Mississippi rising
Next generation Hill Country blues, with an economical groove and a soft centre. By Andrew Perry.
Cedric Burnside ★★★★
I Be Trying SINGLE LOCK. CD/DL/DL
Readers hooked on last month’s Black Keys-compiled MOJO CD Hill Country
Blues will be pleased to hear the Nashville-based duo aren’t the only people keeping alive this specific strain of music from North Mississippi. Cedric Burnside debuted as his grandfather R.L. Burnside’s live drummer aged just 13, soon pounding the skins on R.L.’s wild, mid-’90s international tours opening for post-hardcore revivalists Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Now 42, Cedric is the foremost, twice Grammy-nominated ambassador for a style of blues whose trance-inducing, metre-flouting otherness opposes contemporary pop’s computerised grid systems.
Following collaborative and Cedric Burnside Project outings, his stand-alone debut, 2018’s Benton County Relic, introduced his own lean, sinewy take on the Hill Country idiom. Now, on I Be
Trying, it’s even more tightly coiled, its motivational and cautionary messages immediate and often terrifying, its roots as ancient as the rolling landscape around his native Holly Springs, Mississippi.
Here, Burnside gathers further scions of the region’s greater musical dynasties: most of the recording took place at Memphis’ Royal Studios, birthplace of Hi
Records classics by Al Green and Ann Peebles, with Lawrence ‘Boo’ Mitchell, son of Hi production genius Willie and present-day custodian of Royal. On the record’s two most explosive tracks, Luther Dickinson, son of Memphis legend Jim, adds electrifying slide guitar, his bottleneck intensifying Step In’s cry for salvation.
Burnside busts out intricate picking throughout, and robust beats on six of the 13 tracks, but largely avoids instrumental showboating, in favour of a stark, funky economy where every twang and thump serves the song’s forward motion. Only those blasts of slide, the odd lick of cello, bass and backing singing (from his youngest daughter, Portrika), intrude.
On first listen, this reductive clarity, and a fierce lyrical directness, disarms. Cedric’s craftsmanship is revealed cumulatively, and addictively, thereafter.
The two bluesiest cuts, Hands Off That Girl and the scary Bird Without A Feather, where his Hendrix-y tenor drops to a John Lee Hooker moan, are covers of Junior Kimbrough and Grandpa R.L. respectively. Otherwise, Cedric’s songwriting is best described as extrapolating from the blues, building on their foundation to his own ends. While often espousing their downtrodden worldview (see acoustic-plucking opener The World Can Be So Cold), his is a 21st century perspective, on the title track preaching self-betterment, and in romantic tunes like You Really Love Me and Love You Forever, revealing a vulnerability that would’ve repulsed a 1930s practitioner like Skip James.
But to contemporary sensibilities, Burnside presents as a genuine one-off – a uniquely rooted artist of rare precision and power.