The Mississippi Delta bluesman who was taught by Robert Johnson dies aged 91
Robert Lockwood Jr., the Mississippi Delta bluesman who was taught by Robert Johnson and became a mentor to generations of blues musicians, died on Tuesday in Cleveland, where he lived. He was 91.
The cause was respiratory failure, said his wife, Mary Smith Lockwood. Mr. Lockwood had been hospitalized since suffering a brain aneurysm on Nov. 3.
Mr. Lockwood considered himself Johnson’s stepson, since Johnson had a decade-long romance with his mother. For long stretches of his career, he called himself Robert Jr. Lockwood to acknowledge Johnson’s influence.
Mr. Lockwood carried the music of the Mississippi Delta to other emerging blues scenes. He performed on the pioneering blues radio show “King Biscuit Time.” He gave B. B. King guitar lessons. He became a studio musician at Chess Records and played on sessions that defined electric Chicago blues and went on to shape rock ’n’ roll. Although he could play in the old Delta style, he embraced blues from across the United States and drew strongly on the harmonies and phrasing of jazz.
“I never did want to sound like anybody else,” he said in a 2001 interview with the Big Road Blues Web site. “What I play sounds easy, but you just try it. It’s not easy.”
Mr. Lockwood was born on March 27, 1915, in Turkey Scratch, Ark. He learned to play the family pump organ and hoped to become a pianist. But when he was a teenager, Robert Johnson moved in with his mother (who was separated from Robert Lockwood Sr.). Once Mr. Lockwood heard Johnson’s music, he turned to guitar. Other bluesmen worked in guitar duos, but “Robert came along and he was backing himself up without anybody helping him, and sounding good,” Mr. Lockwood recounted in Robert Palmer’s 1981 book, “Deep Blues.”
Johnson was secretive about his technique, but he instructed Robert Jr. in his songs and his guitar style. “Robert wouldn’t show me stuff but once or twice,” Mr. Lockwood said, “but when he’d come back I’d be playing it.”
When Johnson was killed in 1938, Mr. Lockwood was so shaken that he didn’t perform for a year. “Everything I played would remind me of Robert, and whenever I tried to play I would just come down in tears,” he said.
Mr. Lockwood often insisted that he improved on what he learned from Johnson. “On a lot of things, you know, Robert kind of messed the time around, and I played perfect time,” he said.
In 1940, Mr. Lockwood traveled to Chicago, and in 1941 he made his first recordings in nearby Aurora, Ill. But that year he returned to the Delta, where he and Rice Miller (calling himself Sonny Boy Williamson) inaugurated a daily blues radio show, “King Biscuit Time,” on KFFA in Helena, Ark. It made them stars across the South.
Growing up in Mississippi, a young B. B. King heard Mr. Lockwood on the radio and went to him for guitar lessons, and Mr. Lockwood worked with Mr. King in the late 1940s. In interviews, he said that while Mr. King was already a skilled guitarist, his timing was bad.
Mr. Lockwood settled in Chicago in the early 1950s and became a mainstay of the studio bands at Chess Records and other labels. Although he recorded a few singles of his own, he worked primarily as a sideman. He backed Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sunnyland Slim and Little Walter, among many others, and was in the pianist Roosevelt Sykes’s live band. In 1960 he accompanied Muddy Waters’s pianist, Otis Spann, on the duet album “Otis Spann Is the Blues.”
As the 1960s began, Mr. Lockwood moved to Cleveland, where he reigned as the city’s leading bluesman. He resumed his solo recording career in the 1970s with albums for the Delmark and Trix labels, drawing on blues, jump blues and swing styles from across the country. He also recorded live albums in Japan.
Around 1975, his first wife, Annie Roberts Lockwood, gave him a 12-string guitar, and he made it his main instrument, switching from the six-string. He is survived by his second wife and nine children.
Mr. Lockwood reunited with an old Delta partner, Johnny Shines, on albums for Rounder Records as the 1980s began. Their album “Hangin’ On” was named best traditional blues album at the first Blues Music Awards in 1980. Mr. Lockwood’s 2000 album “Delta Crossroads” (Telarc) received the same award. Mr. Lockwood was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1989.
In the ’80s, Mr. Lockwood made albums of Robert Johnson songs, and in the ’90s he started his own label, Lockwood Records, which released “What’s the Score.” In 1995 he received the National Heritage Fellowship Award, America’s most prestigious traditional arts award. He toured the worldwide blues circuit.
Until Nov. 1, Mr. Lockwood worked a weekly club gig at Fat Fish Blue in Cleveland. A street in Cleveland’s night-life area, the Flats, was named for him in 1997. Verve Records released his album “I’ve Got to Find Me a Woman,” on which B. B. King and others sat in, in 1998. It was nominated for a Grammy Award, as was “Delta Crossroads.”
“I just do what I’m doin’,” Mr. Lockwood told Living Blues magazine in 1995. “Express my ideas, explore new ideas.”
By JON PARELES
New York Times
November 25, 2006
