Review: Cedric Burnside ‘Hill Country Love’
By Jim Hynes
Grammy winning torch bearer of Mississippi Hill Country Blues, Cedric Burnside, pens a personal heartfelt love letter to his roots and home on his new album Hill Country Love. With Burnside on lead vocals, guitar, and baritone guitar, producer Luther Dickinson joins him on bass and slide guitar along with Patrick Williams on harmonica and Artemas LeSueur on drums.
Hill Country Love was recorded not in a studio but in an old building in Ripley, MS, initially designated to be Burnside’s juke joint. The raw and spontaneous sessions unfolded in a rapid two-day session. Once hailed as the best drummer in blues when he thrived on the kit in his grandfather’s band, Burnside’s solo career has embraced both drums and guitar, gradually evolving to just the latter in the past few albums. Hill Country Love follows in a similar vein, perhaps with an even stronger spiritual focus to 2021’s Grammy winning I Be Trying.
Leading off with the stomping “I Know” Burnside and his three collaborators establish the raw, steady thumping sonics that set the stage for what follows. The title track has Burnside expressing his love for the music, counting down the hours to when he can “spread a little bit of Hill Country Love” with potent vocals set to LeSeur’s incessant beats. The Hill Country anthem, his grandfather’s “Shake-em on Down” follows. Those unmistakable Hill Country riffs course through “Juke Joint” (“Let the music, make you stump your feet”). The riffs are as repetitive as are the lyrics in many of these tunes but as we know this music is all about the feel, which is as raw as it gets with Burnside singing about maintaining a stiff lip in the face of life’s tough luck. It’s his faith that enables him to persevere as he hails the lord, asking for forgiveness, and offering praise in “Closer.”
We hear Luther Dickinson’s slide punctuate “Coming Real to You,” a sentiment that goes without saying, given the way Burnside pours out his personal side. In a couple of other tunes Burnside extends the ‘real’ to music, first in “Thank You” and again in “Love You Music,” praising it as the one constant he can count on to lift his spirits. The staccato guitar rips and drum beats of the latter are especially infectious. His baritone guitar imbues the stomping “Toll on They Life,” lyrically reminiscent of the classic “Grinning In Your Face” with these verses, “People will lie in your face/To get things to go they way/Even if they know it’s not nice/But it can a toll on they life.” The foursome turns to Mississippi Fred McDowell’s classic “You Got to Move” with fine harp blowing from Williams.
“Strong” moves away from the Hill Country riffing into a back porch county blues ballad with Dickinson caressing the lyrics with his slide while Burnside holds down the low end on his baritone. The stomping returns with the hell raising “Get Funky” before closing with the traditional Hill Country standard “Poor Black Mattie” with its oft used blues phrase – “Woman I got cherry red, need no heater or fireplace by my bed.” The lyric “Going to Memphis to see that worldly fair” is on the surface confusing as no world fair was ever held in Memphis, but old songs of this nature are passed down through oral traditions and thus lend themselves to multiple interpretations as you’ll learn in this article if you’d like to learn more.
As genuine and gutbucket as it gets, Burnside is a champion of the sub-genre, and nothing will ‘shake-em’ away from his torch bearing stance.
Pre-order ‘Hill Country Love’ Here
“Hill Country Love”
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