Mississippi Bluesman Kenny Brown at the Southern Comfort Blues Shack @BealeStMusicFes #BSMF13

Mississippi bluesman Kenny Brown played in R. L. Burnside’s last band, and the blues legend used to tell people that he had adopted Kenny. But Brown’s interest in blues had begun long before, when he and his family lived in Nesbit near Mississippi Joe Callicott, a blues musician whose best recordings were made at the 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival at the Overton Park Shell in the last year of his life. With this kind of legacy, Kenny Brown has helped to preserve the Mississippi Hill Country blues tradition, not only as a performer, but also through organizing with his wife the North Mississippi Hill Country Picnics, which are held every year in June in Marshall County, Mississippi and which feature most of the living Hill Country blues musicians, including the heirs of the Burnside and Kimbrough families. Brown’s performance at the Beale Street Music Festival was for some odd reason not included on the schedule, so I was somewhat surprised to see him, but a small crowd stood around the shack enjoying the music.