Dick Burnett (musician)

Burnett was born in the area around the head of Elk Springs about seven miles north of Monticello. He remembered little of his farming parents. His father died when he was only four and his mother died when he was 12. Burnett did say that his mother told him how his father would carry him in his arms when he was only four years old, and he would help his dad sing. Burnett's grandparents were of German and English descent and that particular ancestral influence would be instrumental in forming Burnett's musical career. As a teenager, then as a married man with a child, Dick Burnett worked extensively as a wheat thresher, logger, oil driller and oilfield tool fitter. Then in 1907, he sustained a gunshot explosion in his face while fighting off a mugger. Surgeons were unable to save his eyesight, so he resorted to supporting his family and himself by his music. Musicians in Wayne County could elicit small change from audiences drawn from people frequenting or passing through the Monticello Courthouse Square. To earn a proper income, Dick was forced to travel to as many different places as he could reach by train or on foot. At other courthouses, at rail stations, and on street corners, he would perform to attract a crowd. While other street musicians might place a hat on the ground, he accepted contributions in a tin cup tied to his leg. ==Burnett and Rutherford==

Around 1914, Burnett proposed to solve the problem of travelling as a blind man by employing teenaged Leonard Rutherford as sighted companion. Their first trip together was to the nearby Laurel County Fair, then young Leonard spent more and more time with the older man, becoming a permanent companion when his parents died. Burnett was not his only music teacher; he learned from other South Kentucky fiddlers, including the African American Cuje Bertram. Playing with Dick made him a professional musician, though, and from him he learned the old style of playing in unison with the banjo. As his fiddling improved, ranging further afield by horse, bus, and railroad became profitable. Eventually, Burnett bought a car, which Rutherford learned to drive, thus allowing them to travel, in Burnett's words, "from Cincinnati to Chattanooga" playing "every town this side of Nashville". without many authentic Southern performers, but Columbia had some success with groups such as the north Georgia Skillet Lickers, the Virginia Blue Ridge Highballers, and the band of North Carolina's Charlie Poole. Columbia's A&R manager, Frank Walker, was prepared to record more southern musicians, and invited Burnett and Rutherford to a "field recording" session in November at a temporary studio in Atlanta. At this first session, Burnett and Rutherford recorded six sides, which were issued in 1927 as three 78 rpm records, which sold very well. Country-music historian Charles Wolfe considers that the success of these records encouraged Frank Walker to shift Columbia's emphasis from studio singers such as Vernon Dalhart to authentic southern artists. The bestseller of the three with "Lost John" on the A-side sold 37,600 copies in three years, an astonishing figure for that market at the time. Profitable as the records were for Columbia, Dick and Leonard received only $60 per side plus their expenses. Dick Burnett did find a way to profit from their records. He bought many copies wholesale from Columbia and sold them at his performances, just as he had previously sold his ballets and songbooks. Burnett and Rutherford were invited to the Columbia's next Atlanta sessions in April and November 1927. The 10 numbers included Dick's autobiographical "Song of the Orphan Boy", which was not issued, a record with two sides of dance tunes without a vocal (enlivened by Dick's "monkey business" in the form of kazoo and jew's harp imitations), and a version of "Hesitation Blues" backed by Dick's adaptation of the well-known "Danville Girl". Another blues song, "All Night Long", was backed by the ballad "Wilie Moore", which was reissued on the influential 1952 Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, thus introducing Burnett and Rutherford to the new market of the American folk-music revival. The next year, dissatisfied with their payment, they broke from Columbia and recorded with Gennett Records. This involved travel to the northern recording studio, but Gennett's base in Richmond, Indiana, was more accessible from Kentucky than those of other northern record companies. Newly partnered with guitarist Byrd Moore, they recorded five sides in October 1928. One of these was rejected, so a take of "Cumberland Gap" was issued with a reverse recorded by Burnett and Moore with another fiddler, Charles Taylor. Recording details Click on a label to change the sorting. ==References==