Duwayne Burnside

Highway 78 winds through Tennessee, ultimately passing through in Memphis. At least this is where most tourists stop. They look around Graceland, maybe eat some "soul food," take in a blues show and then wind back up Highway 78 to wherever they call home.

On the other side of the city, the Tennessee/Mississippi state line provides more than just a geographical border. Things move at a different pace across the border. The big city is replaced with rolling hills and miles upon miles of farmland. The landscape on Beale Street may go hotel-restaurant-bar-bar-hotel... On the Mississippi side it goes farm-farm-cow-juke joint-farm... But the music pouring out of these backwoods barrooms will pound in to your head long after the Memphis bars close. It's not flashy, it's not pretty, it's not clean – but Mississippi Hill Country Blues is a style that's slowly learning to crawl over the railroad tracks into bars and clubs across America.

Duwayne Burnside – who'll perform with the Mississippi Mafia at the Kalamazoo State Theatre on Jan. 27 – was raised watching one of the patriarchs of Hill Country Blues. His father, the late R.L. Burnside, was mildly successful in the 1960s, but his career caught fire in the early 1990s as R.L. approached age 70. Albums like A Ass Pocket of Whiskey, Mr. Wizard, and Come On In feature mean, driving guitar riffs that don't just ask you to listen, they walk up to you, punch you in the gut and shout, "Hey, asshole! You're going to listen, and you're going to like it!"

Duwayne Burnside said he always includes a couple of his father's songs in his set lists, but during his 30-plus years performing he's developed a style all his own. To say he learned from his father is an understatement. The younger Burnside first picked up a guitar at nine years old and was playing clubs at 10. There were a lot of record stores or big-name touring artists dropping by the area, so his father's music, and the music of his father's friends, was really all he had beside a few Memphis radio stations.

"I was kind of stuck in the blues scene, you know what I'm saying," he told Recoil last month during a 30-minute phone conversation. "'Cause I heard it all the time, it's what I did – I hung out with all these people like my daddy."

Burnside talks like one would expect a man raised in the Mississippi Hill Country to talk. About a third of what he says is understandable. "Daddy" is "deed-y." "You know what I'm saying" is "yanowa-I'msayn." But no translator is needed because his story is told every night through the lyrics he sings, and more importantly through the hammering guitar lines that let you know the maker came from a place a little rougher than West Michigan will ever know. And for the record, the people he hung out with at such a young age included Junior Kimbrough, B.B. King, Albert King and members of the Bobby Blue Bland.

Lately, Burnside has won acclaim and even a few Grammy nominations as a member of the North Mississippi All Stars. He's a good friend of the Dickinson brothers, who also grew up in the same area and play a modernized version of the style – albeit a little jam band-esque. Burnside's style is a little more accessible to a mild blues fan than his father's. Much of the hammering guitar riffs on his latest album, Under Pressure, are left to the bass guitar, and he's more apt to fall back on a 12-bar blues progression with some heavy soloing.

"Duwayne just kind of writes the way he talks," his publicist Scott Hatch added in a more in depth manner during the conversation. "And he wrote the songs in the studio in three days and recorded the album. And what he was talking about just became the songs."

Hatch added that he expects the sounds coming from Holly Springs, Miss., are to become more popular in the next decade. R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough laid the groundwork, and now artists like Duwayne, the North Mississippi All Stars and Jimbo Mathis are beginning to fuse it with the younger audience.

However, it's not really possible to replicate the style unless you've lived it. Hatch said he's seen a number of musicians try, and some even enjoyed some mild success. But in the long run, their hammering riffs become more ball peen than sledge. Look for a new Duwayne Burnside album in 2006, and also check out Burnside Exploration's The Record. 

January 2006