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Jimmy Burns – Back To The Delta
Delmark DG 770 (2003)
Compact Disc

“Chicago’s Jimmy Burns accompanies his soulful, countrified voice with unstoppable rhythms and sure-handed solos. His vibrant, heartfelt blues and boogies echo the Mississippi Delta, where he was born and raised.” —Guitar Player in a review of Leaving Here Walking (Delmark 694)

Back To The Delta reflects those same influences with 13 new original songs including “Juke, Juke, Juked”, “Stranded In Clarksdale”, and “Country Boy In The City.” The title track “Back To The Delta” is about Jimmy’s hometown just up the road from Tutwiler, where the blues was born.

1 Back To The Delta 4:11
2 Stop The Train 4:54
3 Red Hot Mama 3:52
4 Stranded In Clarksdale 4:02
5 I Wanna Kiss You 3:58
6 I Feel Like Going Home 4:33
7 Country Boy In The City 5:07
8 Groovin' With Jimmy 3:29
9 Who's Been Using That Thing 5:24
10 All About My Woman 2:36
11 Nice And Easy 5:25
12 You're My Desire 4:17
13 Someday Baby 4:25
14 How Many More Years 3:49
15 Yonder Come Miss Rosey 3:01
16 Juke Juke Juked 3:37

all songs by Jimmy Burns, except 6 (McKinley Morganfield)
13 ("Sleepy" John Adam Estes) and 14 (Chester Burnett)

Jimmy Burns - vocals, guitar
Roosevelt Purifoy - piano (tracks: 1 to 9, 11 to 16)
Greg Haar - drums (tracks: 1 to 9)
Larry Taylor - drums (tracks: 11 to 16)
Kevin Shanahan - 2nd guitar (tracks: 5, 6, 8, 9)
Nick Charles - bass (tracks: 11 to 16)
Ron Lasken - bass (tracks: 1 to 9)


Jimmy Burns Back To The Delta Delmark DG 770

In 1943, blues singer Jimmy Burns was born on a plantation near Dublin, Mississippi, just a few miles from the Tutwiler train station where, some 40 years earlier, W.C. Handy had encountered a sad-faced and ragged guitarist playing what he described as “the weirdest music I had ever heard.” Like Handy, Jimmy took the blues that he heard around Tutwiler and Clarksdale, combined it with his knowledge of the music of the day, and reworked it into something exciting and new.
By the time Jimmy emerged as a Delmark recording artist in 1996, he had crafted a compelling, original blues style, based on his Delta roots, the sounds of Chicago, rocking rhythms, and soulful R&B, embued with a refreshing enthusiasm missing from so many contemporary recordings.

1. Back To The Delta 4:11
2. Stop The Train 4:54
3. Red Hot Mama 3:52
4. Stranded In Clarksdale 4:02
5. I Wanna Kiss You 3:58
6. I Feel Like Going Home 4:33
7. Country Boy In The City 5:07
8. Groovin' With Jimmy 3:29
9. Who's Been Using That Thing 5:24
10. All About My Woman 2:36
11. Nice And Easy 5:25
12. You're My Desire 4:17
13. Someday Baby 4:25
14. How Many More Years 3:49
15. Yonder Come Miss Rosey 3:01
16. Juke Juke Juked 3:37

Jimmy Burns, vocal, guitar
with:
1-9 Roosevelt Purifoy, piano; Kevin Shanahan, 2nd guitar 5,6,8,9; Ron Lasken, bass; Greg Haar, drums
11-16 Roosevelt Purifoy, piano; Nick Charles, bass; Larry Taylor, drums

All songs by Jimmy Burns, Velrone Publishing, BMI except 6 by McKinley Morganfield, Waterttons, BMI; 13 by John Adam Estes, P.D. and 14 by Chester Burnett, Arc Music Group, BMI.

Send for a free catalog of jazz and blues:
Delmark Records, 4121 N. Rockwell, Chicago, IL 60618 • www.delmark.com
CP 2003 Delmark Records

1. Back To The Delta 4:11
2. Stop The Train 4:54
3. Red Hot Mama 3:52
4. Stranded In Clarksdale 4:02
5. I Wanna Kiss You 3:58
6. I Feel Like Going Home 4:33
7. Country Boy In The City 5:07
8. Groovin' With Jimmy 3:29
9. Who's Been Using That Thing 5:24
10. All About My Woman 2:36
11. Nice And Easy 5:25
12. You're My Desire 4:17
13. Someday Baby 4:25
14. How Many More Years 3:49
15. Yonder Come Miss Rosey 3:01
16. Juke Juke Juked 3:37

Visit Jimmy Burns on the web at www.jimmyburnsband.com

This album is dedicated to all the great delta musicians, past and present, starting with my late father Albert Burns Sr. I listened to him at a very early age and learned about musicians such as Blind Boy and Blind Lemon Jefferson to whom I dedicate "All About My Woman". "Back To The Delta" is a tribute to the delta region of Mississippi where Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker and so many other greats came from. With love and respect, Jimmy Burns.

Album Production and Supervision: Robert G. Koester
CD Production, Recording and Mix Engineer: Steve Wagner
Asssistant Mix Engineer: Dave Katzman
Photos: Jeff Griffin
Design: Al Brandtner

Other Delmark Albums Of Interest:
Jimmy Burns, Night Time Again (730)
Leaving Here Walking (694)
Syl Johnson, Back In The Game (674) with Hi Rhythm
Talkin’ ’Bout Chicago (729)
Magic Sam, West Side Soul (615)
Black Magic (620)
Live (645)
The Magic Sam Legacy (651)
Give Me Time (654)
Rockin’ Wild In Chicago (765)
Little Milton, Live At Westville Prison (681)
Jimmy Johnson, North/South (647)
Johnson’s Whacks (644)
Pepper's Hangout (745)

Call or write for a free catalog of jazz and blues:
Delmark Records • 1-800-684-3480 • 4121 N. Rockwell, Chicago, IL 60618 www.delmark.com
CP 2003 Delmark Records

In 1943, blues singer Jimmy Burns was born on a plantation near Dublin, Mississippi, just a few miles from the Tutwiler train station where, some 40 years earlier, W.C. Handy had encountered a sad-faced and ragged guitarist playing what he described as “the weirdest music I had ever heard.” Like Handy, Jimmy took the blues that he heard around Tutwiler and Clarksdale, combined it with his knowledge of the music of the day, and reworked it into something exciting and new.
The Delta landscape has changed since Jimmy Burns grew up there with his eight brothers and sisters (including Eddie Burns, who went on to become a noted bluesman in Detroit). Gone are the tenant shacks and the sharecroppers who lived in them, rendered obsolete by the mechanization of cotton farming. Tutwiler was a bustling town then, a center of local commerce; now most of the old stores and businesses are closed, and a different kind of traffic drifts in and out: blues tourists, on their pilgrimages to see the site of the train station (itself also long since demolished), “home of the blues” signage and blues murals painted on the building walls on a few years ago, and just outside of town, Sonny Boy Williamson’s grave. But for Jimmy Burns, the Delta has remained a source of inspiration. Before he left in a car full of fellow travelers all heading for new homes in Chicago on Labor Day of 1955, Jimmy had lived with various family members in or near the Delta towns of Dublin, Drew, Clarksdale, Marks, and Shelby, as well as on the Lake Place near the Coahoma/Quitman County line.
In Chicago, blues was hot, but among the teenagers, so was doo-**** music, and Jimmy – always one to keep up with the times – hooked up with a vocal group after first singing in a gospel quartet. As the R&B scene turned to soul music in the ‘60s, so did Jimmy Burns, and he waxed a few singles as a soul singer. (One of those, I Really Love You, is a collector’s classic, ranked in Kev Roberts’ Northern Soul Top 500 book.) Even in later years when he wasn’t so active on the performing scene, Jimmy remained a keen observer of musical trends and audiences. By making his living as a carpenter at Michael Reese Hospital, he didn’t have to scuffle in music and compete for nightclub gigs to survive. In fact, he feels he was able to better able to enjoy the music as a result when he did go out: “A lot of the guys, when I used to go around, they’d hate to see me comin’ but they didn’t realize I was makin’ more money than them. I mean like I wasn’t there for the money, I was there for the music, and the love of the music. Do you know even blues now, I mean if you’re thinkin’ about gettin’ rich off it, you’d better forget it. And so it’s strictly for the love of the music.”
In 1977, Living Blues Magazine helped organize a concert in Berlin by “The New Generation of Chicago Blues,” a group of young bluesmen who had just been profiled in the magazine as proof that blues still had a future. An unexpected offshoot of this youth movement was the inspiration it gave a middle-aged Jimmy Burns to re-embrace the blues. (Two of those “New Generation” artists, by the way, now have albums on Delmark: Lurrie Bell and Johnny B. Moore.) Jimmy explains: “What made me make a transition back into blues was back in ’78, my nephew Larry Taylor had just got back. Larry, Johnny B. Moore, Vernon and Joe Harrington, a boy named James Kinds. And Billy Branch and them. And I’m out there listenin’ to these guys play the blues. ‘Cause I mean I already had played the guitar—only then, I wasn’t that active with the guitar. I had put it down. And I told my wife, ‘Damn, I’m gonna put me together a blues band!’ So they were my influences, Billy and Lurrie. That’s what made me get off into the blues.”
Still a full-time carpenter who had also started his own barbecue business, Jimmy pursued his new blues mission to little public fanfare for years. By the time he reemerged as a Delmark recording artist in 1996, he had crafted a compelling, original blues style, based on his Delta roots, the sounds of Chicago, rocking rhythms, and soulful R&B, embued with a refreshing enthusiasm missing from so many contemporary recordings.
“My whole thing when I got off into the blues was to redefine the blues,” says Jimmy. “Which I think I succeeded in doin’ and still doin’. I try to make it a habit to not copy. I try to be as original as possible. I just think my music moves more. I just understand trends. Really, that’s what you’re dealin’ with, you know, trends -- the way things movin’.
While Jimmy still wants to rework and redefine the blues, when it came time to do his third CD for Delmark, he wanted to move forward by reaching back to his roots: “My biggest complaint is like too many guys have left the Delta. I mean you ain’t gotta be 50 years or 70-80 years back there. Like get it and then take it to another level. Move on, you know. . . . Now, with this last CD it wasn’t about transforming anything. It was just about the Delta music. The stuff that I remember, naturally with Jimmy Burns’ twist on it. I just said, ‘I want to go back down there where the whole thing started.’ You know: go back home, and I did. I even went down there and shot the cover down there.
“That’s where I first heard John Lee Hooker when I was about five years old. We used to go to town on Saturday and they was playin’ that on the jukebox and then they were playin’ Muddy, Can’t Be Satisfied and Late in the Evenin’ (I Feel Like Going Home) and all that stuff.”
Jimmy’s memories of the Delta have stayed with him: “I remember the cottonfields. All of the houses. And I remember just country life, and the cows. I remember the food, the fresh milk and the biscuits, and the country butter just had a special taste to me. And then I can remember workin’ in the field even as a little boy. You would have to go out there and help to pick and even chop. In the early ‘50s when me and my brothers were going to school, I didn’t realize at the time that they had two school seasons, you know: one for the black kids and one for the white kids. The black kids had a shorter season, and the white kids had a longer season. And I can remember goin’ to funerals down there at the church. Cause my father and my brother are buried there.
“My father played guitar and piano and harmonica. He would play like different little parties and fish fries and stuff. He was never considered a professional musician but he coulda damn well been. I mean he was that good. His name was Albert Burns. I’m gon’ write about him. ‘Cause I’m still inspired by some of the stuff, you know, that sound. I‘ve never forgotten that sound. And that tune All About My Woman, that lick I got from Blind Lemon. My father used to play his music. That was actually some of the first chords that I can remember my father playin’.
“Well, you had the radio and you didn’t have electricity. You had to use them old big batteries. But you couldn’t always afford that. We heard music that way. Smokey Hogg was always one of my favorites, and I still love him today. My favorite guy -- I would still have to say, Delta blues or country blues -- Lightnin’ Hopkins – or should I say Muddy Waters? Because I never get tired of listenin’ to their music. I just love those guys. And to me the greatest blues singer that ever lived was the Howlin’ Wolf. I mean he was so expressive. To me, he was ahead of the other blues singers.
“I can remember visitin’ Clarksdale and I found a indoors toilet a oddity, ‘cause I had never seen nothin’ like that. When my father took us to the dentist in Clarksdale, the McWilliams Building, well, to me and my brothers, I guess we considered it a skyscraper. At one time that was the biggest building in the world to me. On DeSoto and 4th Street, used to be a house there. Me and my brother used to do work for the lady, and I can remember you had to go to the back door and knock. You couldn’t go in the front door. And Mr. Abe [of Abe’s Bar-BQ, a popular Clarksdale restaurant and blues tourist stop even today], me and my brother used to clean that barbecue pit for Mr. Abe. But then you couldn’t go in there. You know, if you ordered somethin’, you had to order it at the door and they bring it.”
His tales of life in the Delta are based on fact, but, he cautions, aren’t necessarily autobiographical. Despite the topic of Stranded in Clarksdale, for instance, Jimmy was never in jail there: “It’s just a fictitious story,” he says. “You know, out of all the stuff I wrote, this is the first time I’ve actually like told stories. Other than about the man and a woman.”
When it came time to join the rest of his family who had already moved to Chicago, Jimmy recalls, “I couldn’t wait to get here. I had heard so much about Chicago and they considered this the land of milk and honey. Yeah, I mean I fell right in with it, and I’m gonna tell you now, I still think Chicago is the greatest city in the world. I mean I love the hell out of Chicago.”
It’s been nearly 50 years since Jimmy Burns moved to the Windy City, but he makes it a point to continue going back to the Delta: “I go back every year. Just about. I just go to keep in touch with the land and not forgettin’ where I came from, just a reminder. You know, that you came from a long ways and you’re blessed. Count your blessings.”

 Jim O’Neal
 Founding Editor, Living Blues
 www.bluesoterica.com