Obit: Fats Burnside - surgery '99 finally dead

Subject: Obit: Fats Burnside - surgery '99 finally dead
From: GUEST
Date: 02 Sep 05 - 12:11 AM

Another one bites the dust. From BBC. Mississippi bluesman R L Burnside, a guitarist who only found fame late in life, has died, aged 78.

Born in Delta town of Harmontown, he worked most of his life as a sharecropper and fisherman, only taking up music professionally when he was 65.

Mississippi Fred McDowell taught him to play in Chicago in the 1940s, and he performed in local bars for decades.

After signing to Fat Possum records in 1991, he recorded a dozen albums and toured worldwide.

Surgery in 1999 sent him down, down, down.