Cedric Burnside

Cedric Burnside, the grandson of the pioneering bluesman R. L. Burnside, is the inheritor of the grooving hill country blues of his native North Mississippi. He has received a National Heritage Fellowship, the country’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts, and a 2024 Mississippi Governor’s Art Award for Excellence in Music. Burnside has performed and recorded with such diverse musicians as Jimmy Buffett, Bobby Rush, and Widespread Panic. Burnside’s newest album, Hill Country Love, follows his 2021 Grammy-winning album I Be Trying. The record displays rock, R&B, and hip hop elements and a range of sounds and emotions in songs such as the instrumental “Get Funky” and the harsh but true “Toll on Your Life” and “Coming Real to You.” The most familiar composition is Burnside’s version of Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Gotta Move,” a song popularized by the Rolling Stones but often performed by R. L. Burnside at his Holly Springs farm. To Cedric, Hill Country Love is a culmination of a career that’s already seen astonishing accomplishments and only keeps growing.