Illustration by Megan Wolfe.
by Scott Barretta
Today if you ask blues fans to list their top artists, it’s likely that R.L. Burnside, whose centennial birthday will be this November, will be frequently mentioned. The most well-known figure in the subgenre of North Mississippi Hill Country blues, Burnside symbolized that blues remained a vigorous tradition, and, notably in Oxford, he became an iconic figure, inspiring t-shirts and trucker caps emblazoned with his catchphrase “Well, well, well” and “Burnside style.”
If you posed the same question in 1990, though, it’s unlikely his name would come up. Then in his mid sixties, Burnside was a beloved juke joint entertainer in rural Marshall County, while collectors knew him from relatively obscure recordings. What changed?
First, some background. Burnside [R.L. is alternatively explained as standing for Rural L., Robert Lee or simply R.L.] was born in Lafayette County on November 23, 1926, near Harmontown in an area subsequently flooded during the creation of Sardis Lake. His musical heroes included John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Muddy Waters (a cousin by marriage), but his primary local inspiration was Mississippi Fred McDowell, who first called him up to perform at local house parties. Burnside lived in Chicago for a couple years but mostly in northern Mississippi, where he worked as a sharecropper, tractor driver, and commercial fisherman, supplementing his income by selling moonshine and hosting blues house parties with his wife of over fifty years, Alice.
Burnside first recorded in 1967 for folklorist George Mitchell on acoustic guitar; six tracks appeared on the 1969 Arhoolie LP Mississippi Delta Blues Vol. 2, leading to appearances at blues festivals in the United States and Europe. The blues audience declined over the next decades, though, and his recordings on European LPs, a cassette-only album and 45rpm singles recorded by Dr. David Evans for Memphis’ High Water Records didn’t spark widespread demand.
The first big breakthrough for Burnside was Robert Mugge’s 1991 documentary Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads, which featured older artists in Memphis, the Delta, and northern Mississippi. An onscreen host was Arkansas-born musician and critic Robert Palmer, author of the 1982 book Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta and an instructor of a rock’n’roll history course at UM’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture in the late ’80s.
The film featured Delta blues artists Roosevelt “Booba” Barnes, Big Jack Johnson, and Lonnie Pitchford and Jack Owens from Bentonia, but the most riveting and surprising music for many viewers was by Jessie Mae Hemphill from the Como/Senatobia area, Junior Kimbrough from Holly Springs, and Burnside—artists soon recognized as stalwarts of “North Mississippi Hill Country Blues,” a genre only widely recognized in the latter 1990s.
Kimbrough and his band were featured playing a hypnotic, eight-minute-long version of his signature “All Night Long” for dancers at the Chawalla Rib Shack in Holly Springs, and Burnside was captured playing his standards “Jumper on the Line” and “Long Haired Doney” on electric guitar on the porch of his house.
The film was positively received and led some intrepid fans—including myself, then resident in Sweden—to make the pilgrimage to witness Burnside and Kimbrough play at Junior’s Place, a juke joint in Chulahoma, southwest of Holly Springs. Burnside and his family lived next door, and many of the children and grandchildren of both men performed at Junior’s. The Burnside family jams are captured on the 1991 album Bad Luck City, which appeared on a new Oxford-based label, Fat Possum, founded by former Living Blues editor Peter Lee and UM student Matthew Johnson.
If Bad Luck City left the impression of Burnside trying to keep up with the young folks, the 1994 Fat Possum follow up Too Bad Jim, produced by Robert Palmer and recorded at Junior’s Place, captured the iconic and ferocious slide-guitar driven, one-chord groove sound that still resonates throughout the blues and rock worlds today.
Burnside, Kimbrough and Fat Possum roster members T-Model Ford and Paul “Wine” Jones began playing regularly at Oxford’s Syd and Harry’s, now occupied by City Grocery, and toured the country incessantly as the “Fat Possum Blues Caravan.” Their raw sounds heightened interest among veteran blues fans, excited music critics who normally didn’t bother with blues releases, and attracted alternative rockers who ate up Fat Possum’s often cartoonish promotion of their artists’ music as chaotic and “not the same old blues crap.”
Burnside reached an even broader audience via the 1996 album A Ass Pocket of Whiskey, a “collaboration” with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion that featured Burnside’s basic sound—aided by longtime second guitarist Kenny Brown—overlaid with Spencer and company’s screaming, use of the Theremin, and distorted guitars. I saw the tour in Malmö, Sweden—Burnside, Brown, and Cedric Burnside played an opening set, and there was no onstage interaction with the Explosion. Burnside chuckled backstage about Spencer’s music and told me he enjoyed the money.
Burnside likewise didn’t play much of an active role in the 1998 album Come On In, on which producer Tom Rothrock remixed Burnside’s basic sound through sampling, looping, and use of enhanced bass and hip-hop beats (some created by Cedric). The experimentation was controversial but effective—“It’s Bad You Know” was featured in The Sopranos. Later, a remix of Burnside’s “Rollin’ Tumblin’” appeared in a Nissan TV commercial.
The resulting royalties allowed Burnside to take it easy, though he continued touring and recorded several more albums for Fat Possum with a more conventional sound. The label also re-released older acoustic recordings of Burnside which provided a more nuanced view of his artistry.
Burnside died on September 1, 2005, but his music lives on via his progeny. Notably, Cedric Burnside has enjoyed a successful solo career, including collaborative work with his slightly older uncle Garry Burnside, who recently joined his touring band. And the community of Hill Country musicians is reinforced every year via festivals staged by members of the Burnside, Kimbrough, and Otha Turner families, as well as the annual Mississippi Hill Country Picnic, co-run by Kenny Brown, which honors the legacies of the genre’s founders.
Harmontown, Lafayette County, Mississippi. Show Map
This article is from The Local Voice 2026 North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic Guide. Access the digital edition here
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