RL Burnside

RL Burnside

This page discusses the legacy of RL Burnside, currently my favourite bluesman of all time.

The Last of the Delta Blues men.

"I think I've worked out RL Burnside actually. It's just old blues on an electric guitar".
[John Peel dismisses RL Burnside in 1999].

Exactly so.

RL Burnside is for me the embodiment of modern delta blues, together with his usual band of Kenny Brown on guitar and grandson Cedric on drums, Burnside's blues crosses right over to a modern generation of fans like me who like music rough, missing out the stagnant pond of white boy guitar trio blues entirely.

And no matter who was buying the tickets or attending the shows Burnside did his thing - and it wasn't the hip hop blues of Come on In, or the folksy nonsense of the Arhoolie singles. No matter how other people recorded and arranged his songs, live he only played it one way - the electrifying rough house pogo music that finally found a voice on Burnside on Burnside.

RL BurnsideIt's hard to see how Burnside learned his blues direct from the masters, as the liner notes like to suggest. But then 'learned at the feet of X' is blues mythology, signifying the passing on of a torch. He learned blues because it was always there, in the local jukes and bars where he grew up and began sharecropping. These songs they sang to each other and passed around by travelling musicians were handed down, evolving, growing, alive. When Burnside decided to take up music as an easier way of making a living than farming or fishing, he played the stuff in his head - he didn't go and listen to a bunch of records to learn every note.	Burnside's Arhoolie years When finally asked to make a record in the late 60s, Burnside knew the lessons from history. It was Big Bill Broonzy who got taken off to la la land by the white chiefs of the US 'ethnomusicography' industry. So he cut his cloth accordingly - acoustic farm blues in the old style. And it got reviews, it got a little bit of recognition, and he made some money. For 20 years he occasionally cut singles for th professors who knew all about blues. It didn't affect the electric boogie he played in the jukes - that was his real living, and if he so much as put a straw in his mouth or mentioned a chord shape he'd have been run out of town as a boring old wet drip.
Come on In Burnside learned fast, and he never forgot a trick. Fat possum teamed RL up with producer Tom Rothrock to make the hip hop crossover hit Come on In out of fragments of Burnside sessions. Burnside approved the rushes without listening to them - he never had much to say about the record, except he liked it a whole lot more when he got the royalty cheques. And the cheques kept coming - a reworked fragment of Snakedrive called 'Let my Baby Ride' was used as a link for two years on MTV. We heard it in the UK in a mobile phone commercial. Moby used RL samples in his big beat hit LP. There were more hip hop cross-over records to follow, but none hit the spot like Come On In. I don't suppose Burnside listened to any of them.	A Ass Pocket Full O Whiskey Although I can now hear some holes in it, I can't deny that the influence of this record on me has been immense. In the 1990s John Spencer's Blues Explosion dragged Burnside's trio on to one of their tours, and then admirably went one step further, sitting in with Burnside and recording his usual catalogue. It doesn't all work of course, the art school artifice of some of the tracks palls after a while, and when you hear the real thing you realise that a lot of the tracks lack that groove, the Mississippi beat. But the high points are high, a towering version of Goin' Down South that at least takes it away from the hip hop beat Burnside was becoming associated with, and Snakedrive really clicks in places. Actually, the best groove is on the tail end of one of the tracks, Poor Boy. Judah Bauer and RL really slot in - and then get cut off.
Same old same old How many times has RL recorded the same songs? Goin' Down South, Shake em On Down, Snakedrive, Poor Boy, Walkin Blues all get at least 5 outings on the Matador/ Fat Possum/ Arhoolie catalogue. There just has to be a lesson here. 'Serious' musicians keep trying to make new epoch-shaking records. But music hipsters are just people with repeated short term meory failure. It sounds great now, but soon we've forgotten. Make the record again 3 years later and it will sound different because the style of the time in the studio and in the culture will be different. What seem like the biggest hit records of the day will in turn sink without trace; U2, Coldplay, Elton John...so long. I've got 'great' records in my collection that I haven't listened to for 20 years. New records get 30 plays a month 'til I get bored of them.	Burnside on Burnside Finally, Burnside gets to make a record with nobody else interfering. This is it, the sound of today's delta blues. It's an absolute mess, and I love every minute. The pissing about before every song, the catchphrases ad nauseam 'Thank y'all, thank y'all' and 'Well, well, well', the stupidest joke which the audience seems to think is the funniest thing they've ever heard, the MAJOR fuck ups in at least 2 songs, this is a tour de force of infectious energy that makes me smile just to think about it. Eric Clapton made a tribute record called "Me and Mr Johnson", that couldn't be further from this living organic car-crash of music if it was sung in Chinese. If Mr Johnson were alive, Eric, I know which record would sound more like him. Yes, so do you.

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RL Burnside

The Last of the Delta Blues men.