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Robert Jr. Lockwood: Blues From The Delta |
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Sunday, 29 January 2006 05:32 |
Robert Jr. Lockwood
Blues From The Delta
By John Sinclair
The Mississippi Delta, that fertile strip of silt-rich land stretching south from Memphis to Jackson on the east and Vicksburg on the river, has for a hundred years produced a swift-flowing stream of deep, emotionally-charged music which gradually came to flood the entire world with the sound and feeling of the blues.
Created and developed by self-taught African-American guitarists and singers out of the materials and conditions of slavery, share-cropping, and the Jim Crow south, this rude indigenous musical form struck a universal chord in the human heart everywhere it could be heard.
The blues breathed life into ragtime and made it come out jazz. It crept into the pale corpus of American popular music and added muscle, rhythmic thrust, depth of feeling. The blues gave birth to rock & roll and went on to sire an even larger second generation of rock musicians all the way across the Atlantic Ocean whose Blues-based offerings have transformed popular culture for an entire quarter-century.
The inventive giants of the Delta Blues have long passed into legend: Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Skip James, Son House, Rice Miller (Sonny Boy Williamson), Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Guitar Slim, Elmore James, Magic Sam and a legion of fellow creators who are no longer among us.
Living masters like B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Albert King and Little Milton Campbell are known now far beyond the strict precincts of the Blues ghettos, while lesser-known titans like Sunnyland Slim, Jimmy Rogers, Johnny Shines and David "Honeyboy" Edwards elicit awe and admiration from music lovers of all ages and stations.
One of the greatest surviving Delta originators, Robert Jr. Lockwood, has never received the acclaim accorded to his peers, although his contribution to the development of the modern Blues idiom is immense.
As Robert Palmer insists in his epochal work of scholarship, Deep Blues, Lockwood "was the first Delta guitarist to popularize a jazz-influenced, single-string lead guitar style."
His influence has been felt in the work of the great guitar heroes of the second half of the 20th century, including Muddy Waters and "B.B." King, as well as among their legions of followers in America and England.
Robert Jr. Lockwood was born on a family-owned, 160-acre farm between Aubrey and Marvell, Arkansas (around 25 miles from Helena) on March 27, 1915. His mother and father split up while he was very young, and when Robert reached school age his mother brought him into Helena to live with her and attend the local schools. He started entertaining as a kid dancer on the streets of Helena and learned to play the family's organ at home "before I got on that guitar."
His guitar studies were inspired by the legendary Robert Johnson, the Delta Blues virtuoso who had taken up with Lockwood's mother and spent his time in the Helena area largely as a guest in the Lockwood home.
Young Robert Jr. would pester his mentor for instruction and quickly developed his guitar skills under the supervision of the master, who soon began to allow Robert Jr. to accompany him as second guitarist in Johnson's travels around the area.
Lockwood's development as a guitarist suffered when Robert Johnson abruptly lost his life in the summer of 1938, the victim of poisoning by a juke-joint operator near Three Forks, Mississippi, whose wife had made a play for the popular, good-looking musician.
Robert Jr. was devastated. It took me a year and a half before I could play in public, he told Palmer. Everything I played would remind me of Robert, and whenever I tried to play, I would just come down in tears. That's what really inspired me to start writing my own material."
Lockwood left the Delta briefly for Chicago in 1940, where he recorded several of his new compositions for Bluebird Records: "Take A Little Walk With Me," "Black Spider Blues," "Little Boy Blue" and "That's All Right," all now regarded as classics of modern blues.
But his first stay in the Windy City was a short one. Soon he was back home in the Delta, where he hooked up with harmonica great Rice Miller, better known as Sonny Boy Williamson, whom he had often accompanied as a teen-ager.
"I left Chicago in 1941," Lockwood recalled for Robert Palmer, "after I made those records. When I got back to Helena, I remember I was walkin' on Elm Street when Sonny Boy spotted me. He grabbed me, had me up off the ground, and said, 'You ain't gonna leave here.' And I was stuck with him for about two years."
By this time Lockwood had begun experimenting with the still-new electric guitar, just beginning to be popularized by pioneers like Eddie Durham, Charlie Christian, and Aaron "T-Bone" Walker. He was also leaning away from the crude harmonies and straight-forward melodies of the traditional Delta Blues, opening his ears to the sounds of jazz and searching for ways to bring them into the blues idiom.
"I never really listened to guitar players after Robert Johnson," he told Robert Palmer. "I listened to horns. I'd tune in Count Basie or somebody like that and sit and try to copy the licks the horns were playing.... hat's where all the good electric guitar players get their ideas, from other types of instruments."
In November of 1941 Sonny Boy, always a canny promoter, made a deal with radio station KFFA in Helena, Arkansas which put Williamson and Lockwood on the Delta's musical map in a big way. Starting in December the two Bluesmen would appear on KFFA every weekday at noon to play 15 minutes of their own material and announce the times and locations of their local engagements.
The Interstate Grocery Company, manufacturers of King Biscuit Flour, signed on as sponsors of the show, and Robert Jr. Lockwood became "the first electric guitarist heard over the radio in the Delta, and the first many younger guitarists in the area heard anywhere."
King Biscuit Time opened the radio airwaves to the sound of the blues, and the program quickly became immensely popular throughout the upper Delta. When the King Biscuit Entertainers added James "Peck" Curtis on drums in 1942 and Robert "Dudlow" Taylor on piano soon after, Sonny Boy and Robert Jr. helped create the prototype for the modern blues band which would dominate the scene throughout the 1950s and 60s.
Robert Jr. finally tired of Sonny Boy's erratic and cantankerous ways in 1945 and left the King Biscuit show to begin his own KFFA program under the sponsorship of Mother's Best Flour. He formed a band utilizing piano, bass, drums, trumpet and trombone, mixing in jazz with the blues and novelty numbers featured on the show and reflecting the new trends in rhythm & blues then evolving on the east and west coasts.
Lockwood left Helena again later that year to take a railroad job that would lead him to Wyoming and Nevada, where he ended up playing with an assortment of groups before returning to the Memphis/West Memphis area around 1947 and signing up with pianist Bill "Destruction" Johnson's jump blues band, which featured two saxophones, piano, bass, drums, & Robert Jr. on guitar & vocals.
Johnson got steady work for the group in North Little Rock, Ark., where the band also broadcast over KXLR. It was here that Bill Johnson turned Robert Jr. on to using the guitar pick instead of his favored finger-style approach, saying, "Goddamnit, you gonna use it."
With this move, as Palmer puts it, "Lockwood's transformation into the Delta's first modern lead guitarist was now complete," and before long he would move to Chicago to take his place in the center of the burgeoning urban blues scene for the next 10 years.
Although Robert Jr. never enjoyed the popularity of fellow Delta refugees like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed and Elmore James, all of whom developed substantial followings as a result of their recordings for Chess, VeeJay and Modern records during the 50s, he played a big part behind the scenes as a top studio guitarist and artistic role model.
His tasteful, intelligent, jazz-influenced guitar can be heard on many of the best Blues recordings of the period, including the bulk of the masterworks cut by Sonny Boy and Little Walter for the Chess brothers' Checker Records imprint.
Lockwood left Chicago at the end of 1960, moving with Sonny Boy to Cleveland, Ohio and blues obscurity. When Sonny Boy returned to Chicago a year later, Robert Jr. remained behind and brought his family to join him in Cleveland, where he has resided for the past 30 years almost completely outside the national limelight.
From time to time he can be moved to accept an invitation to perform for modern-day audiences at blues festivals and special events, where his magisterial presence, authoritative manner and timeless, emotionally rich blues playing and singing never fail to delight listeners of every persuasion.
"Ain't too many left," Muddy Waters said to Robert Palmer, "who plays the real deep blues." Robert Jr. Lockwood, dear friends, is one of the few surviving innovators of the deep-down Delta Blues, one of the men who literally started it all with the sound of his single-string electric guitar lines played over the driving pulse of a pounding rhythm section, bringing the blues into the modern era and propelling its sound around the entire world.
Don't miss this rare chance to observe and enjoy one of America's greatest living musical treasures while we're still blessed with his presence here on the planet.
--Detroit
1990
Poet/journalist John Sinclair is the producer & host of Blue Sensations, heard every Saturday night on WDET-FM. He teaches a course in the roots of rock & roll music at Wayne State University and edits City Arts Quarterly for the Detroit Council of the Arts. The quotes cited above are taken from Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (Viking Press,1981) -must reading for all Blues lovers.
(c) 1990, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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