R.L. Burnside R.I.P.

INTRO

An era in American music ended when legendary blues guitarist R.L. Burnside passed away in 2005. A fixture on the Mississippi Delta blues scene for decades, Burnside and his gritty, growling musical style was a living link to the black musicians who originated the Delta blues back in the 1920s and from whom he first learned how to play. In the early 1990s Burnside gained fame when he was "discovered" by new generation of blues aficionados and rock and rollers.

Beginning at Mississippi

Robert Lee Burnside was born November 23, 1926 in Oxford, Lafayette County, MS, in the hill country above the Delta. Burnside spent much of his life in the northern section of the state and made his home in Holly Springs. A triangular basin between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, the Delta was long an impoverished, rural place, with an economy dominated by an unfair system in which whites owned the land and black sharecroppers worked it for meager wages.

The blues was a musical style that emerged as a key element of African-American culture in the twentieth century, and was born in the 1920s out of the Delta's pervasive injustice and racism. "Working for the man, you couldn't say nothing but you could sing about it, ya know," Burnside told Ed Mabe in a 1999 interview that was published on the Web site Perfect Sound Forever, when asked about the starting point of the blues. "Couldn't tell him what he done wrong."

Burnside was himself a sharecropper in his earliest working years, and did not begin playing the guitar until the age of 16. He came under the influence of a neighbor, "Mississippi Fred" McDowell, who was one of the pioneers of the blues genre. He learned a lot from him, and the highly rhythmic style that Burnside plays is evident in McDowell's recordings as well.

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R.L. Burnside

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LANGUAGE!

You See Me Laughin' (1 of 4) 2002

You See Me Laughin' (2 of 4) 2002

You see me laughin part (3 of 4) 2002

You see me laughin part (4 of 4) 2002