Robert Lockwood junior

Robert Lockwood Jr in 1982

Robert Lockwood Junior (born March 27, 1915 in Helena , Arkansas , † November 21, 2006 in Cleveland , Ohio ) was an American blues guitarist and singer.

biography

Robert Lockwood Jr. began playing the organ in his father's church when he was eight. After his parents divorced, his mother lived with the blues legend Robert Johnson for ten years . Lockwood learned to play the guitar from him. From the age of 15, Lockwood performed with Sonny Boy Williamson for a few years . The two worked together again and again later. Lockwood completely absorbed the style of Johnson, in which he made his first recordings in 1941. Some of them can be heard on the anthologies Lonesome road blues (USA: Yazoo 1038) and Windy city blues (USA: Nighthawk 101) . After Lockwood longer time in Memphis lived and in Arkansas and Sonny Boy Williamson for the radio show " King Biscuit Time had worked", he went to Chicago , where he worked as a guitarist with many shots in JOB , Mercury Records and especially at Chess Records participated . Lockwood broke away from Johnson's style and developed his own, complex, jazz-oriented guitar game. As a guitarist, he accompanied musicians such as Sonny Boy Williamson, Otis Spann and Little Walter , with whom Lockwood worked for a long time.

Lockwood produced few of his own recordings until 1971. Worth mentioning is the very nice album Otis Spann is the blues (D: CrossCut 1003) with Otis Spann at the piano. In 1961 Lockwood moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he lived until his death. There he had his own band from 1970, with which he took part in many concerts and festivals and recorded some albums, e. B. Steady rolling man (USA: Delmark 630) ; Blues live in Japan (USA: Advent 2806) , where he was accompanied by the Aces and he presented himself as a musician from the Delta. He developed his full talent on the two albums Contrasts (USA: Trix 3307) and Does Twelve (USA: Trix 3317) . He later teamed up with Johnny Shines , another "student" of Johnson, with whom he recorded an album in 1980: Hangin 'on (USA: Rounder 2023) . In 1989 he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame . In the nineties it became quieter around him. Robert Lockwood Jr. received a Grammy nomination for I Got To Find Me A Woman in 1998 and Delta Crossroads in 2000 . In 2005 he was awarded the Living Blues Award for best male blues artist. He died of respiratory failure on November 21, 2006 at the University Hospitals Case Medical Center, Cleveland, Ohio .

Discography

• 1941 Recording of four singles under his own name for Bluebird
• 1970 Steady Rollin 'Man
• 1974 Contrasts
• 1975 Blues Live in Japan
• 1977 Does 12
• 1979 Hangin 'On
• 1980 Mr. Blues Is Back to Stay
• 1982 Plays Robert and Robert
• 1991 What's the Score?
• 1998 I Got to Find Me a Woman
• 1999 Blues Live, Vol. 2
• 2000 Delta Crossroads
• 2002 Ramblin 'On My Mind
• 2003 Swings in Tokyo: Live at the Park Tower Blues Festival
• 2003 Complete Trix Recordings
• 2004 The Legend Live
• 2009 Steady Rollin 'Man

literature

• Gerard Herzhaft: Nouvelle Encyclopédie du Blues . Jacques Grancher, Paris 1984.

Web links

Robert Lockwood Jr.'s homepage ( January 6, 2014 memento in the Internet Archive )