Cedric Burnside

The blues is music for all time – past, present, and future – and few artists simultaneouslyexemplify those multiple temporal moments of the genre like North Mississippi’s CedricBurnside. The Mississippi Hill Country blues guitarist and singer/songwriter contains within himthe legacy and future of the region’s prescient sound stories. At once African and American andsouthern and Mississippian, these stories tell about love, hurt, connection, and redemption in theSouth. His most recent contribution to this tradition is 2022’s Grammy-winning Best TraditionalBlues Album, I Be Trying, a 13-track treatise on life’s challenges, pleasures, and beauty.“Life can go any kind of way,” Burnside says. With almost 30 years of performing and livingblues in him, he would know.Burnside’s blues inheritance, the North Mississippi Hill Country blues, is distinct from its Deltaor Texas counterparts in its commitment to polyrhythmic percussion and its refusal of familiarblues chord progressions. Often, and especially in Burnside’s care, it leads with extended riffsthat become sentences or pleas or exclamations, rendering the guitar like its West Africanantecedent, the talking drum. Riffs disappear behind and become one with the singer’s voice,like the convergence of hill and horizon in the distance. Sometimes they become the only voice,saying what the singer cannot conjure the words for. Across some nine individual andcollaborative album projects, Burnside’s voice eases seamlessly into, through, and behind theriffs spirit gifts him, carrying listeners to a deep Mississippi well. There is mirror there in thewater of that well, in Burnside’s music, that shows us who and what we have been, who we are,and what we might be if we look and heed.The 44-year-old Burnside was born in the blues as much as he was in funk, rock, soul, and hip-hop. These latter sensibilities are reflected across his work, as he drives Hill Country blues intogrooves that lend themselves readily to an urgent, modern moment. But he is also keenly hisgrandfather’s grandson, who he studied so carefully over a decade playing with him that he cameto know him better than his own self. The elder Burnside blues man, the hill country bluesluminary RL Burnside, and his wife Alice Mae wrapped their Holly Springs land and family inwarmth, joy, and music. RL Burnside, alongside collaborators and contemporaries from David“Junior” Kimbrough to Jessie Mae Hemphill and Otha Turner, cultivated the sound and feelingof Black North Mississippi life and offered it up to the world. Cedric observed and absorbed thisart world intently and with wonder as a child, declaring to himself, this is the music I want toplay and I want to do that for the rest of my life. Moreover, this was the offering he, too, wantedto make, and the life of service to the spirit through blues that he wanted to live. By age 13, hewas on the road with his “Big Daddy” Burnside, playing drums, being raised up by the musicand the road, and developing the next, electric generation of the Hill Country calling and sound.Burnside’s two Grammy-nominated album projects – the 2015 Descendants of Hill Country and2018’s Benton County Relic – were both capstone statements for a lifetime of musical laborchanneling the blues spirit on drums, guitar, and vocals in the North Mississippi Hill Countrytradition. I Be Trying, Burnside’s second release with Alabama’s Single Lock Records, is anotherunfolding of his influence and voice as an architect of the second generation of Hill Countryblues. This album pushes just beyond his long-time roles as Hill Country blues collaborator, torchbearer, and innovator into the rooms of the artist’s inner life. Written in reflection on andoff the road in 2018, the album responds to the confusion and anger he felt in the years after aseries of deaths in the family and a host of other interpersonal hurts, some he dished out andsome he took. The album opens with an acoustic lament, “The World Can Be So Cold,” thatencapsulates the tenderness of this pain and then quickly rallies and pleads with the Lord for helpon the rousing second track and the album’s first single, “Step In.” The title track, on whichBurnside is accompanied on background vocals by his youngest daughter Portrika, is a plea forgrace and forgiveness from a man “still learning and trying to be the best me.” Burnside’ssignature approach and contribution to the Hill Country genre – electricity, intention, andtimeless timbre – is seamlessly complemented here by star collaborators Alabama Shakes bassistZac Cockrell, North Mississippi Allstars guitarist Luther Dickinson, and principal collaboratorReed Watson on drums.With lessons to impart, Burnside strips down the sound with precision so there can be nomisunderstanding, allowing for space and breath where otherwise chords and reverb might bepresent. This portion of the offering is a guidebook for life’s dark times, set to mostly minor riffsand pulsing bass and percussion rhythms that immediately set in the soul like the gospel. If youwake up on the wrong side of the bed, “Ask the Lord for revelation/so [you] can see clearer” and“keep on pushing as hard as [you] can,” he advises to a march on “Keep On Pushing”; “Becareful who you talk to/ain’t no telling what they might do” he warns on “Gotta Look Out” overa menacing bass eighth-note couplet on the one and three. Recorded over a few sessions at RoyalStudios in Memphis with lifelong friend and fellow North Mississippi descendant Lawrence“Boo” Mitchell, I Be Trying is Burnside boiled down by a fiery blue anger from descendant torelic to human.What is left, and this is everything, is a resonant kind of love. Buoyed by his readings of Lao Tzuand rumination on his own life choices and hurts, Burnside says he is “trying his best toimplement love” in his life and in relationships with others. “There’s not enough love shown inthe world. People have a lot of regret. The world needs more love.” In the places where loveglistens on the album’s surface, like in the harmonies on the anthem groove “Love Is the Key” orin the smooth, purposeful falsetto sliding over the strings on the final track, “Love You Forever,”Burnside’s desire for us all to “really just try to come closer” is palpable.But this is the blues, so love is necessarily double-edged. On two covers, one of RL Burnside’s“Bird Without a Feather” and another of Junior Kimbrough’s “Keep Your Hands Off Her,”which Burnside titles by its signature opening threat, “Hands Off That Girl,” there is hurt andfear, quiet menace and outright threat. “Dark,” he admits, “but what people go through.”Flashing this side of love’s sword, Burnside reminds us of the complex, raw, blues people legacythat undergirds his art. Still, he says on the soaring “Love Is Key,” which is his thesis as of late,“a life filled with love is the key/yes it is.”Blues is an embodied practice that frequently crosses the boundaries of reality and fiction, and assuch, Burnside appears as himself in Bill Bennett’s Tempted (2001), a New Orleans-set thriller;Arliss Howard’s Mississippi-based romantic comedy Big Bad Love; and Craig Brewer’sTennessee-based drama Black Snake Moan (2006). He also can become something other thanhimself. In 2021, Burnside played the title character in Don Simonton and Travis Mills’ story of Texas Red, a Franklin County, Mississippi juke joint owner who, after defending himself from anattack, was hunted by a mob for a month and eventually caught and killed. Burnside brings abluesman’s haunted gravitas to the role, balanced about life and death and freedom even in themost unspeakable moments. Like his music, this role is ancestral blues work that honors the deadand their legacies to teach and heal new generations.Burnside recalls chopping wood and hauling water as a child, and these days he is in his gardengrowing food and contemplating getting some chickens. This penchant for cultivation andinnovation that has always characterized his music spills over to the land, and especially in thismoment of shift wrought by pandemic life. On a hunting trip to Montana, Burnside connected tonature, as well as his interior life, in a new way. This feeling, one of opening, was a revelation tohim. It underscores his love strivings and, along with his studies of the Dao, even changes howhe structures and writes songs. It is a process of “realizing what was already there,” he says, ofremembering. Love is key, and love is work.Burnside’s turn inward has him considering his place in the family legacy of professional bluesmusicians. He is a proud father of three daughters, ages 22, 18, and 15, all of whom can playdrums and guitar, and is looking forward to more collaborations like the one with the youngestBurnside daughter on “I Be Trying.” Striving for transparency with his children about his ownlife, he lets them know not to be too hard on themselves. He says Big Daddy always took care ofhis family, including his 13 children and several grandchildren and great grandchildren. Despitehis touring schedule, Burnside is deeply grateful for his capacity to support and be present for hisown children. About this, he says, “I have been there, and I will be there.” That’s for certainabout the past, present, and future of the North Mississippi Hill Country blues, too.

Dale Watson and His Lone Stars

He’s spent the past two decades proving there are still powerful tales to be told from the honky-tonk pulpit, and he's brought that message to the faithful.— THE NASHVILLE SCENEDale Watson is a country music maverick, a true outlaw carrying on where Waylon Jennings left off. A member of the Austin Music Hall of Fame, he stands alongside Waylon, Willie Nelson, and George Strait as one of the finest country singers and songwriters from the Lone Star State.Although Dale has made his name as a Texas artist, he actually was born in Alabama. Moving to Houston as a teenager, his musical journey began right out of high school as he started playing clubs and local honky-tonks. In 1988, it led him to move to Los Angeles on the advice of rockabilly singer-guitarist Rosie Flores. He played in the house band at the legendaryPalomino Club in Hollywood for a couple years and recorded a few singles before moving to Nashville to write songs for a publishing company run by Gary Morris (writer of such country/pop hits as “The Wind Beneath My Wings”). Commercial country did not fit the fiercely independent songwriter so Dale relocated to Austin, Texas where he got a record deal and wrote several songs poking fun at the industry side of Nashville, including “Nashville Rash” from his Hightone debut Cheatin’ Heart Attack and “A Real Country Song” from his 1996 follow-up Blessed or Damned.After making three albums with Hightone, Dale released The Trucking Sessions on Koch Records in 1998. Including 14 original driving songs, the album received high praise and caused critics to compare him to chart-topping writer Red Simpson, who was responsible for some of the most iconic trucking tunes in country music.Just two years after this success, Dale’s fiancee died in a car accident. As chronicled in theZalman King documentary Crazy Again (2006), he turned to drugs and alcohol to cope with her loss and nearly died of an overdose. Dale then checked himself into a mental institution and left a year later, releasing his tribute album to her called Every Song I Write Is For You(2001). After recording a few more albums, he decided to take a break from touring and moved to Maryland to be closer to his daughters.Back in Texas and on the road in 2006, Dale has been trucking ever since and is now releasing his 20th album. His debut on indie label Red House Records, The Sun Sessions was recorded at Memphis’ legendary Sun Studios with The Texas Two (bassist Chris Crepps and drummer Mike Bernal) in the stripped-down style of Johnny Cash’s earliest recordings.Like the early country legends of the 1950’s and 1960’s, Dale has a style and sound all his own. Tattooed and always dressed to the nines, he is a true entertainer, mixing humor and pathos into his lively shows. Whether playing with his Texas Two or with his rocking band the Lone Stars, Dale is sure to take us on one hell of a musical ride.

Dale Watson and His Lone Stars

He’s spent the past two decades proving there are still powerful tales to be told from the honky-tonk pulpit, and he's brought that message to the faithful.— THE NASHVILLE SCENEDale Watson is a country music maverick, a true outlaw carrying on where Waylon Jennings left off. A member of the Austin Music Hall of Fame, he stands alongside Waylon, Willie Nelson, and George Strait as one of the finest country singers and songwriters from the Lone Star State.Although Dale has made his name as a Texas artist, he actually was born in Alabama. Moving to Houston as a teenager, his musical journey began right out of high school as he started playing clubs and local honky-tonks. In 1988, it led him to move to Los Angeles on the advice of rockabilly singer-guitarist Rosie Flores. He played in the house band at the legendaryPalomino Club in Hollywood for a couple years and recorded a few singles before moving to Nashville to write songs for a publishing company run by Gary Morris (writer of such country/pop hits as “The Wind Beneath My Wings”). Commercial country did not fit the fiercely independent songwriter so Dale relocated to Austin, Texas where he got a record deal and wrote several songs poking fun at the industry side of Nashville, including “Nashville Rash” from his Hightone debut Cheatin’ Heart Attack and “A Real Country Song” from his 1996 follow-up Blessed or Damned.After making three albums with Hightone, Dale released The Trucking Sessions on Koch Records in 1998. Including 14 original driving songs, the album received high praise and caused critics to compare him to chart-topping writer Red Simpson, who was responsible for some of the most iconic trucking tunes in country music.Just two years after this success, Dale’s fiancee died in a car accident. As chronicled in theZalman King documentary Crazy Again (2006), he turned to drugs and alcohol to cope with her loss and nearly died of an overdose. Dale then checked himself into a mental institution and left a year later, releasing his tribute album to her called Every Song I Write Is For You(2001). After recording a few more albums, he decided to take a break from touring and moved to Maryland to be closer to his daughters.Back in Texas and on the road in 2006, Dale has been trucking ever since and is now releasing his 20th album. His debut on indie label Red House Records, The Sun Sessions was recorded at Memphis’ legendary Sun Studios with The Texas Two (bassist Chris Crepps and drummer Mike Bernal) in the stripped-down style of Johnny Cash’s earliest recordings.Like the early country legends of the 1950’s and 1960’s, Dale has a style and sound all his own. Tattooed and always dressed to the nines, he is a true entertainer, mixing humor and pathos into his lively shows. Whether playing with his Texas Two or with his rocking band the Lone Stars, Dale is sure to take us on one hell of a musical ride.

John R Miller

John R Miller is a true hyphenate artist: singer-songwriter-picker. Every song on his thrilling debut solo album, Depreciated, is lush with intricate wordplay and haunting imagery, as well as being backed by a band that is on fire. One of his biggest long-time fans is roots music favorite Tyler Childers, who says he's "a well-travelled wordsmith mapping out the world he's seen, three chords at a time." Miller is somehow able to transport us to a shadowy honkytonk and get existential all in the same line with his tightly written compositions. Miller's own guitar-playing is on fine display here along with vocals that evoke the white-waters of the Potomac River rumbling below the high ridges of his native Shenandoah Valley.   Depreciated is a collection of eleven gems that take us to his homeplace even while exploring the way we can't go home again, no matter how much we might ache for it. On the album, Miller says he was eager to combine elements of country, folk, blues, and rock to make his own sound. Recently lost heroes like Prine, Walker, and Shaver served as guideposts for the songcrafting but Miller has completely achieved his own sound. The album is almost novelistic in its journey, not only to the complicated relationship Miller has with the Shenandoah Valley but also into the mind of someone going through transitions. "I wrote most of these songs after finding myself single and without a band for the first time in a long while," Miller says. "I stumbled to Nashville and started to figure things out, so a lot of these have the feel of closing a chapter."   Miller grew up in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia near the Potomac River. "There are three or four little towns I know well that make up the region," he says, name-checking places like Martinsburg, Shepherdstown, Hedgesville, and Keyes Gap. "It's a haunted place. In some ways it's frozen in time. So much old stuff has lingered there, and its history is still very present." As much as Miller loves where he's from, he's always had a complicated relationship with home and never could figure out what to do with himself there. "I just wanted to make music, and there's no real infrastructure for that there. We had to travel to play regularly and as teenagers most of our gigs were spent playing in old church halls or Ruritan Clubs." He was raised "kinda sorta Catholic" and although he gave up on that as a teenager, he says "it follows me everywhere, still."   His family was not musical — his father worked odd jobs and was a paramedic before Miller was born, while his mother was a nurse — but he was drawn to music at an early age, which was essential to him since he says school was "an exercise in patience" for him. "Music was the first thing to turn my brain on. I'd sit by the stereo for hours with a blank audio cassette waiting to record songs I liked," he says. "I was into a lot of whatever was on the radio until I was in middle school and started finding out about punk music, which is what I gravitated toward and tried to play through high school." Not long after a short and aimless attempt at college, I was introduced to old time and traditional fiddle music, particularly around West Virginia, and my whole musical world started to open up." Around the same time he discovered John Prine and says the music of Steve Earle sent him "down a rabbit hole." From there he found the 1970s Texas gods like Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver, and Blaze Foley, the swamp pop of Bobby Charles, and the Tulsa Sound of J.J. Cale, who is probably his biggest influence.   As much as the music buoyed him, it also took its toll. "I always prioritized being a touring musician above everything, and my attempts at relationships suffered for it," he says. Miller was also often fighting depression and watching many of his friends "go off the rails on occasion." He says that for a long period he did a lot of self-medicating. "I used to go about it by drinking vodka from morning to night for months on end," he says. "I shouldn't have made it this far. I'm lucky, I think." Ultimately, the music won out and Depreciated is the hard-won result of years of self-education provided by life experiences that included arrests, a drunken knife-throwing incident, relationships both lost and long-term, and learning from the best of the singer-songwriters by listening.   For the creation of the album Miller joined forces with two producers who shared his vision for a country-blues infused record: multiple Grammy nominee Justin Francis, who has worked with everyone from Leon Bridges to Kacey Musgraves, and Adam Meisterhans, a renowned guitarist whom Miller has known since their days as roustabout musicians in West Virginia. They recorded Depreciated in the legendary Studio A of Sound Emporium in Nashville. Miller says the studio's "killer gear and lived-in feeling" enhanced the sound but most importantly it provided plenty of space for the band to be together. "It's important to me to have a relationship with the people I'm working with," Miller says. The crew is a well-oiled machine that is given the opportunity to shine throughout the album: Meisterhans adding guitar along with Miller, Francis bringing in congas and Wurlitzer, Chloe Edmonstone offering a plaintive fiddle, John Looney on mandolin, Jonathan Beam providing bass, Russ Pahl's shimmery pedal steel, John Clay on drums, and Robbie Crowell playing the Wurlie and Hammond B3.   We're driven into Miller's world by steady drums, a thudding bass, and steering electric guitar in "Lookin' Over My Shoulder," a song that perfectly captures going back to your old haunts after a breakup. Right away the many layers — sonic and thematic — are revealed as we continue on into "Borrowed Time," a song that feels like a smoky bar-room but is also Miller at his most profound, pondering about "listening to that eternal engine whine." Its ghostly electric guitar and percussion begs for two-steppers. More variety kicks in with "Faustina," a lovely prayer to the most recent saint that shows Miller in seeker mode. "Shenandoah Shakedown" is a four-minute epic with its river that "speaks in tongues" and a "sky frozen black" but also intimate in its exploration of a relationship crumbling. "Coming Down" is perhaps the thematic heart of the album, asking "Don't you wish you could go back home?" and exploring that question in elegiac tones with stand-out harmonies between Miller and Edmonstone. The breakup is further explored in the deceptively lively "Old Dance Floor," which is answered in the keep-your-head-up anthem of "Motor's Fried" before the intricate character study of a woman who "grew up too fast in the moonlight" in "Back and Forth," which features memorable turns on the fiddle and mandolin. There's the calming instrumental track "What's Left of the Valley" that is an elegy for a region, an ode to searching for used cars called "Half Ton Van," and finally, the melodic mastery of "Fire Dancer," which may be the most complex and psychedelically-influenced track on the album that allows the album to land on a place of self-acceptance, with a narrator ready to go forward stronger and wiser.   The eleven songs, all penned by Miller, provide an album that stands strong as an entity but also provides tight singles that announce a major new voice. Miller possesses a rich voice, a flair for leading a band, and perhaps most of all, a startling ability for songwriting that results in Depreciated being an album that will have widespread appeal. Miller has achieved that most difficult yet most important thing: presenting the universal in the specific, paying attention to the cool beneath the pines along the rivers of the Shenandoah Valley while also pulling the camera back to reveal the longings that unite us all. — Silas House

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