R.L Burnside

R.L Burnside - Too Bad Jim - 1994 - Capricorn/Fat Possum

The best blues album of last year, no contest, was the sizzling A Ass Pocket of Whisky, the one-off collaboration between RL Burnside and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - a turbulent collision of red-blooded rockabilly and black-hearted boogie. Its success has prompted Epitaph to finally release the 70-year-old Burnside's other Fat Possum recordings in Europe, starting with this slice of raw blues primitivism from 1994. Burnside is one of the few remaining practitioners of North Mississippi hill-country blues, a juke-joint style originated by Fred McDowell and characterised by repetitive slashes of slide guitar over a backbeat provided by marching-band snare and bass drum. It's brutally simple but utterly compelling, a dark, brooding sound that locks into a groove and hangs on with grim pit-bull determination. As with the extempore blues of John Lee Hooker, matters of metre and bar-counts are decided pretty much on the hoof, accompanists following Burnside's lead, hanging on a single chord until he deems it time to change. Several tracks derive from the same Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf roots that inspired the early Captain Beefheart classics (".44 Pistol", for instance, is a fairly straight re-take of the Wolf's "Forty-Four"), while Burnside's lyrical interests, on tracks like "Death Bell Blues", are intimately concerned with violence, deceit, mortality and retribution - the authentic emotional mulch of backwoods blues. It's haunting, hangdog stuff: approach with caution. © Andy Gill, Independent, The (London), Nov 7, 1997
R. L. Burnside, one of the last, great Mississippi bluesmen, whose raw, country blues was discovered late in his life, died, aged 78 on September 1, 2005. This album is regarded as one of his finest.

TRACKS

1 Shake 'Em on Down - Burnside, Traditional
2 When My First Wife Left Me - Hooker
3 Short Haired Woman
4 Old Black Mattie -Traditional
5 Fireman Ring the Bell - Burnside
6 Peaches - Traditional
7 Miss Glory B. - Burnside
8 .44 Pistol Burnside
9 Death Bell Blues - Burnside
10 Goin' Down South - Burnside, Traditional

MUSICIANS

R.L. Burnside - vocals, guitar
Kenny Brown - guitar
Calvin Jackson - drums
Dwayne Burnside - bass

BIO

North Mississippi guitarist R.L. Burnside was one of the paragons of state-of-the-art Delta juke joint blues. The guitarist, singer and songwriter was born November 23, 1926 in Oxford, MS, and made his home in Holly Springs, in the hill country above the Delta. He lived most of his life in the Mississippi hill country, which, unlike the Delta region, consists mainly of a lot of small farms. He learned his music from his neighbor, Fred McDowell, and the highly rhythmic style that Burnside plays is evident in McDowell's recording as well. Despite the otherworldly country-blues sounds put down by Burnside and his family band, known as the Sound Machine, his other influences are surprisingly contemporary: Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Lightnin' Hopkins. But Burnside's music is pure country Delta juke joint blues, heavily rhythm-oriented and played with a slide. It wasn't until the 1990's that he began hitting full stride with tours and his music, thanks largely to the efforts of Fat Possum Records. The label has issued recordings made by a group of Burnside's peers, including Junior Kimbrough, Dave Thompson and others. Up until the mid-'80s, Burnside was primarily a farmer and fisherman. After getting some attention in the late '60s via folklorists David Evans and George Mitchell (Mitchell recorded him for the Arhoolie label), he recorded for the Vogue, Swingmaster and Highwater record labels. Although he had done short tours, it wasn't until the late '80s that he was invited to perform at several European blues festivals. In 1992, he was featured alongside his friend Junior Kimbrough (whose Holly Spings juke joint Burnside lives next to), in a documentary film, Deep Blues. His debut recording, Bad Luck City, was released that same year on Fat Possum Records. Burnside has a second record out on the Oxford-based Fat Possum label, Too Bad Jim (1994). These recordings showcase the raw, barebones electric guitar stylings of Burnside, and on both recordings he's accompanied by a small band, which includes his son Dwayne on bass and son-in-law Calvin Jackson on drums, as well as guitarist Kenny Brown. Both recordings also adequately capture the feeling of what it must be like to be in Junior Kimbrough's juke joint, where both men played this kind of raw, unadulterated blues for over 30 years. This is the kind of downhome, backporch blues played today as it has been for many decades. In 1996, Burnside teamed with indie-rocker Jon Spencer to cut A Ass Pocket O' Whiskey for the hip Matador label; he returned to Fat Possum in 1998 for the more conventional Come on In. As Burnside had been recording intermittently since the late '60s a spate of re-issues and live recordings began to appear in the 2000's. Chief among them were Mississippi Hill Country Blues, largely recorded in the Netherlands in the 1980s; First Recordings, which gathered 14 of George Mitchell's 1967 field recordings of Burnside in Coldwater, MS; a live set documenting a west coast tour Burnside on Burnside appeared in 2001. His next studio album Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down appeared in 2000 but it would be another 4 years before the next new R.L. Burnside recording Bothered Mind was released. That same year Burnside suffered a heart attack and underwent bypass surgery. He never fully recovered from the attack and in 2005, at the age of 79, R.L. Burnside passed away in a Memphis, TN hospital. © Richard Skelly, All Music Guide