Burnside’s Brand of Blues Brings Down the House

After a shaky start, the House of Blues has evolved into the premier club in Los Angeles for high-profile pop acts, a satisfying showcase for everything from country and rock to hip-hop.

If high-quality blues, ironically, has been the one sound that has been scarce at the House, it’s understandable.

Despite being such an invaluable influence in contemporary pop, the blues has few figures these days with the authority and authenticity to have stood alongside such giants as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf decades ago at the city’s classic blues spot, the Ash Grove.

An exception is R.L. Burnside, a 70-something singer-guitarist who put on such a sensational 90-minute demonstration of his brand of north Mississippi hill country blues on Friday at the House that the show would have had the Ash Grove crowd buzzing for weeks.

Burnside, who shared the bill Friday with Robert Belfour, another Mississippi native who is a faithful and valuable blues practitioner, is a former sharecropper who was in his 40s before he started making records.

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Since then, Burnside, whose mentor was Mississippi Fred McDowell, has made records in acoustic and electric settings, as well as worked in recent years with alt-rocker Jon Spencer and producer Tom Rothrock, who put the music into an electronica setting in the 1998 album “Come on In.”

The result was a wonderfully soulful sound similar to parts of Moby’s “Play” album. One standout track, “It’s Bad You Know,” is a standout on “The Sopranos” soundtrack album.

The bluesman continues to pursue the blues-electronica merger in his latest album, “Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down” on Fat Possum Records/Epitaph. It’s a collection that supports the liner notes’ boast that Burnside is “the last genuine performer of raw Mississippi hill country sound as well as the most cutting-edge crossover artist the blues has had in the past 30 years.”

But Burnside left the electronica in the studio Friday, taking the stage with grandson Cedric Burnside on drums and longtime cohort Kenny Brown on electric guitar and slide guitar. Playing mostly songs that have been part of his repertoire for decades, Burnside sang about hard times without self-pity and of lust without apology.

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From the playful old “Miss Maybelle” (which he revives on the new album) to the gut-level lament of “Bad Luck and Trouble” to the tense “Goin’ Down South,” Burnside sang in a gruff, almost documentary style. He delivers the lines with conviction and force but without the dramatic punctuation often associated with blues singers.

His guitar playing, including lots of slide, is equally straightforward, steering the songs in a steady, unbending course that gives the music the liberation and power of a train howling through the desert night. Indeed, Burnside was so rigid in his chair that you wondered when he would stand up and cut loose.

He finally did just that when he returned for an encore version of Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man” that was so spirited that he punctuated the music with couple of so appropriate hip shakes.

It wasn’t the most graceful way to cap off a remarkable evening in which you heard the glory of the blues in every note, but it was probably the most disarming.