Cedric Burnside announces three Melbourne shows
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10.12.2021

Cedric Burnside announces three Melbourne shows

Cedric Burnside

The grandson and longtime drummer of the late great RL Burnside, Burnside carries the mantle of Mississippi Hill Country blues.

Renowned bluesman Cedric Burnside returns to Australia for the fourth time following his third Grammy nomination (a Best Traditional Blues Album nod for this year’s I Be Trying), taking to a bunch of stages in Victoria and Tasmania, alongside special one-off performances in Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney.

Burnside will kick off the tour in Archie’s Creek in Victoria on March 4 2022 and visit Castlemaine, Melbourne, and Port Fairy for a performance at the Pork Fairy Folk Festival before continuing on to Adelaide for Womadelaide, Launceston, Hobart and Cygnet in Tasmania, before finishing up the tour with shows in Sydney on March 19 and Brisbane on March 20.

What you need to know

  • Renowned bluesman Cedric Burnside returns to Australia
  • The tour kicks off in March 2022 and sees Burnside take to stages in Victoria and Tasmania, alongside special one-off performances in Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney
  • Tickets go on sale on Wednesday, December 15

Keep up with the latest music news, festivals, interviews and reviews here.

For the initiated, Cedric Burnside is blues royalty. The grandson and longtime drummer of the late great RL Burnside, he carries the mantle of Mississippi Hill Country blues – with its commitment to polyrhythmic percussion and its refusal of familiar blues chord progressions – to new audiences around the world. Playing music his whole life, he has performed and recorded with countless musicians, including Junior Kimbrough, Kenny Brown, North Mississippi Allstars, Burnside Exploration, Widespread Panic, Jimmy Buffett, T Model Ford, Bobby Rush, Honey Boy Edwards, Hubert Sumlin, Galactic, Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion among many others.

Predominantly a guitarist in recent times, Burnside plays stripped back and sizzles like a live-wire. Burnside’s music echoes the past, present and future all at once and expands upon the traditional darkness of blues with themes of love and hope.

Burnside’s two previous Grammy-nominated album projects— the 2015 Descendants of Hill Country and 2018’s Benton County Relic—were both capstone statements for a lifetime of musical labour channeling the blues spirit on drums, guitar, and vocals in the North Mississippi Hill Country tradition.

His newest contribution and third Grammy-nominated album is I Be Trying, a 13-track album treatise on life’s challenges, pleasures, and beauty and another unfolding of his influence and voice as an architect of the second generation of Hill Country blues, released earlier this year. “Life can go any kind of way,” Burnside says. With almost 30 years of performing and living blues in him, he would know.

Recorded over three days at Royal Studios in Memphis (the home studio of Al Green and Hi Records in the 60s and 70s), this album is the ultimate statement of purpose for a critically acclaimed artist who has proudly carried the mantle of Mississippi Hill Country blues around the world. Over thirteen tracks, Burnside delivers his bruised but unfettered truth over blistering guitar and deep pocket drums—a sound birthed in his soul but developed and perfected on the road.

But no matter how far he travels, the righteous sound he makes could only come from one place. I Be Trying is the sound of modern Mississippi.

You don’t know soul-stirring until you know Cedric Burnside.

Tour Dates 2022 

March 4 – ARCHIE’S CREEK HOTEL, ARCHIE’S CREEK,  VIC Tickets

March 5 – THEATRE ROYAL, CASTLEMAINE, VIC Tickets

March 6 – WESTWOOD, MELBOURNE, VIC Tickets

March 9 – THE ESPY, MELBOURNE, VIC Tickets

March 10 – NORTHCOTE SOCIAL CLUB, MELBOURNE, VIC Tickets

March 11,12 – PORT FAIRY FOLK FESTIVAL, PORT FAIRY, VIC Tickets

March 14 – WOMADELAIDE, ADELAIDE, SA Tickets

March 16 – ROYAL OAK HOTEL, LAUNCESTON, TAS Tickets

March 17 – REPUBLIC BAR, HOBART, TAS Tickets

March 18 – PORT CYGNET CANNERY, CYGNET, TAS Tickets

March 19 – CITY RECITAL HALL, SYDNEY, NSW Tickets

March 20 – THE ZOO, BRISBANE, QLD Tickets

Tickets go on sale on Wednesday, December 15 at 9am. Check out all the details here