Day 209: R.L. Burnside – Come On In

The other day, I saw a video of R.L. Burnside that said he was a pioneering blues musician, which I unfortunately can’t find at the moment. I popped him onto my list of things to listen to, since I don’t listen to enough blues and need to start rectifying that, and I thought tonight would be the night. I chose his 1996 release, Come On In.

Album cover courtesy of Fat Possum

R.L. Burnside was a hill country blues singer, songwriter and guitarist from Oxford, Mississippi. He was born in 1926 and he died in 2005, having had a long musical career that was very largely spent without much fanfare. When he was a young man, he moved to Chicago to play with Muddy Waters, but he moved away after five of his family members were killed in under a year.

He also killed a man over a game of craps and went to prison for it, but he was released after six months since his boss said he was needed back at work – the before times sure were different. Burnside said about the killing, “I didn't mean to kill nobody. I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head and two times in the chest. Him dying was between him and the Lord.”

For the next 45 years, he was a part-time musician playing in relative obscurity at house parties and bars while having various factory jobs, until he was discovered and started recording his songs. One of his recordings was then heard by Jon Spencer from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, recording albums together that earned him worldwide fame and recognition. At the time, he was in his 70s.

Based on the YouTube video, I was expecting a lesson in blues history, but imagine my surprise when I got something completely different. Come On In is a remix album that was produced by Tom Rothrock and it mixes Burnside’s blues with electronic music and incorporated techniques from dance music, like sampling and looping. The resulting album is interesting, it’s something that I can’t really think of many contemporaries for. It’s an eclectic mix that flows well from song to song and sounds so natural that you really don’t realise how unique it is until you start to think about it.

However, Burnside apparently wasn’t entirely enamoured with the remixes, saying “At first I didn't like them too much. Then I saw how much money they were making and I got to liking them pretty well.” It’s not hard to see why an industry legend wouldn’t feel entirely comfortable with it at first, as it’s definitely veering quite far from what he had been doing for most of his life, but the resulting album is so one of a kind that you can’t help but to enjoy it.

I’ll return to this when I have more time, I liked it a whole lot. I’m giving it a generous but well-deserved 9/10, bumped up from an 8.5 by how much I loved the closing song “Heat”.