R.L. Burnside

R.L. Burnside wasn’t a musician chasing fame. He played because the sound of hill country blues burned his hands and throat—this rough, repetitive blues that rose from the cotton fields of northern Mississippi. His guitar, always deliberately out of tune, sounded like an old tractor starting up in the middle of the night: a rhythm that dragged, a groove that never stopped. There were no frills, just the urgency of someone playing to keep from drowning in silence. He learned from Mississippi Fred McDowell, but he flipped the style: where Fred was precise, he was wild; where Fred sounded like a preacher, he sounded like a man who’d just lost a fight. His voice, raspy and deep, seemed to come from a dry well, as if each word cost him a piece of his life. He recorded his first songs in 1967 on a borrowed tape recorder in the kitchen of his home near Coldwater. George Mitchell, a journalist collecting blues in the Delta, tracked him down after a fife maker’s tip. Mitchell took six songs on acetate and released them two years later on Arhoolie Records. The rest waited, biding its time.

Until the mid-90s, R.L. Burnside was a ghost in the blues world. He lived between Holly Springs and the farms of Tate County, where he’d worked as a tractor driver, fisherman, and door-to-door fish salesman. He played in roadside bars, at country parties, and in his own house, where people came and went as if it were a private club. But in 1995, everything changed. Jon Spencer, frontman of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, heard him at a festival and was captivated by that sound that smelled of damp earth and sweat. Spencer took him to Oxford to record with Fat Possum Records, a label then rescuing the last great rural blues musicians. Burnside recorded with Spencer in the studio and onstage, and suddenly his music reached ears that had nothing to do with blues: punks, garage rockers, people searching for something raw and direct. The album Burnside on Burnside (1999) put him on the map, but it was Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down (2000) that revealed his darker side. On that record, he covered Hard Time Killing Floor by Skip James and told his own story in R.L.'s Story, where he spoke of Chicago, Parchman Farm, and the night a man stopped breathing.