Dick Burnett (musician)

Richard Daniel (Dick) Burnett (October 8, 1883 – January 23, 1977) was an American folk musician and songwriter from Kentucky.

Burnett was born near Monticello, Kentucky. Blind for most of his life, he was a full-time travelling entertainer. With fiddler Leonard Rutherford he formed a long touring partnership, and a brief recording career in which they cut a number of popular and influential sides with Burnett on banjo or guitar. Both men also sang.

Burnett has been described as "one of the great natural songsters, a man who collected, codified, and transmitted some of our best traditional songs. Dick was also a skilful composer and folk poet of considerable skill; his "Man of Constant Sorrow" remains one of the most evocative country songs."

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 twelve. 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. It is notable that Burnett's grandparents were of German and English descent and that particular ancestral influence would be instrumental in forming Burnett's musical career. At the age of seven, Burnett was playing the dulcimer; at nine he was playing the banjo, and at thirteen he had learned to play the fiddle. Unusually for the time, he also learned the guitar, which was still a novelty in that area.

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 support himself and his family by his music. Almost prophetically, his boss made the following statement to Burnett: "Well, you can still make it; you can make it with your 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.

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