See My Jumper Hanging on the Line

Traveling through the North Mississippi hill country in 1967, folklorist George Mitchell set up a portable tape recorder and documented a farmer named R.L. Burnside. Unlike the traditional 12-bar structures of the Delta, Burnside played a mesmerizing, single-chord trance blues style. On "See My Jumper Hanging on the Line," Burnside played a heavily rhythmic, aggressively repetitive acoustic guitar riff, locking into a deep, inescapable groove while singing with a high, pleading voice. The raw field recording captured the deeply African, highly percussive sound of the hill country, a style Burnside would eventually electrify to massive acclaim decades later.