Jimmy Burns Interview

Delta/Chicago blues veteran joins with Chicago jazz giants to come Full Circle and revisit his early hits

Story and Photos: Peter M. Hurley

Photo: Peter Hurley

Jimmy Burns Comes Full Circle

By Peter Hurley

Veteran Bluesman Jimmy Burns slipped into the booth at the Italian restaurant chain, the one with the free breadsticks, where he had arranged to meet for lunch. His beard was fuller and snowier than when last seen, his almond shaped eyes alive and dark with amber-tinged whites behind yellow-lensed specs. He adjusted the Kazakh cap that has become his signature look, a quilted patterned cloth with finely embroidered paisley and medallion shapes. “I’ve got four of these, gifts from when I played in the Kazakhstan region. A shopkeeper asked me to pick out ones I liked. Some people think I’m Muslim because I wear them, but they don’t understand that these are traditionally worn by Kazakhstani men. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Christian Baptist,” he insisted.  At 82, Jimmy Burns is nimble of mind and body, full of wit, charm and grace.

A month earlier, Delmark Records had released Jimmy’s long-waited new CD, Full Circle, with virtuoso Chris Foreman on the Hammond B3, Greg Rockingham on drums, Lee Rothenberg on guitar, Geof Bradfield on tenor sax and Greg Jung on alto sax, who make up the Soul Message Band. Guest musicians include Steve Eisen on baritone and tenor sax, and Typhanie Monique on vocals. He was in a chipper mood about its positive reception. “I was just over at the Delmark office yesterday. They tell me it’s doing well on the charts,” he said quietly. Some of Jimmy’s collector-coveted single releases from 1966 through 1972 were revisited during these recording sessions.

Pre-production conversations with Delmark Records’ CEO Julia Miller and A & R man Elbio Barilari had set the stage. It was a matter of Jimmy’s choosing numbers he wanted to recut. “You know, these songs go way back with me and I’ve often thought about what it would sound like to update a few.” It was Barilari’s idea to pair him with the Soul Message Band to reignite the feeling on the old 45s. “We put a new spin on some tried-and-true material,” said Burns. “Rockingham’s a great drummer and really got into the groove. This is a little different approach from the early discs and I’m glad people are responding so well to it.” Dubbed Northern Soul in the U.K. to distinguish it from the Soul music from Memphis and the other American Southern cities in the ‘60s, the music is much prized by many Brits. “To me it’s just the music I always played up here in Chicago. Northern Soul was happening in Detroit, Philly and N.Y. too.” Burns’s “I Really Love You” was voted among the top 500 Northern Soul discs and an original pressing was valued by collectors for as much as $1,200 at the height of the genre’s popularity. “Not that I get any of that money,” Jimmy lamented. “In fact, I never saw a dime after I recorded it. Went into the studio, laid my vocal down and that’s the last connection I had with the record company at that time.” But now, with this new release, remuneration from sales to a whole new audience is promising.

Well-loved and respected by musicians and fans alike, Jimmy Burns has been a figure of mentorship and inspiration to a younger generation in Chicago for as long as anyone can remember. Though born in Dublin, Mississippi in 1943 and raised on the Hilliard Cotton Plantation where he learned to play both one-string and 12-string guitars, Jimmy has spent his entire adult life in Chicago pursuing a musical career. A brief excerpt from Burns’s mini bio bears reviewing:

“The youngest of eleven children, Burns sang in a church choir and was influenced by the Delta blues he heard on the streets. Burns's father was a sharecropper who performed as a singer at house parties. At the age of 12 he moved with his family to the Windy City in 1956. Recording mostly solo in the 1960s, Burns issued singles for the USA, Minit, Tip Top and Erica labels. He toured the Midwest with his backing group, the Fantastic Epics, and with another outfit called Jimmy Burns and the Gas Company into the early 1970s. After a long hiatus to operate his bbq restaurant Uncle Mickey’s, he later returned to performing in the mid ‘90’s with a residency at Smokedaddy. There, he was “re-discovered” by Delmark founder Bob Koester, commencing an album recording career that continues to this day.”

Jimmy Burns & brother Eddie Burns

“As I tell everyone, my roots go back to hearing the Blues from my Mississippi home. Lightnin’ Hopkins is one of my first influences.” His musical past is rich. “I got started on the diddley bow, but my daddy just called it a guitar. One string stretched up on the porch – he took it off a broom, those were the strongest wires. He taught me how to play it; it just had that Delta sound, the thing that gets in your blood. Then I got my own guitar around 9 or 10 years old. But when we moved to Chicago in my teen years, singing on the street corners was the thing. Since I had come up singing gospel music in the church, it came natural to me to harmonize with other voices – I was 2^nd tenor.“

A group of older cats were impressed enough to take the younger boy into their fold. ‘’The Medallionaires brought me in; they were 19, I was 16. They had records out at the time, some good ones. They played ‘em at sock hops and parties. I never recorded with them, though, but you can still find their Mercury singles on YouTube and in collections.’’

When asked if he’ll be playing with the Soul Message Band to promote Full Circle, Burns gave a philosophical spin. “I pretty much live in the present now; I like where I am at this age,” he confessed. “If they want me to do that, I’ll be more than happy to. Otherwise, I’ll continue to take things day-to-day.” Jimmy’s day-to-day includes holding down an every-other-Wednesday-night spot at Buddy Guy’s Legends with bandmates Anthony Palmer or Carlos Showers on second guitar, E.G. McDaniel on bass and James Carter on drums. He also schedules frequent bookings at Rosa’s Lounge.

But Jimmy’s future is not without new musical ideas. “I’m practicing more guitar lately,” he offered. “Being primarily a singer, a melodic player, I play by ear. I play simply and leave the solos to my other guitarist. But increasingly, I’m thinking of performing on my own because there are so many songs I know and don’t have time to teach the band. So, I’ve been inventing ways that I can accompany myself; searching for chords that will complement my interpretation of a song.” Burns emphasized that he’s known some of these songs for so long. “See, a vocalist knows the material from the inside out, the lyrics have a depth of meaning that sometimes only he or she can explore in a band setting. And my own repertoire includes years of songs that might not resonate with my instrumentalists without a great deal of extra work. You see, band time is so difficult to schedule. My idea is to play solo material drawn from the many sources I’ve been influenced by over the decades: Doo-wop, Gospel, Pop, Folk, you name it - and of course, the Blues.”

Conversation wound through a myriad of recollections.  He recalled some of the Blues clubs that were around back in the day. “I lived in the Rush St. area in the ‘50s when we first moved to Chicago. A friend and I used to shine shoes over near where Blue Chicago is now. The streets were full of burlesque houses back then, but I didn’t know anything about that at that time,’’ he laughed. Another club on the North Side, sparked more memories. “Yeah, the Fickle Pickle in Old Town –Mike Bloomfield played there. He told me he was putting a blues band together and I’d never heard of a white guy doing that. I kind of regret I didn’t take him up on the offer to do some of that with him.”

A later gig at the old Arie Crown Theater precipitated a meeting with a certain member of the British Blues invasion. “The Fantastic Epics and I opened for the Yardbirds,” he said matter-of-factly. “Jeff Beck was interested in the Chicago Blues scene, so we went out to a club afterwards near Lincoln Park. Years later, he came to see me at Buddy Guy’s; he remembered that time we had spent together all those years before.” Concerning another guitar luminary from that era, Burns had his doubts at first listen. “When I heard Jimi Hendrix in the beginning, I wasn’t so sure,” he asserted. “But right before he died, I could hear who his influences were on his double album, Electric Ladyland. I heard John Lee Hooker in “Voodoo Child” and Curtis Mayfield in “Electric Ladyland”. He even covered an old Earl King number, “Come On.” It was with that material I could hear where he was coming from and felt a kinship.” When pointed out that he would have been about the same age as Hendrix, Jimmy underscored it. “We were the same age.” A later fact-check revealed they were born a mere three months apart.

The man knows his history. And geography. And social science. Conversations with Jimmy Burns seamlessly segue from his extensive travels as a performing artist to the socio-political situation of the countries visited. He discussed tribal conflicts between the people of Georgia and native Russians. Soviet leaders were identified by their region of birth. “Khrushchev spent his youth in the Ukraine. Stalin was Georgian,” Burns mentioned. He went on to address the ancient enmity between Greece and Turkey. Blues players from Latvia were compared to those from South America and the accent differences heard in Manchester and London were identified. “Outside of England, the Scottish accent is the hardest English for me to understand. The rest at least make some sense,” he laughed.

A memory for details is anchored by personal circumstance. “I saw David Ruffin perform at the Regal Theater before he joined the Temptations. That would be November 15, 1961. I recall that distinctly because the next day my daughter was born.”

The chat invariably circled back to music. Jimmy’s music, Blues music, world music. “I have this notion that we’re all playing the same things, we just don’t know it,” he mused. “Now, I’m not saying there aren’t distinctions. Even urban blues and Delta Blues are different. Some more modern Blues even uses the major scale, unlike Mississippi Blues. It’s just that I hear commonalities across the globe. I can’t help it; I just hear it. Perhaps the soul of mankind and womenkind is most evident in the expression of music.”

Burns’s tone turned more serious and his eyes became more focused when he delineated the difference between country and city blues. “Delta Blues? It goes deep. It’s deeper—much deeper.” Born on Delta soil, Jimmy Burns draws from this reserve of deepness for his own musical expression. And it’s been his stated goal to combine his native Mississippian Delta Blues with the sounds of Chicago urban Blues ever since he returned to playing the Blues after his long hiatus from performing. “You can’t play what you don’t know, so I go to what I know. Simplicity is the key, tapping into what you feel. My feelings for the original Blues are always with me, deep in me from my childhood.” And deepness is the common denominator in all of Jimmy Burns’s recorded material, Full Circle included.

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Jimmy Burns and Soul Message Band's new album, Full Circle, is available for downloads and streaming on Spotify, Apple, iTunes, Amazon and other platforms. The physical CD can be purchased at his live shows or HERE

About the Author: Peter M. Hurley is a photographer/writer/artist whose interest in Blues began as a young boy upon first hearing the distinctive and haunting Chess Records sound of Bo Diddley. Exposure to Little Walter, Junior Wells and Howlin' Wolf in later years led him to further discover more Blues originators. After many years as an artist, Mr. Hurley shifted his visual focus, bringing his painterly sensibilities to the art of photographing musicians in the throes of performance on Chicago Blues stages. Combining music and visual art goes to the heart of what he had felt growing up with rock 'n roll and then discovering its source: the Blues.