RL Burnside - Jumper On the Line by Alan Lomax (1978 - 2010)

RL Burnside at home in Independence, Mississippi, shot by Alan Lomax

Robert Lee Burnside Born November 23, 1926, in Harmontown, MS; died on September 1, 2005, in Memphis, TN. Sharecropper in Mississippi, in early 1940; he worked in a foundry in Chicago; blues guitar playing small venues in Mississippi and Chicago.

Burnside spent much of his life in the northern part of the state, outside of unofficial borders of the region known as the Delta. A triangular basin between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers.

Burnside dabbled in music when I lived in Chicago, but most of his time was devoted to work in a foundry. He married Alice Mae Taylor in 1949, with whom he had twelve children. --A Mid-2005, Burnside was hospitalized in Memphis, where one of his sons went to a blues club, and died on September 1, 2005 "Actually, I never wanted a career," Johnson said of the label Fat Possum in an interview with Spencer Leigh of The Independent of London. "We just gave one."