R.L. Got Soul

R.L. Burnside – Too Bad Jim (1994)

In the same way I thought rock’n’roll was pretty boring as a young person, I thought the same of the blues. To me, a lot of the blues was about Eric Clapton and this hangover from the hippy era, so much of it still dominates. So to discover that there were these people making really honest, weird and funky music – blues – it was a big revelation.

One of those players was R.L. Burnside from the Hillside country in Mississippi, a disciple of Mississippi Fred McDowell. He played all of his life, but it wasn’t until later on when he was in his sixties that he began to really do it in a professional way. He was a sharecropper who worked all of his life and music was his hobby. R.L., when we met him, was playing as a bass-less trio with his grandson Cedric on drums and adopted son Kenny Brown on second guitar. He played in a hypnotic style, very loose, it was totally idiosyncratic and true to who he is. Too Bad Jim is a good example of that; this is one of my favorites.