Despite regular urging from friends and area music lovers, I didn’t make it to the
Roasting Room Lounge & Listening Room until a couple weeks ago. What prompted me to finally head to Bluffton to check out the space?
Cedric Burnside. The Cedric Burnside Project includes Burnside’s longtime collaborator Trenton Ayers. Based in Holly Springs, the two men play traditional North Mississippi blues — Burnside is the grandson of the legendary R.L. Burnside — but the sound sprawls across the decades into funk.
The Roasting Room’s second floor bourbon bar made a perfect venue for this sometimes-intimate, sometimes-raucous show, which was part of the Blues411.com Concert Series. The show began with Burnside solo, singing and playing guitar, and then he was joined by Ayers. With such great energy in the room, the pair seemed reluctant to take a break, so the first set alone was well over an hour. No one left between sets either — in fact, the crowd seemed to get even bigger. What a great night of music from electrifying (and very photogenic) pair of musicians.
The first shot here is from Jamie Smith Arkins, one of a number of other Savannahians who made the trip for this extraordinary show.
