A Quick Tribute to RL Burnside, Gone Twenty Years Now

With his house-rocking guitar style and his quizzical facial expressions, RL Burnside seemed like one of a kind. Though his early music and his locale place him squarely in the blues tradition, his music in later years transcended genre by allowing crossover and embracing modern styles, mostly through collaborations and remixes. The great hill country bluesman passed away twenty years ago today, on September 1, 2005.

I came late to RL Burnside’s music, finding it in the mid-2000s, around the time of his death. Not knowing anything about Burnside, I had bought the CD compilation from the 2004 Bonnaroo concert, and on it, guitarist Luther Dickinson plays a rip-it-up version of “Peekaboo” with Robert Randolph— which led me to wonder who he was. Luther Dickinson is the leader of North Mississippi All-Stars and the son of the late Jim Dickinson, a Memphis-based record producer. That, in turn, led me to find his collaborations with Burnside and with fife-and-drum legend Otha Turner. That new-to-me discovery then led to the purchase of the North Mississippi All-Stars’ Hill Country Revue album, also from the 2004 Bonnaroo, which had Burnside performing with the band.

Though I’ve never heard anyone claim that RL Burnside is not a bluesman, there is some argument over whether those latter-day albums are blues albums. The fall after that Bonnaroo show, critic John Clarke wrote this in an October 2004 review of A Bothered Mind in the British newspaper The Times:

The argument goes that Burnside was a respectable North Mississippi bluesman (listen to the simple vocal and guitar beauty of Bird without a Feather for evidence of this) who didn’t merely sell his soul to the Devil, but remortgaged it to a bunch of hip-hop performers and producers, including Kid Rock and Lyric Born. [ . . . ] Is it blues? I don’t think that it matters really. In a field that is also occupied by the likes of Little Axe and Moby, Burnside gets my vote as the most entertaining and authentic of them all.

A year later, Burnside’s September 2005 New York Times obituary called him a “Master of Raw Mississippi Blues.” It had this to say:

With a raw, unadorned electric guitar style and hypnotic one-chord songs, Mr. Burnside’s music was seen by critics as a link to the sound of Muddy Waters and Mississippi Fred McDowell. That might not have been a coincidence: Mr. Burnside, who was born in Harmontown, Miss., grew up near McDowell and learned to play guitar from him, and said that a cousin of his had married Muddy Waters.

But Mr. Burnside’s music had a rough, obstinate energy that also appealed to contemporary rock musicians and fans, and in the 1990’s, after decades of
obscurity, Mr. Burnside began to find wide success. In 1991, in his mid-60’s, he signed with Fat Possum, based in Oxford, Miss. One of his first albums for that label, “Too Bad Jim,” was produced by Robert Palmer, a former pop critic for The New York Times.

RL Burnside was 78 years old at the time of his death. His discography can be found here.