A legion of music fans loved Robert Lockwood, Jr. for the delicate sounds he coaxed out of his 12-string guitar. But, there were also those who found him to be an ornery egotist. Cleveland City Councilman and blues fan Jay Westbrook says, you had to understand where the man was coming from.
Jay Westbrook: Frequently, his bluntness was taken as arrogance or a kind of self-centered point of view. I think that Robert was in many ways a perfectionist who just called things like he saw them.
It might have sounded arrogant, but Robert Lockwood's life was the stuff of legend. A native of the Mississippi Delta region of Arkansas, his mother had an affair with blues icon Robert Johnson, who taught a teenaged Lockwood to play the guitar. Lockwood would then go on to co-host an historic blues radio program with a harmonica player, named Sonny Boy Williamson. And that's how a young sharecropper who we now know as guitarist B.B. King first heard Lockwood, in the early 1940s.
B.B. King: I'd come out of the fields at noon on our break, and Robert Jr. and Sonny Boy Williamson would come on the radio from Helena Arkansas. The announcers would say, 'Now, here's Robert, Jr. and Sonny Boy.' I just felt like I knew him.
King has regularly mentioned Robert Lockwood's influence whenever he plays in Greater Cleveland. Lockwood and Williamson moved to Chicago in the 1950s, where they recorded for Chess Records. When work started drying up in a city market brimming with blues players, Williamson and Lockwood came to Cleveland, where there wasn't as much competition, in 1960. Eventually, Williamson would move on to further fame in Europe. But, Lockwood stayed behind.
He had started a family and decided to nurture his new Cleveland roots. At the same time, he became a mentor to a series of local musicians who would become regulars on the Cleveland blues scene, including a retired Hough bakery worker who played harmonica as a hobby.
Wallace Coleman: He was kind of like the father I never had.
Wallace Coleman played in Lockwood's band for nearly 10 years.
Wallace Coleman: Everything I learned about the business - the music, the timing, the keys to play, how to conduct myself on stage in front of people - I learned all that from Robert, Jr.
Because of Lockwood's many years on the Blues road, Cleveland City Councilman Jay Westbrook lobbied to get a road in the Flats entertainment district renamed in honor of the blues man, in 1997.
Jay Westbrook: Like so many times when people are not as appreciated in their own community as they should be, he was a performer who would travel in Europe, travel in Japan, or travel blues festivals across the country. And then play small clubs here in Cleveland. I wanted to give tribute to our own international treasure.
Over the next couple days, the rest of Northeast Ohio can join in the tribute. A wake for Robert Lockwood Jr. will take place today from 4:00 to 8:00 PM at Old Stone Church on Public Square in downtown Cleveland. Funeral services will start tomorrow morning at 11:00, at the same location. David C. Barnett, 90.3.
I got the key
To the highway
Yes, I'm bound to go
I'm gonna leave here walking
Won't come back no more.