On Sunday nights in the nineties, locals from northern Mississippi’s hills and hollers, and sometimes a handful of adventurous tourists, gathered at Junior’s, an hour’s drive from Memphis in one of the South’s most unforgivingly rural landscapes. Inside, the revelers sipped moonshine from glass jars and danced as trancelike jams led by the now-legendary bluesmen Junior Kimbrough and R. L. Burnside stretched into the early morning hours. ¶ Forty-four-year-old Cedric Burnside, a grandson of R. L.’s and now a Grammy-winning artist, grew up in this world. “By age ten, I was [playing] at the juke joint,” he says, “and I was about thirteen years old when I joined [R. L.’s] band full-time.” ¶ While he’s known today for his own interpretations of the Hill Country blues style his grandfather helped create, at the time Cedric played drums behind R. (2015), (2018), and (2021)—he has evolved into the most potent contemporary practitioner of the tradition. We caught up with Burnside to talk about growing up in the jukes, picking up the guitar, and the inspirations behind his own soulful take on Hill Country blues.
