R. L Burnside
8 Oct 96


Poor Black Mattie
Shaek 'Em On Down
Fireman Ring The Bell
Long Haired Doney
Rolling & Tumblin
Goin Away Baby
Snake Drive - minor skip
Going Down South


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 RL Burnside, who died on Sept 1, 2005 aged 78, was one of the Mississippi hill-country bluesmen, and won public recognition only late in life when he was taken up by the pioneering blues recording label, Fat Possum.

 The singer and guitarist plied his raw blues round Mississippi in relative obscurity, while scraping a living as a sharecropper and fisherman, until he was in his sixties.

 Although Burnside had made occasional appearances at European blues festivals, and had been recorded by the folklorist George Mitchell in 1968, he came to public attention only after 1991, when he was the first act signed to Fat Possum, a Mississippi-based label that has become famous for rejuvenating lost - or previously non-existent - blues and country music careers.

 Described by Fat Possum's founder, Matthew Johnson, as "a happy-go-lucky nihilist", Burnside became the label's best-selling artist. He also found an enthusiastic following among young rock fans, thanks to his association with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, with which he collaborated on an album - A Ass Pocket of Whiskey - in 1996. (When Burnside's wife heard it she asked him: "You mean you do that stuff in public?"

 Two years later, in an attempt to capitalize on Burnside's new, younger audience, Fat Possum released a hip-hop remix of his material called Come On In; this also did well, selling 50,000 copies, although it upset the purists.

 Born at the town of Harmontown, Mississippi, into a family of sharecroppers on November 23 1926, RL Burnside learned to play blues from Fred McDowell, who lived nearby. In the 1940s he spent several years in Chicago, where he worked in a foundry and got to know Muddy Waters, who had married his first cousin.

 After Burnside returned to Mississippi, he shot a man who, he claimed, had been attempting to run him out of his home. Although he was convicted of murder, the story goes that he had served only three months in jail when a plantation owner persuaded a judge to release him, saying he needed Burnside to work during the cotton-planting season.

 "I didn't mean to kill nobody," Burnside later said of the murder. "I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head. Him dying was between him and the Lord."

 Having been signed to Fat Possum, Burnside released a live album, Bad Luck City, in 1992, following this two years later with Too Bad Jim. His raw, one-chord progression blues on songs such as Death Bell Blues and Shake 'Em On Down received critical acclaim. In 1999 one of his songs was featured on the soundtrack of The Sopranos. His last record was A Bothered Mind, which came out last year.

 Burnside's band, the Sound Machine, included several members of his family. In all he released more than a dozen albums, and by the late 1990s he was said to be earning more than $100,000 a year. He continued, however, to live in a cockroach-infested, tumbledown house near Chulahoma, Mississippi, whose front garden was home to a collection of old tyres, engine blocks and wrecked cars.

 RL Burnside is survived by his wife, Alice Mae, and 12 children. In later life he was nostalgic for the old days, before civil rights improved the circumstances of black people in the Deep South. "The biggest change I've seen in my life is more crime," he said in 1999. "A 15-year-old chopped up his grandmother here so he could pawn her TV set. That don't look like progress to me."