The Princess Theatre

Thursday, May 2, 2024, GRAMMY-Winner and 2023 NEA National Heritage Fellow, Cedric Burnside brings his Mississippi Delta Blues to the Princess Theatre. The North Mississippi Hill Country blues guitarist and singer-songwriter contains within his artistry the legacy and future of the region’s sonic stories. At once African and American, Southern and Mississippian, these stories tell of love, hurt, connection and redemption and Burnside’s newest contribution to this tradition: I Be Trying is a 13-track treatise on how “Life Can Go Any Kind of Way.” Burnside’s blues inheritance, North Mississippi Hill Country Blues, is distinct from Delta or Texas counterparts in its commitment to polyrhythmic percussion and refusal of familiar blues chord progressions. Often in Burnside’s care, this leads to extended rifts that become sentences, pleas, or exclamations rendering his guitar like its West African antecedent, the talking drum. Burnside’s two Grammy-nominated albums: Descendants of Hill Country (2015) and Benton County Relic (2018) were capstone statements for a lifetime of musical labor channeling the blues spirit on drums, guitar, and vocals in the North Mississippi Hill Country tradition. I Be Trying, his second release with Alabama’s Single Lock Records, pushes just beyond his long-time roles as Hill Country blues collaborator, torchbearer, and innovator into the artist’s inner life. The album responds to grief, loss of family members and interpersonal hurts. Burnside said he is trying his best to implement love in his life and relationships with others. The artist’s turn inward has him considering his place in the family legacy of professional blues musicians (Cedric is the son of electric blues guitarist, drummer, singer-songwriter Calvin Jackson and grandson of blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist R.L. Burnside). Burnside said he is looking forward to more collaborations with, like the one with his youngest daughter, on I Be Trying. Carrying on the legacy, and blazing a creative path forward.