Cedric Burnside – W Hotel – June 21 & 22
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“Cedric Burnside carries the mantle — the joy and the burdens and the history of the North Mississippi hill country blues, a style like no other in Southern music.” – The Bitter Southerner
Grammy-nominated Blues musician Cedric Burnside remembers his roots— NPR Weekend Edition
The blues is music for all epochs, and Hill Country blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter Cedric Burnside is widely heralded as an exemplar of the genre’s timeless prescience about American life. Spanning three decades, Burnside’s work holds the legacy and future of North Mississippi’s sound stories, telling ancestral blues stories that honor the region’s heritage and ensure its future. These stories, monumental and everyday, at once African and American and Southern and Mississippian, document the human condition and the Black American experience, from the genre’s birthplace.
Born in Memphis in 1978 and raised in North Mississippi’s Marshall and Benton Counties, Burnside’s blues inheritance is multigenerational. The grandson of Hill Country blues luminary R.L. Burnside, Cedric spent his youth carefully studying his blues elder, playing alongside him at house gatherings and juke joint gigs. By age 13, he was out on the road accompanying his grandfather’s band on drums and coming of age as an artist in a distinct blues tradition. Before he was an adult, Burnside had made his own place as a collaborator and innovator in the tradition, traveling around North America representing the Hill Country blues, and the sound’s distinctiveness from its Delta, Texas, Piedmont, and Chicago counterparts.
As an architect of the second generation of the Hill Country blues, Burnside has spent his career tending to the legacy of the genre by expanding the next, electric generation of the North Mississippi sound.
Burnside is a recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship, the country’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. In 2022 he won the GRAMMY for Best Traditional Blues Album for I Be Trying. Cedric’s new album Hill Country Love will be out on April 5, 2024. Take a listen now:ss