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F R I D A Y
Not all blues guitarists hew to the electrified Chicago-style playing favored by beer commercials. Tonight’s “Mississippi Blues Revue” celebrates three idiosyncratic variations rooted instead in the genre’s rural traditions. Eschewing self-indulgent solos, 69-year-old headliner R.L. Burnside has endeared himself to punk devotees and maintained his original following of juke-joint dancers with raw two-chord drones and rough-voiced delivery. On his forthcoming Fat Possum/Matador co-release, A Ass Pocket of Whiskey, this one-time hill-country sharecropper is backed by some of those punks, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, whose guttural shouting and atonal backing help take Burnside’s hepped-up Hookerist chaos over the top. Joining Burnside will be fellow Mississippi-based Fat Possum artist Paul “Wine” Jones, whose deep-voiced bellow and coarse-textured grooves are nearly as hypnotic as his labelmate’s, and young Corey Harris, who though not from Dixie, lends his elderly-sounding drawl to acoustically picked adaptations of classic ’30s Delta laments. At 9 p.m. at Twist & Shout, 4800 Auburn Ave., Bethesda. $8. (301) 652-3383. (Steve Kiviat)