North Mississippi guitarist R.L. Burnside stood among the leading figures of modern Delta juke joint blues. Born November 23, 1926, in Lafayette County, Mississippi, the guitarist, singer and songwriter settled in Holly Springs in the hill country above the Delta, where he spent most of his life amid the region’s small farms. He absorbed his approach from neighbor Fred McDowell, whose own recordings already displayed the highly rhythmic technique that Burnside later made his own. Although the otherworldly country-blues textures produced by Burnside and his family band, the Sound Machine, drew from contemporary sources such as Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins, the music remained pure country Delta juke joint blues, rhythm-driven and executed with a slide.
Only in the 1990s did sustained touring and wider recognition arrive, chiefly through the work of Fat Possum Records, the label that also documented several of Burnside’s contemporaries, among them Junior Kimbrough and Dave Thompson. Until the mid-1980s Burnside worked chiefly as a farmer and fisherman. Folklorists David Evans and George Mitchell brought him modest notice in the late 1960s; Mitchell captured him for Arhoolie, after which Burnside recorded for Vogue, Swingmaster and Highwater. Short tours preceded his late-1980s appearances at European blues festivals. In 1992 he appeared with neighbor Junior Kimbrough, whose Holly Springs juke joint stood beside Burnside’s home, in the documentary Deep Blues; that same year Fat Possum issued his debut album, Bad Luck City. A second Fat Possum release, Too Bad Jim, followed in 1994.
Both albums presented Burnside’s raw electric guitar work, supported by a compact band that included son Dwayne on bass, son-in-law Calvin Jackson on drums and guitarist Kenny Brown, and both conveyed the atmosphere of Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint, where the two men had delivered this unvarnished style for more than thirty years. In 1996 Burnside joined indie-rocker Jon Spencer for A Ass Pocket O’ Whiskey on Matador; he returned to Fat Possum in 1998 for the more conventional Come on In. Because Burnside had recorded only sporadically since the late 1960s, the 2000s brought a series of reissues and live documents, notably Mississippi Hill Country Blues, drawn largely from 1980s sessions in the Netherlands, First Recordings, which collected fourteen of George Mitchell’s 1967 field recordings made in Coldwater, MS, and the 2001 live set Burnside on Burnside documenting a West Coast tour. His next studio album, Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down, appeared in 2000, yet four more years passed before the release of A Bothered Mind. That same year Burnside suffered a heart attack and underwent bypass surgery; he never fully recovered and died in 2005 at age 79 in a Memphis, TN hospital.
