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Cedric Burnside
Take one glance at the iconic tintype photograph which serves as the cover to his new album, Benton County Relic, and you know immediately that Cedric Burnside is the real deal. “When I first saw it, I thought I looked like an outlaw,” he laughs.
The 39-year-old still lives on several acres not far from the Holly Springs, Mississippi, home where he was raised by “Big Daddy,” his grandfather, the late singer/songwriter/guitarist R.L. Burnside whom Cedric famously played with, just as his own father, drummer Calvin Jackson, did. Cedric was literally born to the blues, more specifically, the “rhythmically unorthodox” Hill country variant which emerged from Mississippi, where he grew up surrounded (and influenced) by Junior Kimbrough, Jessie May Hemphill and Otha Turner, as well as delta musicians T-Model Ford and Paul “Wine” Jones.
Grammy-nominated in 2015 for Best Blues Album for the Cedric Burnside Project’s Descendants of Hill Country, as well as the recipient of the Blues Music Awards honor as Drummer of the Year for four consecutive years, Cedric’s latest album offers a showcase for his electric and acoustic guitar, recording 26 tracks in just two days with drummer/slide guitarist Brian Jay in the latter’s Brooklyn home studio in a rush of creativity. It’s his first release for Single Lock Records, the Florence, Alabama label headquartered across the Tennessee River from the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and responsible for critically acclaimed records by John Paul White, Nicole Atkins, Dylan LeBlanc and St. Paul & the Broken Bones.
And while Cedric humbly refers to himself in the album’s title, the music within is anything but ancient, the rich tradition of Hill country blues dragged kicking and screaming into the modern-day with crackling electricity amid its nod to life’s essentials. If the blues has traditionally been about getting through hard times, Benton County Relic offers the kind of deep baring of the soul that enables us to transcend oppression, whether in the 19th century or in the precarious present.
There’s blood on these 12 tracks, from the matter-of-fact recitation of his poverty-stricken childhood without running water, radio or TV in “We Made It” (“I come from nothin’/I done been lower than low/I keep my head straight/No matter how low I go”) and the description of a “Typical Day” (“I wake up in the mornin’/Sun shinin’ on my face/I drink a cup of coffee/I might roll me a J”) to the loss of family endured in “Hard to Stay Cool” and the unrequited passion of “There is So Much.”
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Grammy Nominee The Cedric Burnside Project Drops New Release On February 12 Entitled Backwater Blues
Source:
Scott Thompson Public Relations
Pass the Pick Productions to release new single and video of Grammy nominated The Cedric Burnside Project Release of the Bessie Smith classic BackwaterBlues" Due Out February 12 via Pass The Pick Productions/BFD/The Orchard. Cedric Burnside and Trenton Ayers, who together form The Cedric Burnside Project, are today's living connection to the traditional Mississippi Hill Country Blues genre, and Pass the Pick Productions has captured that spirit and sound with a new video and single of the classic Bessie Smith ...
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Rockwired.com's Jazzed And Blue Presents Music And Exclusive Interviews With Cedric Burnside, Blues Singer-Songwriter Peach, and Jazz Rock Fusion Band Dream Logic
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Rockwired Media LLC
The latest edition of Jazzed and Blue: Profiles in Blues and Jazz is now available for download at Rockwired.com and features music and exclusive interviews with Cedric Burnside, blues singer-songwriter Peach and jazz rock fusion band Dream Logic. Kicking off this latest edition of Jazzed and Blue is a profile on blues artist Cedric Burnside. As the grandson of the late and most definitely great R.L. Burnside, Cedric is carrying on the family legacy with The Cedric Burnside Project and ...
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