CEDRIC BURNSIDE MOST definitely doesn’t seem like he has the blues. Sitting in his car on the side of a rural north Mississippi blacktop, the third-generation blues man is all smiles when he logs onto our call on a recent Sun day afternoon. His joy could be the afterglow of the church service he
just left. It could be excitement for Hill Country Love, the album he’s getting ready to release, or the tour he’s about to start, which will take him across the continent and to Europe at least through the summer. It might have something to do with bringing home the Hill Country’s first Grammy award for his last album, 2021’s I Be Trying, and the doors it opened for him.
Truth be told, though, he’s always been this way. So was his grandfather, the late blues legend R.L. Burnside — Cedric affectionately calls him his “big daddy” — from whom he absorbed the Mississippi Hill Country blues style at Sunday afternoon jams throughout the Eighties and Nineties.
“I used to be that one grandchild sitting there, and it was like I was hypnotized by that music as they were playing,” Cedric tells us. “As I got more drawn to that music, I couldn’t wait till they did a house party. I was mesmerized.”
R.L. entrusted him with the backbone of his music at a young age. When Cedric was just 13, he played his first show away from home in Toronto, supporting his grandfather on drums, his first instrument. He didn’t pick up guitar until 2003, when he was 25 — but R.L.’s death in 2005 really spurred him to start writing his own Hill Country legacy.
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