How many people get their big break at age 72? Although he had been recorded as early at the 1960's, R. L. Burnside didn't get much serious exposure until the 1990's and even then all of those recordings were firmly rooted in the blues. The Deep Blues documentary helped Burnside and his peers like Junior Kimbrough appear on the radar and attracted the attention of white rock artists like Jon Spencer. So it was a bit of a shock when this pure vein of Mississippi blues got the remix treatment with this album and suddenly Burnside was among the MTV crowd.
I was right on the front lines, doing the college radio gig, when this album hit, and probably like many was thinking "holy $#!t they remixed this old guy?" I hadn't even heard the original material being remixed other than "Come On In" itself, which reappears into completely different forms later in the album (and "Just Like a Woman" appears here too largely unaltered). It wasn't until hearing Burnside on Burnside, the live album released a few years later, that I really saw what was going on here on this album. As far as the studio goes, Burnside never went back to anything traditional, with two more heavily produced albums released before his death in 2005. I can see the points of the purists that Burnside left the blues faith with this album, but all in all, this is always fun to listen to. Burnside's legacy continues on, for good or ill, through the proselytizing of hipster favorites the Black Keys and the ilk (and the movie Black Snake Moan cuts very close too) but I've been more interested to hear what his two latter-day bandmates, grandson Cedric Burnside, and adopted son Kenny Brown, have been up to these days.
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