Reissued through a joint agreement with Oxford, Miss.-based Fat Possum and Epitaph, R.L. Burnside’s First Recordings is the result of a neighbor’s recommendation.
“If you want a man who can flat lay down the blues,” Othar Turner said, pointing producer George Mitchell down the road in 1967 outside Coldwater, Miss.: “I know who that be.”
It was Burnside, who later found chart success on the superlative early-1990s releases Too Bad Jim and Bad Luck City; as a guest with the Jon Spencer Experience and on soundtracks for HBO’s celebrated series The Sopranos and MTV’s The Real World, even through a Nissan commercial.
Mitchell, from the start, was struck by this nervy vibe, something the former farmhand would one day brag about in a moment of graffiti on the hood of his own van: “Burnside style.”
It was a dangerous, muscular sound, something far different than the Burnside presented here in his acoustic infancy. Yet, there are small previews of successes still to come.
In the ensuing years before his wider fame, Burnside primarily played with a family band called the Sound Machine. Then Robert Palmer featured Burnside, along with Junior Kimbrough, in the book, movie and soundtrack Deep Blues, garnering new and widespread accolades. Palmer later produced Too Bad Jim; Michael Johnson, and former Louisiana band leader Bruce Watson, oversaw subsequent recordings for Fat Possum.
Along the way, R.L. Burnside established himself as an important popularizer of the north Mississippi style of droning blues. First Recordings takes you back to a unadulterated country antecedent to that sound, something akin to the plantation sessions with Muddy Waters (a cousin-in-law) before his Chicago-based hey day — and nothing like 1998’s hip-hop flavored rave-up “It’s Bad You Know” from Burnside, featured on the Come On In album and later on The Sopranos.
R.L. Burnside tries out a number of traditional tunes during these initial sessions, including “Rollin’ and Tumblin,'” “Goin’ Down South” and “Long Haired Doney,” among others. “Skinny Woman,” later redone by the North Mississippi All-Stars, and the slide-driven “Walkin’ Blues” are among the other self-penned highlights.
We get a clearer idea of where he’ll go, however, through a sprinkling of early compositions — notably on the John Lee Hooker-ish “Just Like a Bird Without a Feather,” which opens First Recordings. Also released as “Lost Without Your Love,” the tune almost elicits kind-hearted sympathy for the loss of a cherished lover — until you realize that the main character has apparently killed her.
(Burnside himself claimed to have murdered a man, and to have served a brief sentence in Mississippi’s legendary Parchman Prison for it: “I didn’t mean to kill nobody,” he’s said to have remarked. “I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head. Him dying was between him and the Lord.”)
R.L. Burnside passed in 2005, five years after issuing the terrific remix-based Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down. He opened another door in his own legacy by embracing hip hop on that celebrated project, and completed the circle of African-American music stylings begun with these, his First Recordings.
- The Band’s ‘Christmas Must Be Tonight’ Remains an Unjustly Overlooked Holiday Classic - December 25, 2016
- Nick DeRiso’s Best of 2015 (Rock + Pop): Death Cab for Cutie, Joe Jackson, Toto + Others - January 18, 2016
- Nick DeRiso’s Best of 2015 (Blues, Jazz + R&B): Boz Scaggs, Gavin Harrison, Alabama Shakes - January 10, 2016
