BURNSIDE STYLE

I’ve got a kind of interesting story to tell you, particularly so if you have an interest in music. It really tickled me when I learnt about this, so I hope it’ll do the same for you. If you don’t give a shit about music, maybe skip this one and move on. For the third consecutive year, Linda and I — together with our buddies, Lester and Lynda Davis — spent our Easter break at the amazing Byron Bay Bluesfest in New South Wales. Man, I love that event! Around 100 artists from all over the world congregate there and give it their all, on five stages, from midday to midnight every day for five solid days. Best I don’t start on about it, or I could soon be raving to you about how fantastic the Byron Bay Bluesfest is in nothing short of an evangelistic manner. So, I’ll spare you the ravings for now, but I must tell you this one intriguing story. It started last year when we were watching an American band called ‘Alabama Shakes’. I noticed that the bass guitar player was wearing a cap with two words embroidered on it. Initially, they were hard to read, as the guy was playing right over at the back of the stage. Eventually, however, I made out that the words were ‘Burnside Style ’— nothing else, just ‘Burnside Style’. Hmmmm. Never heard of it. It intrigued me a little, as I wondered what ‘Burnside Style’ meant and who or what ‘Burnside’ was. The name popped into my mind a few times over the following year, but I never quite got around to researching it. Fast forward, then, to this year’s Bluesfest: we were watching a blues player from Los Angeles by the name of ‘Blind Boy Paxton’ — standing right up the front against the barrier, as we always seem able to do at Bluesfest — and a professional photographer got in my way a little. He looked by his clothing to be a serious sort of a music dude — I guess a reporter from a music magazine. As I was trying to look around him, bugger me, there it was again. This time it was right in my face — a plain black cap with very simple yellow embroidery on it that read ‘Burnside Style’. What was this ‘Burnside’ thing? I asked a few music buddies, and no one knew — until one guy said, “Oh yeah, that’s RL Burnside, the blues man. He was a musical genius. He had a pretty interesting life, too.” My interest was renewed. After some research, I discovered that my contact’s view that Burnside “had an interesting life” was something of an understatement! RL Burnside was born in 1926 and died in 2005. He was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. By all accounts, it was a hard life, in many ways. Like many of his genre, he played the guitar and with a deliberately repetitive sound; when he got onto a good thing, he’d stay with it, in the fashion of older, established blues men such as John Lee Hooker. Burnside played music all of his life, but, for some reason, major attention didn’t come his way until he was well into his 60s, when he became ‘big’, but then he faded away just as quickly. It’s said that his powerful voice grew stronger and better with age, but only as long as he kept drinking. On occasions when he toned down his drinking, his voice did likewise. Burnside’s father lived in Chicago, having shifted there after splitting up with RL’s mother, and, as a young man in the 1940s, RL moved up there from the south in pursuit of better work prospects. Things went well for him for a start, as he gained jobs at metal and glass factories, and got to hang out with Muddy Waters — who, fortuitously, was his cousin-in-law — which helped him to get into the fabled Chicago blues scene. However, 1940s Chicago was a tough place, with crime and violence around every corner. Apparently, in the space of a single year, RL’s father, his two brothers, and two of his uncles were all murdered right there in Chicago city. A few short years after arriving there, RL — sensibly, one would have to conclude — got out of Chicago and headed back south. Burnside moved around the southern states of Tennessee and Mississippi, with things going OK for a while. He played with many established southern blues players. However, he was going from job to job and finding plenty of trouble along the way. During the 1950s, Burnside killed a man. Although the episode is not well documented, it is thought to have happened during a gambling incident. He was found guilty of murder and went to prison — but he was out less than a year later, due to his previous employer arranging to get him released early because he needed Burnside’s abilities as a tractor driver. Maybe his boss was a state senator or something. Here’s my favourite bit of the story. When asked sometime later about the murder he’d committed, Burnside’s quote is incomparable: “I didn’t mean to kill nobody. I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch once in the head and two times in the chest. Him dyin’ was between him and the Lord.” After a heart attack in 2001, Burnside was told by his doctor to stop drinking. He took the advice and quit, but apparently then found himself unable to play the guitar well any more, and his musical career came to an end. It would seem, however, that RL Burnside’s influence lives on; among many others, Luther Dickinson, former guitarist for The Black Crowes, and now front man for the North Mississippi Allstars — one of the coolest bands ever — is said to have been greatly inspired by Burnside, and incorporates a lot of ‘Burnside Style’ in his fabulous music. In fact, RL Burnside was regarded as the all-time master of the North Mississippi hill-country style of blues — the genre from which Dickinson’s band probably took its name. Of course, for me at least, RL Burnside will go down in history for providing the world with one of its best damn quotes.