R. L. Burnside

History

Burnside was already in his 60s when the public embraced him, and he was a classic late bloomer. Born Rural Burnside on Nov. 23, 1926, in Harmontown, Miss., he grew up in a sharecropping family. He was taught the fundamentals of guitar by his neighbor, the great blues singer-guitarist Mississippi Fred McDowell. In the ‘50s, like many another blues performer, Burnside moved to Chicago, where he met and was no doubt influenced by Muddy Waters (who dated Burnside’s first cousin Anna Mae). But he swiftly soured on the city: After his father, two brothers, and an uncle were all murdered there within a year, he returned to Mississippi in 1959. At some point – all sources are vague on the date -- he was arrested for shooting a local bully to death, and served six months at the Parchman prison farm.

Burnside worked and performed in obscurity until August 1967, when folklorist George Mitchell, who was scouting North Mississippi for undocumented talent, recorded the 40-year-old Burnside on the advice of Fred McDowell and fife-and-drum bandleader Othar Turner. The session, cut at Burnside’s home outside Coldwater, was excerpted on a 1969 Arhoolie Records LP, and issued comprehensively on CD as First Recordings (2003), though the latter release bears the incorrect recording date of 1968. Through the 1970s and ‘80s, Burnside was able to secure European festival appearances on the back of those first recordings. He also returned to the studio sporadically.

In 1980, David Evans of the University of Memphis, whose High Water Records recorded regional performers, cut Burnside with his family group Sound Machine (which included sons Daniel and Joseph and brother-in-law Calvin Jackson on drums); the album Sound Machine Groove (1980) offers an early look at his pungent electric style. We are proud to offer these historic recordings once again to the public through High Water Recods.