It has become customary with the passing of every great Mississippi bluesman to note the loosening of the last few remaining ties with the segregated, sharecropping world of the pre-Second World War Delta and the potent music produced by its unique combination of social, cultural, economic and geographical circumstances. Yet the death of Robert Lockwood Jr brings the list of surviving original Delta blues musicians almost to a close, with only Homesick James, Pinetop Perkins and David “Honeyboy” Edwards outliving him.
Lockwood, who gave early guitar lessons to B. B. King, learnt his blues from the most legendary Delta singer of them all, Robert Johnson, who although only four years older, was his stepfather. Johnson died in 1938 but Lockwood was still playing the blues with the same raw passion he imbibed from the older man seven decades later, making his last appearance in Britain in July at the Maryport Blues Festival in Cumbria on a bill that included James and Edwards, presenting more than 275 years of blues experience between them.
Robert Lockwood was born in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, a farming hamlet 25 miles west of Helena. Within a 100-mile radius, Edwards, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Memphis Slim and Johnny Shines were all born in the same year.
Lockwood’s first music lessons were on the family pump organ, but when Robert Johnson moved in with his widowed mother, Estella Coleman, in the late 1920s, he learnt to play guitar. By the age of 15 Lockwood was playing juke joints and street corners, sometimes with Johnson but also with Shines and Sonny Boy “Rice Miller” Williamson. His first recordings, made for Bluebird three years later in Chicago, emphasised his debt to Johnson’s influence on sides such as Take a Little Walk with Me and Little Boy Blue.
In 1941 Lockwood became one of the resident musicians, with Williamson, on the King Biscuit Hour, a radio show broadcast from Helena that had a profound impact on the next generation of southern bluesmen, including B. B. King. By the early 1950s he had settled in Chicago, and became a session man for Chess Records and other labels, backing the likes of Little Walter, Roosevelt Sykes, Sunnyland Slim and Eddie Boyd, in a guitar style that still bore the country hallmarks of Johnson’s tuition but which he also adapted to the more sophisticated urban styles popular in the city. By the time Lockwood cut a series of guitar/piano duets with Otis Spann in 1960, little of Johnson’s sound remained as his playing moved in a smoother and jazzier direction, influenced by the likes of Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker.
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He moved to Cleveland in 1961 and spent the decade living quietly and playing in local clubs. He didn’t re-emerge as a recording artist until the early 1970s with the album Steady Rollin’ Man, on which he was backed by Louis and Dave Myers and Fred Below, who as the Aces had once been Little Walter’s backing band.
In the early 1980s he teamed up with Shines, another long-time friend and former Robert Johnson associate, to record three albums for Rounder. He also recorded for the French label Black and Blue and was persuaded to exploit his connection with Johnson on the 1982 album Robert Lockwood Jr Plays Robert and Robert, which mixed several of his own songs with Johnson covers played on a 12-string guitar.
Although he continued to perform at blues festivals, there were no further releases until 1998, when the comeback album I’ve Got to Find Myself a Woman appeared on the Verve label. It included a guest appearance by B. B. King and was followed in 2000 by the album Delta Crossroads.
In 1995 he was recognised with a National Heritage Fellowship Award, presented by Hillary Clinton, and he had a street in Cleveland named after him. Until a few weeks before he died, he continued to perform with an eight-piece band every Wednesday night at the city’s Fat Fish Blues club.
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Robert Lockwood Jr, blues musician, was born on March 27, 1915. He died on November 21, 2006, aged 91