L. Burnside (November 23, 1926 – September 1, 2005) was an American hill country blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He played music for most of his life but received little recognition until 1995 when Burnside recorded and toured with Jon Spencer, garnering crossover appeal and introducing his music to a new fan base, particularly in the punk and garage rock scenes.
Life and career 1926–1959: Early years Burnside was born in 1926 to Earnest Burnside and Josie Malone,Bruin, Leo (1981). Liner notes, R. L. Burnside Plays and Sings the Mississippi Delta Blues. scan in either Harmontown, College Hill, or Blackwater Creek, all of which are in the rural part of Lafayette County, Mississippi, near the area that would be covered by Sardis Lake a few years later. His first name is given variously as R. L.,Scott Barretta. "Burnside, R. L." The Mississippi Encyclopedia. Ted Ownby and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds. University Press of Mississippi, 2017. p. 155. "His given name appears to have been R. L.; his friends often called him Rule or Rural." Rural, Robert Lee, Rule, or Ruel. His father left the family early on, and R. L. grew up with his mother, grandparents, and several siblings.
He played the harmonica and dabbled with playing guitar, beginning at the age of 16. He said he first played in public at age 21 or 22. He learned mostly from Mississippi Fred McDowell, who had lived near Burnside since Burnside was a child. He first heard McDowell playing at age 7 or 8 and eventually joined his gigs to play a late set.Filmed interview. You See Me Laughin (see filmography), minutes 25–30. Other local teachers were his wife's brother, his uncle-in-law Ranie Burnette, who was a popular player from Senatobia, the mostly unknown Henry Harden, Son Hibbler, Jesse Vortis, and possibly Stonewall Mays.According to Axel Küstner, who met them both in 1978: Liner notes to 'Mississippi Delta Blues', 1982:, scan. Burnside cited church singing and fife-and-drum picnics as elements of his childhood's musical landscape, and he credited Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, and John Lee Hooker as influences in adulthood.
In the late 1940s he moved to Chicago, where his father had lived since he separated from his mother, in the hope of finding better economic opportunities. He found jobs at metal and glass factories, had the company of Muddy Waters (his cousin-in-law), and enjoyed the blues scene on Maxwell Street. But things did not turn out as he had hoped; within the span of one year his father, two brothers, and two uncles were all murdered in the city.
Three years after coming to Chicago, Burnside went back south. He married Alice Mae Taylor in 1949 or 1950, his second marriage. He moved several times in the 1950s, between Memphis, Tennessee, the Mississippi Delta and the hill country of northern Mississippi."R.L.'s Story", interview clip from Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down (2000) During his time in the Delta, he met bluesmen Robert Lockwood Jr. and Aleck "Rice" Miller. It seems it was around that time that Burnside killed a man, possibly at a craps game, was convicted of murder and incarcerated in Parchman Farm.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. He would later relate that his boss at the time had arranged to release him after six months, as he needed Burnside's skills as a tractor driver.
1960–1990: Part-time musician He spent the next 45 years, not unlike his early years, in Panola and Tate counties, in northern Mississippi. At first he kept to particularly remote dwellings, working into the 1980s as a sharecropper growing cotton and soybean, as a commercial fisherman on the Tallahatchie River, selling his catch from door to door,"Charleston interview", audio clip, recorded May 1986), in Well, Well, Well (2001) and as a truck driver. Later he moved closer to Holly Springs. After coming back to Mississippi, and especially after marrying,Bruin, Leo, and Laundre, Kent. Liner notes of Mississippi Hill Country Blues. Swingmaster CD 2201. scan 1, scan 2 he picked more local gigs, playing guitar in juke joints and bars (some under his management), at picnics and at his own open house parties, and at the occasional festival.
His earliest recordings were made in 1967 by George Mitchell, then a graduate student of journalism. Mitchell and his wife went on a 13-day summer trip in Mississippi, which resulted in the first recordings of several country blues artists. He came to Burnside's house near Coldwater on the advice of fife player and maker Othar Turner.George Mitchell; David Evans. Arhoolie 1042 (1969) liner notes (scans: 1, 2) Mitchell wrote that Fred McDowell had not told him about Burnside, likely because Burnside posed "big-time competition".Booklet of The George Mitchell Collection (2007), FP 1114. Quoted in Six of the songs, played on an acoustic guitar lent by Mitchell, were released on Arhoolie Records after two years; nine others are on later records. Another album of acoustic material was recorded in 1969 for Adelphi Records, not to be released until thirty years later. Recordings from 1975 had a similar fate.Wolf LP 120.917 leaflet (scan)
These recordings featured Burnside playing acoustic guitar and singing, and a few tracks had harmonica accompaniment by W.C. Veasey or Ulysse Red Ramsey. Although not recorded, by that time Burnside also played electric guitar. His early repertoire came from hill country and Memphis favorites, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, hits by Howlin' Wolf and Elmore James, and sides by Yank Rachell, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Lonesome Sundown.
In 1969, he performed for the first time outside the United States, at a program in Montreal with Lightnin' Hopkins and John Lee Hooker. As a solo performer, he made three tours in Europe, appearing before enthusiastic audiences.Evans, David (1980). Notes to High Water 410 EP (scan), and to Sound Machine Groove, 1981/1997 (scan). In 1974, he played at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the first of nine of these festivals at which he performed.New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Archive – performers list. See also 1975 setlist Also in 1974, Tav Falco filmed Burnside in the Brotherhood Sportsmen's Lodge, a juke joint he ran at the time near Como. His performance featured the slide guitarist Kenny Brown, Burnside's friend and understudy, whom he began tutoring in 1971 and claimed as his "adopted son". In 1978, Burnside was filmed by Alan Lomax in what remained mostly outtakes of the television documentary The Land Where the Blues Began.
A series of recordings in 1979 by the musicologist David Evans for his record label High Water was the first to feature Burnside's Sound Machine, which included his sons Duwayne and Daniel on guitar, his son Joseph on bass, and his son-in-law Calvin Jackson on drums.: Part 1; Part 2. The band was active mostly in home settings but also joined Burnside in Europe in 1980 and 1983. They offered a rare fusion of rural and urban blues, funk, R&B and soul, which appealed to young Mississippians; their sets included covers of songs by Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, Albert King and Little Milton. An EP, Sound Machine Groove, was released by Evans's label in the US but had next to no distribution. Apart from it, one full album of the same title, a debut of sorts, was licensed for prompt European release by Disques Vogue, and another hour's worth was released by the Memphis label Inside Sounds in 2001.
From 1980 to 1986, Burnside recorded for the Dutch label Old Swingmaster and for the French label Arion, mostly solo or with harmonica accompaniment: Johnny Woods served on some occasions (he also recorded as a lead artist, with guitar accompaniment by Burnside); Curtis Salgado served once in a New Orleans session. Selections focused on hill country material and starker, less danceable songs by Lightnin' Hopkins, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. The results were four more LP releases and a videotape under his name, all in European markets.
In the mid-1980s, Burnside retired from farm work and became more busy with music. For about 12 years he worked with New Orleans–based harpist Jon (Joni) Morris Neremberg (or Nuremberg). He appeared before American crowds at such occasions as the 1982 World's Fair, the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition, and the 1986 San Francisco Blues Festival, between international tours. By the mid-1980s he toured about "once a year or maybe twice", and by one report in 1985 he had been to Europe 17 times. Recordings from his time with Morris were eventually released on two records, both produced by M.C. Records and Louis X. Erlanger: Acoustic Stories (a session from 1988) and Well, Well, Well (a 2001 compilation of informal recordings provided by Morris).
1991–2005: Commercial success and declining health
In the late 1970s or early 1980s, Burnside was introduced and struck a partnership with Junior Kimbrough. Roughly a decade later, his own Burnside Palace had shut down and the family lived next to the Kimbroughs' new Junior's Place in Chulahoma, Mississippi and collaborated with the counterpart musical family. The music writer Robert Palmer, teaching for a time in the University of Mississippi in Oxford, frequented the scene with some celebrity musicians, which led to the making in 1990 of the documentary Deep Blues, in which Burnside was prominently featured.
Burnside began recording for the Oxford, Mississippi, label Fat Possum Records in 1991. The label, dedicated to recording aging north Mississippi bluesmen such as Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, was founded by two students who had been attending their performances for some years—Peter Redvers-Lee, editor of Living Blues magazine, and Matthew Johnson, a writer for the magazine. Burnside remained with Fat Possum from that time until his death. Their first output was Bad Luck City (1992), featuring the Sound Machine. The next, Too Bad Jim (1994), was recorded at Junior's Place and produced by Palmer, with support from Calvin Jackson and Kenny Brown.Robert Palmer. Liner notes to Too Bad Jim, 1994. (scan) After Jackson moved to Holland,Cedric Burnside and Kenny Brown. Interview. Jefferson Blues Magazine, Issue 141, March 2004. Swedish original , via Google Translate Burnside found a new stable band and would usually perform with Brown and drummer Cedric Burnside, his grandson. R.L. played his first art museum gig when Grammy nominee/producer Larry Hoffman brought him to Baltimore to play the Walters Art Museum in February 1993 as the feature of a Baltimore Folk Music Society concert.
In a New York concert around the release of the documentary Deep Blues, he attracted the attention of Jon Spencer, the leader of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. He started touring with this group in 1995, both as an opening act and sitting in, gaining many new fans. The 1996 album A Ass Pocket of Whiskey was recorded with Spencer's band and was marketed for their audience, but was credited to Burnside. It gained critical acclaim and received praise from Bono and Iggy Pop; Billboard magazine wrote that "it sounds like no other blues album ever released" and an author there picked it for a year's end critics' poll, but Living Blues opined that it was "perhaps the worst blues album ever made".Cited in
After parting ways with the Blues Explosion, the label turned to produce music in which recorded materials were remixed by producer Tom Rothrock with an eye to techno, downtempo and hip-hop listeners. The experiment started with a track in Mr. Wizard (1997), an album based on a variety of sessions, and matured into a full album with Come On In (1998). The recording artists themselves heard only the final product, but they conceded that with time they came to like it, in part influenced by its popularity.