The blues is music for all time—past, present, and future—and few artists simultaneously exemplify those multiple temporal moments of the genre like North Mississippi’s Cedric Burnside.

The Grammy-winning, Mississippi Hill Country blues guitarist and singer/songwriter was born in the blues as much as he was in funk, rock, soul, and hip-hop. These latter sensibilities are reflected across his work, as he drives Hill Country blues into grooves that lend themselves readily to an urgent, modern moment. Burnside contains within him the legacy and future of the region’s prescient sound stories. At once African and American and southern and Mississippian, these stories tell about love, hurt, connection, and redemption in the South. His latest contribution to this tradition, I Be Trying, won the 2022 Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. The 13-song collection charts a course through dark times and towards the resonant love waiting to be found on the other side. “Life can go any kind of way,” Burnside says. With almost 30 years of performing and living blues in him, he would know.