R.L. Burnside dies

Sad news today -- R.L. Burnside, one of the more recognizable and popular blues musicians of our time, died yesterday at the age of 78 in a hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

When the music business was my day to day bread and butter, I saw R.L. perform live numerous times. I also had the opportunity to sit and talk with him on one occasion, so I thought this would be a good time to voice one of the more memorable portions of our conversation.

It was 1996, and the collaborative album with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion known as A Ass Pocket of Whiskey had recently been released, much to the chagrin of blues traditionalists who felt the record was a crass commercial exploitation of R.L. akin to, say, Paul Simon's handling of Ladysmith Black Mambazo or Ry Cooder's gathering of elderly Cuban musicians. It certainly didn't help matters that the record sounded like a buzz saw of electric guitar and yelps from Jon Spencer, which caused R.L. to sound understandably lost on a few tracks.

Personally, I was at odds with the album, for I had first heard R.L. on Too Bad Jim, which is a raw, honest, at times beautiful record that runs deep in the delta blues tradition. But I also appreciated Jon Spencer's work for what it was, which was a post-modern take on the two-guitar, one drum, no-bass electric boogie of Hound Dog Taylor.

So I asked him about Ass Pocket, and how the record was doing. He replied with a wry smile that it had sold more copies than anything he had put out in his career, and that from the proceeds he was able to put a new roof on his house in Mississippi, which according to R.L. leaked like crazy whenever it rained.

R.L. was the bread-earner for an enormous family -- his wife, twelve children, and multiple grandchildren -- all of whom lived under the same leaky roof in deep rural Mississippi. R.L. didn't perform to make a living, he performed to feed a family, and he wasn't losing any sleep over what music critics or traditionalists thought about the record.

I bring this story up partially because the news of his death dug it out me, and because it's an example of how easy it is to assume that all musicians with fairly well-known names and catalogs make a comfortable living. The vast majority do not, and sometimes it takes an admittedly commercial album like Ass Pocket to lead listeners to other recorded output, and hopefully a deeper appreciation of their talent. A talent that, in the case of R.L., is sadly gone.