Chicago Neighborhoods

An era in American music ended when legendary blues guitarist RL Burnside passed away in 2005. A fixture on the Mississippi Delta blues scene for decades, Burnside and his gritty, growling musical style was a living link to the black musicians who originated the Delta blues back in the 1920s and from whom he first learned how to play. In the early 1990s Burnside gained fame when he was “discovered” by new generation of blues aficionados and rock and rollers. One of them, Judah Bauer of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, told Guitar Player’s Jas Obrecht that Burnside was “devoted to the blues…. Hanging out with him, you really feel he’s from another time and place. The past in him is big—he’s a direct connection to it—and you hear it in his storytelling and phrases.” Born Robert Lee Burnside in 1926 in Lafayette County, Mississippi, Burnside spent much of his life in the northern section of the state, just outside of the unofficial borders of the region known as the Delta. A triangular basin between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, the Delta was long an impoverished, rural place, with an economy dominated by an unfair system in which whites owned the land and black sharecroppers worked it for meager wages. The blues was a musical style that emerged as a key element of African-American culture in the twentieth century, and was born in the 1920s out of the Delta’s pervasive injustice and racism. “Working for the man, you couldn’t say nothing but you could sing about it, ya …
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