Eddie Burns and John Lee Hooker became fast friends when they met in 1948 and remained so until Hooker passed away recently. Burns backed Hooker on his Sensation single "Burnin' Hell" and "Miss Eloise," and at Chess Records' Chicago Studio in 1965 playing on Hook's classic The Real Folk Blues album.
EDDIE BURNS' PLAINTIVE VOICE, WAILING harmonica, and sure-handed guitar hearken back to the hey-day of Detroit blues a half-century ago. Back then, Burns was a Hastings Street regular, cutting storefront singles and making the rounds of the black-owned clubs and taverns where John Lee Hooker, Baby Boy Warren, Willie D. Warren, Calvin Frazier, and Bobo Jenkins were also making their names playing lean electric blues and boogies. Burns, who like his peers grew up in Mississippi, is now the last of Detroit's postwar legends to still live and play in the Motor City, and his pure, unadorned blues show that the 74-year-old bluesman is, indeed, a lion in winter.
Born in Belzoni, Mississippi, in 1928 and raised around Clarksdale, Webb, and Dublin, Eddie Burns is the eldest brother of Chicago bluesman Jimmy Burns, who accompanies him on some of his recordings. "I guess music was in our blood," Eddie says, "because our father, Albert, was a musician. My dad was a deacon in the Baptist church, and he played piano, guitar....Iike the Charley Patton-type thing. He played all that stuff. He also blew harmonica and sung. He would play for a few of the country dances at his house." Like many Mississippi Delta blues men of the 1930s and '40s, Eddie's first instrument was a homemade one-string fashioned out of a piece of broom wire tacked to a wall and bridged with bottles. "I played it with a little medicine bottle in my [fretting] hand, and then I'd pick it. I was singing Tommy McClennan, just about everything that was out - boogie woogies and stuff. I was good with that wire."
Eddie Burns is now the last of Detroit's postwar legends to still live and play in the Motor City.