R.L. Burnside

R.L. Burnside wasn’t a musician seeking fame. He played because the sound of hill country blues burned his hands and throat—a raw, 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 dragging rhythm, a groove that wouldn’t quit. There were no frills, just the urgency of someone playing to avoid 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, rough and deep, seemed to come from a dry well, as if every 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 across the Delta, tracked him down after a fife maker’s tip. Mitchell took six songs on an acetate and released them two years later on Arhoolie Records. The rest waited, biding its time.