R.L. Burnside, born in 1926 in the Blackwater Creek area of Harmontown in Lafayette County, became a pivotal figure in Hill Country blues history and, in the 1990s, North Mississippi's most celebrated blues artist as alternative rock audiences in the United States and overseas joined traditional blues fans in embracing his exuberant style. Influenced locally by Mississippi Fred McDowell and Ranie Burnette, he also played songs by John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Muddy Waters, whom he knew from a few years living in Chicago while working at a foundry and a glass company. For most of his life he lived in Lafayette, Panola, Tate, and Marshall counties or in Memphis, supporting his large family as a sharecropper, tractor and combine driver, and fisherman, sometimes supplemented by moonshine sales and earnings from juke joints, and he and his wife Alice, married more than 50 years, at times operated a juke in their house. Long a local juke joint favorite, he was the patriarch of a notable musical family that included his sons Duwayne, Garry, Daniel, Joseph, Dexter, and R.L. Jr. and grandsons Cedric, Cody, and Kent. After his first recordings for folklorist George Mitchell in 1967 were released by Arhoolie Records, he traveled occasionally as a solo act and recorded for small European and American companies while maintaining his rugged work schedule at home. As his sons grew older, he formed a family band, the Sound Machine, and also performed as a duo with harmonica player Jon Beckley Morris. Only late in life did music become his main source of income, after he began recording and touring under the management of Fat Possum Records of Oxford; he appeared in the 1992 film Deep Blues, gained a wider crossover following through recordings that began to incorporate punk rock and hip hop arrangements, made an album with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and reached broader audiences through the use of his music on The Sopranos. Despite the modern technology used on some later sessions, he performed in person as he always had, whether at Junior Kimbrough's juke joint or on tour, often with his protégé Kenny Brown and grandson Cedric Burnside. His jovial presence and jokes were part of his appeal, but illness forced a reluctant retirement in his final years, and he died at St. Francis Hospital in Memphis on September 1, 2005. Burnside's style became a worldwide phenomenon as young blues and rock bands sought to capture the Burnside groove, his sons, grandsons, and followers carried on his music, and he was posthumously inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2014.