songwriter, and guitarist. He played music for much of his life but received little recognition before the early 1990s. In the latter half of decade, Burnside recorded and toured with Jon Spencer, garnering crossover appeal and introducing his music to a new fan base in thepunk and garage rock scene.


He spent the next 45 years, not unlike his early years, in Panola and Tate counties, in northern Mississippi. At first he kept to particularly remote dwellings, working into the 1980s as a sharecropper growing cotton and soybean, as a commercial fisherman on the Tallahatchie River, selling his catch from door to door, and as a truck driver. Later he moved closer to Holly Springs. After coming back to Mississippi, and especially after marrying,he picked more local gigs, playing guitar injuke joints and bars some under his management),at picnics and at his own open house parties, and at an occasional festival. His career boomed in the last twenty years of his life.