Poor Boy - RL Burnside

R. L. Burnside (November 23, 1926 – September 1, 2005), born Robert Lee Burnside, was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist who lived much of his life in and around Holly Springs, Mississippi. He played music for much of his life, but did not receive much attention until the early 1990s. In the latter half of the 1990s, Burnside repeatedly recorded with Jon Spencer, garnering crossover appeal and introducing his music to a new fan base within the underground garage rock scene.

One commentator noted that Burnside, along with Big Jack Johnson, Paul "Wine" Jones, Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes and James "Super Chikan" Johnson, were "present-day exponents of an edgier, electrified version of the raw, uncut Delta blues sound."
In the 1990s, he appeared in the film Deep Blues and began recording for the Oxford, Mississippi, label Fat Possum Records. Founded by Living Blues magazine editor Peter Redvers-Lee and Matthew Johnson, the label was dedicated to recording aging North Mississippi bluesmen such as Burnside and Junior Kimbrough.

Burnside remained with Fat Possum from that time until his death, and he usually performed with drummer Cedric Burnside, his grandson, and with his friend and understudy, the slide guitarist Kenny Brown, with whom he began playing in 1971 and claimed as his "adopted son."

In the mid 1990s, Burnside attracted the attention of Jon Spencer, the leader of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, touring and recording with this group and gaining a new audience in the process.

Burnside's 1996 album A Ass Pocket of Whiskey (recorded with Jon Spencer) gained massive critical acclaim, earning praise from music legends Bono and Iggy Pop. During this time he also provided the entertainment at private events such Richard Gere's birthday party.

After the death of Kimbrough and the burning of Kimbrough's juke joint in Chulahoma, Mississippi, Burnside quit recording studio material for Fat Possum, though he did continue to tour. After a heart attack in 2001, Burnside's doctor advised him to stop drinking; Burnside did, but he reported that change left him unable to play.
Burnside at the Double Door Inn in Charlotte, N.C. in 1998

Members of his large extended family continue to play blues in the Holly Springs area: grandson Cedric Burnside tours with Kenny Brown and most recently with Steve 'Lightnin' Malcolm as part of the 'Juke Joint Duo', while his son Duwayne Burnside has played guitar with the North Mississippi Allstars (Polaris; Hill Country Revue with R. L. Burnside). Nephew Garry Burnside used to play bass guitar with Junior Kimbrough and in 2006 released an album with Cedric. In 2004, the Burnside sons opened Burnside Blues Cafe, located 30 miles southeast of Memphis at the intersection of U.S. Highway 78 and Mississippi Highway 7 in Holly Springs.
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Preaching Blues - Joe Ayers

Joe Ayers has literally rewritten the history books regarding the development of the banjo in America...and has provided the most accurate account of the true sound of early banjo.

Joe Ayers is a musician, historian, lecturer, musicologist, classical guitarist, blues expert, performing artist, and author. His recordings of early American music include several volumes of 19th century banjo classics. He has worked as a music history consultant and appeared in motion picture feature films (Warner Bros. productions) and in NBC, PBS, Discovery Channel and National Geographic television specials. He has played a seminal role in presenting authentic music for museums, Civil War reenactments, festivals, and education venues.

The grandson of a Virginia dance fiddler, Joe led the Tuckahoe Social Orchestra for 14 years, incorporating his children within the ranks of the performing group. The orchestra performed 19th century parlor, dance and minstrel music. Joe also gives lectures, offers historical consultation for films, sound tracks and other artists’ recordings, conducts workshops and seminars, and participates in residencies.

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Napoleon Strickland

Napoleon Strickland (October 1, 1919 – July 21, 2001) was a fife and drum blues artist, and songwriter, and vocalist specializing in country blues, sometimes known as Napolian Strickland. He also played guitar, drums, harmonica, fife, and all manner of percussion instruments.
Born near Como in the northern Mississippi Delta, his father introduced him to the music as a boy but it was Otha Turner that taught him how to play. He was adept with guitar, drums, harmonica, diddley-bow, fife, and all manner of percussion. He was primarily a fie player and singer, playing a great number of festivals, on appearing on several compilation albums of North Mississippi Country Blues. He also appeared in the bopic documentary film, The Land Where The Blues Began. Strickland was considered by many to have been the premier fife player of his genre, having appeared at numerous festivals, on several recorded compilations and on film. He worked as a share cropper for most of his life, mentoring other musicians in the region.[citation needed] After a car accident he was committed to a nursing home but continued to play for guests even from his bed.
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Poor Black Mattie - R.L. Burnside

R. L. Burnside (November 23, 1926 – September 1, 2005), born Robert Lee Burnside, was a North Mississippi hill country blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist who lived much of his life in and around Holly Springs, Mississippi. He played music for much of his life, but did not receive much attention until the early 1990s. In the latter half of the 1990s, Burnside repeatedly recorded with Jon Spencer, garnering crossover appeal and introducing his music to a new fanbase within the underground garage rock scene.

One commentator noted that Burnside, along with Big Jack Johnson, Paul "Wine" Jones, Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes and James "Super Chikan" Johnson, were "present-day exponents of an edgier, electrified version of the raw, uncut Delta blues sound.
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Sad Days, Lonely Nights - Junior Kimbrough

David "Junior" Kimbrough (July 28, 1930 — January 17, 1998) was an American blues musician from North Mississippi. His best known work included "Keep Your Hands Off Her" and "All Night Long". Music journalist Tony Russell stated "his raw, repetitive style suggests an archaic forebear of John Lee Hooker, a character his music shares with that of fellow North Mississippian R. L. Burnside".
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Ain't Goin' To Worry - Roosevelt " Booba" BARNES

I really like this guy. Great voice, just the right amount of polish but not over produced... just in the slot!

Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes (September 25, 1936 – April 2, 1996) was an American Delta blues musician.

Born in Longwood, Washington County, Mississippi, Barnes got his start in 1960 as a member of the Swinging Gold Coasters, a local Mississippi blues outfit. He relocated to Chicago in 1964, where he played in bars and clubs, but returned to Mississippi in 1971 and continued to perform locally into the early 1980s. He opened a nightclub, the Playboy Club, in 1985, and played there with a backing group called the Playboys; they became regional blues favorites, and eventually signed to Rooster Blues, who released Barnes's debut effort in 1990.

The album was hailed by Allmusic as "an instant modern classic" and Guitar Player called Barnes "a wonderfully idiosyncratic guitar player and an extraordinary vocalist by any standard". Barnes toured the U.S. and Europe following the album's release.

Barnes's career was interrupted in the middle of the decade when he was diagnosed with cancer, and he died of the disease in 1996 in Chicago, aged 59.
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Catfish Blues - Big Jack Johnson

Johnson was born in Lambert, Mississippi. His father was a local musician playing both blues and country ditties at local functions. At the age of 13, Johnson junior was playing guitar with his father's band. By 18, Johnson followed B.B. King's electrified lead. His break came when he sat in with Frank Frost and Sam Carr at the Savoy Theatre in Clarksdale, Mississippi. The trio were seldom apart for the next 15 years, recording for Phillips International and Jewel Records with Frost as the bandleader.

In 1979, Rockin' the Juke Joint Down, was released (as by the Jelly Roll Kings) and marked Johnson's first recordings as a singer. Johnson's subsequent 1987 album for Earwig Music, The Oil Man, included his recording of "Catfish Blues." He has recorded both solo and as a member of the blues groups the Jelly Roll Kings and Big Jack Johnson and the Oilers (with poet/musician Dick Lourie).

He performed and wrote "Jack's Blues" and performed "Catfish Medley" with Samuel L. Jackson on the Black Snake Moan, film soundtrack. Daddy, When Is Mama Comin Home?, his ambitious 1990 set for Earwig, found him tackling issues as varied as AIDS, wife abuse, and Chinese blues musicians.

Johnson died from an undisclosed illness on March 14, 2011. According to family members, he had struggled with health issues in his final years, worsening to the point that there were erroneous reports of his death several times in the weeks prior to his death.
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Train Train - Jessie Mae Hemphill

I first saw Jessie Mae on Deep Blues, a film documentary by Robert Palmer... Hughly Recommended!

Jessie Mae Hemphill (October 18, 1923 – July 22, 2006) was a pioneering and award-winning electric guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist specializing in the primal, northern Mississippi country blues traditions of her family and regional heritage.

Hemphill was born near Como and Senatobia, Mississippi, in northern Mississippi just east of the Mississippi Delta. She began playing the guitar at the age of seven and also played drums in various local Mississippi fife and drum bands. Her musical background began with playing snare drum and bass drum in the fife-and-drum band led by her grandfather, Sid Hemphill. Aside from sitting in at Memphis bars a few times in the 1950s, most of her playing was done in family and informal settings such as picnics with fife and drum music until her 1979 recordings.

The first field recordings of her work were made by blues researcher George Mitchell in 1967 and ethnomusicologist Dr. David Evans in 1973 when she was known as Jessie Mae Brooks, using the surname from a brief early marriage, but the recordings were not released. In 1978, Dr. Evans came to Memphis to teach at Memphis State University (now University of Memphis). The school founded the High Water label in

1979 to promote interest in the indigenous music of the South. Evans made the first high-quality field recordings of Hemphill in that year and soon after produced her first sessions for the High Water label.

Hemphill then launched a recording career in the early 1980s, a period which which be her heyday. In 1981 her first full-length album, She-Wolf, was licensed from High Water and released on France's Vogue Records. In the early 1980s, she performed in a Mississippi drum corps put together by Evans composed of herself, Abe Young, and Jim Harper on Tav Falco's Panther Burns' Behind the Magnolia Curtain album; she also appeared in another drum group with Young and fife-and-drum band veteran Othar Turner in a televised appearance in Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. Other recordings of hers were released on the French label Black and Blue, and she performed concerts across the United States and other countries including France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and Canada. She received the W. C. Handy Award for best traditional female blues artist in 1987 and 1988.

In 1990 her first American full length album, Feelin' Good, was released, which also won a Handy Award for best acoustic album. Hemphill suffered a stroke that paralyzed her left side in 1993, preventing her from playing guitar, resulting in her retiring at that time from her blues career. However, she did continue to play, accompanying her band on the tambourine.

In 2004 the Jessie Mae Hemphill Foundation released Dare You to Do It Again, a double album of gospel standards, newly recorded by the ailing vocalist singing and playing tambourine with accompaniment from Steve Gardner, DJ Logic, and descendants of the late musicians Junior Kimbrough, R. L. Burnside, and Otha Turner. The release, her first recordings since the 1993 stroke, also included a DVD. Also in 2004, Inside Sounds released Get Right Blues, containing material recorded from 1979 through the early 1980s; Black & Blue released Mississippi Blues Festival, which included seven live tracks by her from a Paris concert in 1986.

On July 22, 2006, Jessie Mae Hemphill died at The Regional Medical Center in Memphis, after experiencing complications from an ulcer.
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Early in the Morning and Booker's Boogie

I found out about Booker on the video documentary by Robert Palmer called Deep Blues. If you haven't had the chance to see it, it is really quite great!
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