Blues Singer R.L. Burnside Dies; Music Reflected Own Hard Life

"I didn't mean to kill nobody," he said in 2003. "I just meant to shoot the son of a [expletive] in the head and two times in the chest. Him dying was between him and the Lord."

After he was released, Mr. Burnside played music when he wasn't working as a farm laborer and fisherman to support his 12 children. Several of his sons, grandsons and in-laws played in his band.

He once said he would need a computer to count all his grandchildren and, in recent years, put a padlock on his refrigerator to keep the people wandering through his trailer home from taking food intended for his diabetic wife.

"He has such a raw spirit, and it's a spirit that's kept him alive through a lot of corrupt places, like prison," Matthew Johnson, founder of Fat Possum Records, for which Mr. Burnside recorded, told the Los Angeles Times in 2001. "His music can only come from the kind of life that he's led."

Alan Lomax recorded Mr. Burnside in 1959 for the folk and blues collection of the Library of Congress, and he made a few albums in the 1960s and 1970s. But it wasn't until blues historian Robert Palmer featured him in "Deep Blues" that his fame began to spread.

Amused by his sudden following, particularly among young white fans, Mr. Burnside continued to live by his wits and whims.

He often wouldn't show up at the studio to record his own albums and demanded his pay in cash.

Once, when walking past an open microphone at a club, he was heard to mutter to himself, "The devil -- that's who I've been serving."

Survivors include his wife of 56 years, Alice Mae Burnside, and 12 children.