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(Ides of March, 2005)
R.L. Burnside: A Bothered Mind
Rating - ***
The R.L. Burnside page
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Here's a blues CD that is good fun, the latest offering from Mississippi
blues artist R.L. Burnside, shown on the inner jacket relieving himself
by the side of the road (and from the looks of it, he must take Vitamin
B supplements.) Count me among those who hadn't heard of R.L. Burnside
before now, but I should have, and better late than never. His bio says that
he was born in Mississippi in 1926, and was the son of a sharecropper. The
family later moved to Chicago and Burnside's father, brother and uncle
were all murdered within the space of a month (bad even by Chicago standards.) So
he went back to Mississippi and began recording the blues, and eventually made
it to the national scene in the 1990's. His personal history is an interesting
one and you can find out more at
www.fatpossum.com/artists/rl.html.
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Getting back to A Bothered Mind, there's not a bad song on it. Burnside
is joined by a couple of hip-hop artists on two of the tracks: Lyrics Born on
"Goin' Down South" and Kid Rock on "My Name is Robert Too." The latter seems
to be the better of these two selections, but the fusion (to use a very tired
expression from which there seems to be no escape) between traditional blues and
hiphop is an interesting one and makes you think. Now, you had the
Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and the Beatles and
basically every successful white artist in the 60s and 70s resurrecting
the collective works of African-American blues artists from the 40s and 50s. Then
you had the new wave of bands that copied the first wave. Then you had another
ripple of bands copying those bands. At long last, there was nothing left to
copy, and all that remained was Rap, which can survive even nuclear winter.
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So with the fusion of an original blues artist and a hiphop artist, you have
Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end of Rock. If one follows this
logic, Rock will not be reborn until young musicians drop the spinning
and hiphop crap and start writing real music again, so that future
Sons of Suburbia will have something to copy when the 2020s roll around, and
the process can repeat itself.
There's another interesting thing I've come to realize when listening to music
like Burnside's. There's not a huge effort to give credit to original
songwriters, and while it is an outrage that the mega-bands of the 60s and 70s
snubbed the earlier blues artists they owed so much to, those mega-bands had
no lock on the practice of ignoring a song's history. Two excellent cases in
point are a couple of blues classics, one on A Bothered Mind ("Someday Baby")
and one sung most recently by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros ("Junco Partner"). Fans
of The Allman Brothers will instantly recognize "Someday Baby"
as "Trouble No More." But naturally, the Allmans didn't write the song
either. Who did? To make a long story short, somebody named Sleepy John Estes
wrote it, back in the 30s. And it was re-done by a long succession of artists,
both black and white, and each time it was re-done, nobody bothered to give much,
if any, credit to either Estes or the person that they "borrowed" the song
from most recently. "When in Rome..." would seem to be the prevailing modus
operandi. All this makes the name of RL Burnside's publishing
company, "Big Legal Mess," very revealing. If you gathered the survivors of
everyone who ever recorded "Someday Baby", and the heirs of the deceased
artists, together in the same room, you'd have an excellent format for a
new reality show. Big legal mess, indeed.
None of that really matters, though. Burnside has had a long, tough
struggle to the top and he is entitled to take credit for the material on this
CD because he has put his own definite, immensely talented stamp on it, and
it doesn't seem likely that Sleepy John Estes would object to the way
things turned out. I highly recommend A Bothered Mind for the
curious among you. By the way, make sure to listen to track 12,
"Stole My Check" - a classic.
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