R.L. Burnside: Hill Country Blues Patriarch Who Conquered Rock

In the early 1950s, R.L. Burnside watched his father, two brothers, and two uncles get murdered in Chicago within a single year. In fact, two of his brothers were killed on the same day in separate, unrelated incidents. By 1959, R.L. Burnside had abandoned the city entirely and returned to the Mississippi hills where he was born. He picked up a guitar, started playing the local juke joint circuit, and spent the next three decades in near-total obscurity. Furthermore, he worked as a sharecropper, a commercial fisherman on the Tallahatchie River, and a truck driver — playing house parties and fish fries on the side for audiences that rarely exceeded a few dozen people.

Then Fat Possum Records found him. R.L. Burnside was in his mid-sixties. Within five years, he had recorded with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, earned praise from Bono and Iggy Pop, and introduced the hypnotic drone of Hill Country blues to punk rockers, indie fans, and mainstream rock audiences who had never heard anything like it. Consequently, the man who had played for pocket change in Mississippi juke joints became the most unlikely crossover artist in modern blues history.

Early Life and the Chicago Tragedy

R.L. Burnside — born Rural Leroy Burnside on November 23, 1926 — came into the world in the Blackwater Creek area of Harmontown, Lafayette County, Mississippi. His parents, Earnest Burnside and Josie Malone, raised him in the rolling, forested hills of North Mississippi — terrain that was geographically and musically distinct from the flat Delta alluvial plain sixty miles to the west. Specifically, the Hill Country’s poor soil supported small farms and lumber operations rather than the massive cotton plantations that shaped Delta culture. As a result, the communities were more isolated, and the musical traditions they preserved were older and more deeply rooted in West African rhythmic practices.

R.L. Burnside began playing harmonica around age sixteen. However, the instrument never clicked for him, and he eventually turned to guitar. His most formative influence was Mississippi Fred McDowell, a neighbor whose droning, slide-driven guitar style would become the template for everything R.L. Burnside played for the rest of his life. He first heard McDowell play when he was barely seven or eight years old. Eventually, he joined McDowell’s gigs, taking the late sets while the older man rested. In addition, a local musician named Ranie Burnside provided early guidance, reinforcing the one-chord, rhythm-heavy approach that defined the Hill Country sound.

From Mississippi to Chicago and Back

In the early 1950s, R.L. Burnside moved to Chicago seeking better economic opportunities. What he found instead was devastating violence. His father was murdered. His two brothers were killed on the same day in separate incidents. Two uncles were also murdered — all within approximately one year. The trauma drove R.L. Burnside back to Mississippi permanently. He settled near Holly Springs around 1959 and married Alice Mae Taylor. Together they would raise twelve children — eight sons and four daughters. Moreover, several of those children and grandchildren would eventually carry the R.L. Burnside name into a new era of Hill Country blues.

Three Decades of Obscurity

For the next thirty years, R.L. Burnside played music without any commercial recognition whatsoever. He worked the land, fished the Tallahatchie, drove trucks, and played guitar at house parties, fish fries, and the small juke joints scattered across North Mississippi. In 1974, he took over management of the Brotherhood Sportsmen’s Lodge, a juke joint near Como. Nevertheless, no record label came calling. In fact, R.L. Burnside was essentially invisible to the American music industry for three full decades.

The first documentation of his sound came in August 1967, when folklorist George Mitchell recorded R.L. Burnside at his home in Coldwater, Mississippi. Subsequently, six songs from that session appeared on Arhoolie Records in 1969. The complete collection was later released as First Recordings in 2003. Meanwhile, in 1979, folklorist David Evans recorded the R.L. Burnside Sound Machine — a family band featuring his sons and relatives. These recordings captured the raw, percussive, communal sound that had been developing in those hills for generations. Notably, they also documented the family-band dynamic that would become central to R.L. Burnside’s legacy.

Throughout the 1980s, R.L. Burnside began making trips to Europe, where blues festivals provided a more receptive audience than he had ever found at home. He made over seventeen European trips by the mid-1980s. Accordingly, European audiences heard R.L. Burnside years before most Americans knew he existed. However, these tours generated little attention stateside. As a result, the wider music world remained completely unaware of what was happening on the front porches and in the juke joints of North Mississippi.

Fat Possum Records and the Breakthrough

Everything changed in 1991 when Fat Possum Records was founded in Oxford, Mississippi, by Peter Redvers-Lee and Matthew Johnson. Johnson was a University of Mississippi student who had spent time at Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint in Holly Springs. He understood, above all, that the generation carrying this tradition was aging fast. Without intervention, the music would die with them. Essentially, Fat Possum’s mission was documentary rather than commercial — capture these artists before it was too late.

R.L. Burnside’s Bad Luck City became one of Fat Possum’s earliest releases in 1992. It featured his family band, the Sound Machine, and introduced the R.L. Burnside sound to a wider audience for the first time. Too Bad Jim followed in 1994, recorded at Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint and produced by Robert Palmer. The album featured R.L. Burnside’s sons alongside guitarist Kenny Brown. Furthermore, it became one of the most important blues recordings of the decade — a raw, unfiltered document of Hill Country blues at its most powerful.

R.L. Burnside quickly became Fat Possum’s most commercially successful artist. In an era when major labels had largely abandoned traditional blues, this small Mississippi operation was capturing something vital. Consequently, Fat Possum’s decision to record R.L. Burnside in his natural environment rather than a polished studio preserved the music’s essential character — the hiss, the room noise, the imperfections that made the sound feel alive.

The Jon Spencer Collaboration and Crossover

The pivotal moment in R.L. Burnside’s career arrived on February 6, 1996. He entered a rented hunter’s cabin at Lunati Farms in Holly Springs, Mississippi, with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. The resulting album, A Ass Pocket of Whiskey, was released on Matador Records in June 1996. Remarkably, Billboard described it as sounding like no other blues album ever released. Similarly, Bono praised the record, and Iggy Pop expressed his admiration for R.L. Burnside’s raw power.

What made the collaboration remarkable was that R.L. Burnside did not change his style to accommodate the rock musicians. Instead, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion adapted entirely to his approach. The result sounded simultaneously ancient and urgent — Hill Country drone meeting garage rock energy. Accordingly, the album drew listeners from indie rock, punk, and alternative audiences who had never encountered traditional blues in any form. Moreover, it demonstrated that the groove-based, one-chord power of the Hill Country tradition could cross genre boundaries without compromising a single note.

The crossover success opened doors that had been closed for decades. Mr. Wizard followed in 1997, recorded across Mississippi and Los Angeles with producers Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock. It peaked at No. 12 on Billboard’s Top Blues Albums chart. In other words, R.L. Burnside — a man who had been playing for pocket change in Mississippi juke joints for thirty years — was now charting nationally.

The Electronic Experiment

R.L. Burnside’s most controversial recording came in 1998 with Come On In, produced largely by Tom Rothrock. The album layered electronic production, sampling, loops, and trip-hop textures over R.L. Burnside’s guitar and vocals. It was a radical departure. Indeed, Living Blues magazine called it one of the worst blues albums ever made. Nevertheless, contemporary critics praised the innovation, and the album sold powerfully — becoming the best-selling release distributed by Epitaph Records in early 1999 and peaking at No. 20 on the Core Radio Chart.

The divided reception illustrated a fundamental tension in R.L. Burnside’s later career. On one hand, purists wanted the raw, unadorned Hill Country sound. Meanwhile, younger audiences and adventurous producers heard something in that hypnotic drone that connected naturally to electronic music’s repetitive structures. Both perspectives had merit. However, what mattered most was that R.L. Burnside himself remained unchanged at the center of every recording. His guitar, his voice, and his groove anchored everything — regardless of what was layered around it.

The Sound That Set Him Apart

R.L. Burnside’s guitar style was rooted in open-G tuning and driven entirely by his thumb. His fingerpicking was percussive and thick-boned, with an almost lazy mastery that disguised its sophistication. Regardless, he played both acoustic and electric guitar, with and without slide, but the approach remained consistent throughout his career — one chord sustained and repeated until it became a rhythmic pulse rather than a harmonic statement.

This was the fundamental distinction between the R.L. Burnside sound and the Delta blues tradition. Where Delta musicians followed the twelve-bar progression through its arc of tension and resolution, R.L. Burnside sat on a single chord and built power through repetition, rhythmic variation, and intensity. Furthermore, he would add extra beats to measures whenever he felt like it, moving freely outside strict metric conventions. Specifically, his songs operated on feel rather than structure — a quality that traced directly to the West African polyrhythmic traditions preserved in the Mississippi hills.

His vocal delivery matched the guitar’s approach entirely. R.L. Burnside sang with a powerful, expressive voice that grew richer with age rather than diminishing. In particular, his delivery was laconic and economical — he said what needed saying and nothing more. The combination of droning guitar and understated vocals created a trance-like quality that audiences consistently described as hypnotic.

Kenny Brown and the Definitive Trio

Kenny Brown served as R.L. Burnside’s essential musical partner for over thirty years. Brown met R.L. Burnside in the early 1970s at a local show and soon became a regular at his home, jamming two or three times a week. R.L. Burnside claimed Brown as his adopted son, calling him “my white son.” Together with R.L. Burnside’s grandson Cedric Burnside on drums, they formed a stable trio that became the definitive live configuration. Consequently, Brown’s slide guitar complemented R.L. Burnside’s rhythm work, creating interlocking patterns that amplified the drone’s intensity.

Later Years and Final Recordings

Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down arrived in 2000, featuring guest guitarists Rick Holmstrom, Smokey Hormel, and John Porter. The album carried deep personal weight for R.L. Burnside. Its opening track, a version of Skip James’s “Hard Time Killing Floor,” and the closing spoken-word piece “R.L.’s Story” both addressed the murders that had defined his young life in Chicago decades earlier. As a result, the album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Blues Album and a W.C. Handy Award.

Burnside on Burnside, a live album released in 2001, captured the raw energy of R.L. Burnside’s performances and earned another Grammy nomination alongside multiple W.C. Handy Awards in 2002 and 2003 for Traditional Blues Male Artist and Traditional Blues Album. However, that same year R.L. Burnside suffered a heart attack that severely limited his performing abilities. He stopped drinking on doctor’s orders. Consequently, his final studio album, A Bothered Mind (2004), was assembled from archival guitar recordings mixed with newly recorded vocals — a compromise forced by declining health.

R.L. Burnside died of heart failure on September 1, 2005, at St. Francis Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He was seventy-eight years old. In 2014, he was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame — a formal acknowledgment of the tradition he had spent a lifetime carrying forward.

The Burnside Dynasty

What R.L. Burnside left behind extends far beyond recordings. His family became a multi-generational blues dynasty unmatched in the Hill Country tradition. For example, sons Duwayne Burnside and Garry Burnside both became professional musicians — Duwayne as a guitarist who performed with the North Mississippi Allstars, Garry as a bassist who played with Junior Kimbrough and the Hill Country Revue.

The next generation carried the R.L. Burnside tradition even further. Grandson Cedric Burnside began touring with R.L. Burnside’s band as a drummer at age thirteen. He eventually became a bandleader in his own right, winning a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album in 2022 for I Be Trying. Similarly, grandson Kent Burnside tours internationally, maintaining the family’s presence on blues festival circuits worldwide. In essence, R.L. Burnside didn’t just preserve a tradition — he ensured it would survive through bloodline.

Lasting Influence

The reach of R.L. Burnside’s influence extends well beyond the blues world. Most notably, the Black Keys have cited R.L. Burnside as a primary inspiration. Dan Auerbach described hearing in R.L. Burnside the ghosts of the whole lineage of Mississippi music combined with the raw bar sounds of Chicago blues. The band’s 2021 album Delta Kream featured Kenny Brown and consisted entirely of Hill Country blues covers — a direct tribute to the tradition R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough embodied. Iggy Pop expressed genuine awe at R.L. Burnside’s live power. Likewise, Bono made a pilgrimage to hear the music firsthand.

The 2002 documentary You See Me Laughin’ captured R.L. Burnside alongside Junior Kimbrough, CeDell Davis, T-Model Ford, and other Hill Country practitioners in their natural settings. The film provided a visual record of a tradition that had survived in isolation for generations. Its footage became particularly valuable as many of its subjects passed away in the years following production. In fact, the documentary remains the most significant filmed document of Hill Country blues culture.

R.L. Burnside’s partnership with Fat Possum Records established the commercial viability of authentic Hill Country blues. His success consequently opened doors for other North Mississippi musicians to record and tour. Furthermore, the raw production aesthetic that Fat Possum developed around R.L. Burnside’s recordings — no overdubs, no polish, no compromise — became the label’s signature and attracted non-blues audiences tired of overproduced commercial music.

Essential Listening: Where to Start with R.L. Burnside

For listeners discovering R.L. Burnside for the first time, Too Bad Jim (1994) offers the most direct introduction to his unfiltered Hill Country sound. A Ass Pocket of Whiskey (1996) captures the explosive energy of his crossover moment with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Burnside on Burnside (2001) documents his live power at its peak. For those interested in the controversial electronic experiments, Come On In (1998) remains a fascinating hybrid. Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down (2000) is the most personal and emotionally devastating record in his catalog. First Recordings (2003) provides the archaeological foundation — the earliest known documentation of the sound that would eventually captivate the world.

Complete Discography

Studio Albums

• Bad Luck City (1992, Fat Possum Records)
• Too Bad Jim (1994, Fat Possum Records)
• A Ass Pocket of Whiskey (1996, Matador Records — with Jon Spencer Blues Explosion)
• Mr. Wizard (1997, Fat Possum Records)
• Sound Machine Groove (1997, Fat Possum Records)
• Come On In (1998, Fat Possum Records)
• Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down (2000, Fat Possum Records)
• A Bothered Mind (2004, Fat Possum Records)

Live Albums

• Burnside on Burnside (2001, Fat Possum Records)

Compilations and Archival Releases

• Mississippi Hill Country Blues (recorded 1980s, European release)
• Acoustic Stories (1988 session with Jon Morris)
• Well, Well, Well (2001, informal recordings)
• First Recordings: George Mitchell Collection (2003, sessions from 1967–1968)