R.L. Burnside - Raw Electric 1979-1980 | 2001
Genre: Blues | 57:49 | mp3 320 | 165,4 MB
10 page booklet included | 600 dpi | 33,1 MB
R.L. BurnsideMost young blues fans today know him as
Mr. Wizard,
some sort of
bluesy proto-punk who is innovating of remix technology to the blues.
These younger fans may not be aware that from the time of his first recording in 1967 until the early 1980s his image was that of solo country acoustic bluesman and that he recorded several albums in this format during those years.
Both of these images were somewhat false, the older one because it was anachronistic and the current one because it involves extensive outside manipulation of his sound. Burnside had switched to electric guitar long before 1967.
The only problem was that he seldom had a guitar and an amplifier that worked.
Sometimes he didn't even have them at all. When George Mitchell recorded him that year,
he let Burnside use his acoustic guitar, whitch was all Mitchell carried with him that year,
on his field recording expedition. The results were spectacular, but probably more a reflection of the Burnside sound of fifteen or twenty years earlier. They established the image, however, of
R.L. Burnside was one of the
last generation of acoustic Mississippi guitar bluesman……
But whatever his music is surrounded with, whatever manipulation is done to it after he has recorded it, and whatever type of guitar is put in his hands, R.L Burnside himself is always pretty much the same and will give a high quality blues performance.
Few of his fans today are aware that there was another Burnside from around the mid 1970s to the early 1990s,
a Burnside that had his own Band, the
Sound Machine, made up of family members, and playing some of the toughest contemporary Mississippi country blues around.
This album,
Raw Electric with his band, the
Sound Machine, was recorded from 1979 to 1980.