time in the Delta, he met bluesmen Robert Lockwood Jr. and Aleck "Rice" Miller. It seems it was around that time that Burnside killed a man, possibly at a craps game, was convicted of murder and incarcerated in Parchman Farm. He would later relate that his boss at the time had arranged to release him after six months, as he needed Burnside's skills as a tractor driver. 1960–1990: Part-time musician He spent the next 45 years, not unlike his early years, in Panola and Tate counties, in northern Mississippi. At first he kept to particularly remote dwellings, working into the 1980s as a sharecropper growing cotton and soybean, as a commercial fisherman on the Tallahatchie River, selling his catch from door to door, and as a truck driver. Later he moved closer to Holly Springs. After coming back to Mississippi, and especially after marrying, he picked more local gigs, playing guitar in juke joints and bars (some under his management), at picnics and at his own open house parties, and at an occasional festival. His career boomed in the last twenty years of his life. His earliest recordings were made in 1967 by George Mitchell, then a graduate student of journalism. Mitchell and his wife went on a 13-day summer trip in Mississippi, which resulted in the first recordings of several country blues artists. He came to Burnside's house near Coldwater on the advice of fife player and maker Othar Turner. Mitchell wrote that Fred McDowell had not told him about Burnside, likely because Burnside posed "big-time competition". Six of the songs, played on an acoustic guitar lent by Mitchell, were released on Arhoolie Records after two years; nine others are on later records. Another album of acoustic material was recorded in 1969 for Adelphi Records, not to be released until thirty years later. Recordings from 1975 had a similar fate. These recordings featured Burnside playing acoustic guitar and singing, and a few tracks had harmonica accompaniment by W.C. Veasey or Ulysse Red Ramsey. Although not recorded, by that time Burnside also played electric guitar. His early repertoire came from hill country and Memphis favorites, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, hits by Howlin' Wolf and Elmore James, and sides by Yank Rachell, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Lonesome Sundown. In 1969 he performed for the first time outside the United States, at a program in Montreal with Lightnin' Hopkins and John Lee