A great artist died recently, and his name was R.L. Burnside. He was a bluesman whose greatness lay in his furious, coarse, whiskey-grained, take-no-prisoners music. A real character with an affable, toothless smile, his health decided to start to bottom out just when things were hitting a commercial peak for him. R.L. Burnside, the Mississippi-Hill-Country Bluesman and ex-con, passed on at a hospital in Memphis on September 1, 2005, at age 78. Most young Blues fans today know R.L. Burnside as "Mr. Wizard," some sort of Bluesy Proto-Punk rocker who innovated the application of remix technology to the blues. These younger fans may not be aware that from the time of his first recording in 1967 until the early 1980s his image was that of a solo acoustic country Bluesman and that he recorded several albums in this format during those years. However, both of these images are somewhat false. Few of his fans today are aware that there was another R.L. Burnside from around the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, a Burnside who had his own band, the Sound Machine, made up of family members and playing some of the toughest contemporary Mississippi-Country-Blues around. This sound, one that he largely created and directed himself, was squeezed between the other images created by outside forces, and unfortunately was seldom heard outside Burnside's home territory in Tate, Panola, Marshall and Lafayette counties, Mississippi, and the occasional festival in Memphis, Tennessee. Actually the best place to hear it was at Burnside 's home near Independence, Mississippi, which on most weekends became an open house, an old-fashioned juke house with up-to-date blues music. R.L. Burnside was really all about live music, as the present album Raw Electric amply demonstrates - since it was for the better part recorded live in his "living! -room-juke-joint" in 1979. But whatever his music was surrounded with, whatever manipulation was done to it after he had recorded it, and whatever type of guitar was thrust into his hands, R.L. Burnside himself was always pretty much the same; giving a high quality Blues performance.