Miami Student

Issue date: 4/13/07 Section: OpEd Page

Two years ago on Easter I was sitting inside the Palace Theater in Cleveland, Ohio waiting for B.B. King to take the stage after an extended opening act. The room was crowded with people, many having come straight from church still dressed in their Sunday best, and the room was painfully hot. King responded to the tension. Working the crowd into a frenzy, he ripped through his set. At the peak of his playing, however, King stood up and waved 90-year-old blues guitarist Robert Lockwood Jr. onto the stage, stopping the show for several minutes to give the longtime fixture of the Cleveland blues scene his due. It was a fitting, if brief, tribute to the aging guitarist, and seemed to be a nod from one legend to another that Lockwood's legacy would be kept alive.

I first saw Lockwood about a year before the King concert at a small club on the corner of Prospect and Ontario called Fat Fish Blue. He would headline Wednesday nights backed by a six piece Chicago style band. Rounding out his '80s, Lockwood relegated himself mostly to rhythm guitar, comping jazz chords and playing the occasional solo when it suited his mood. Dressed in a suit and tie with his trademark driving cap, he would sit on the right side of the stage strumming away 'til the band broke for the night. That night, though, he decided to stay on and play a couple of songs by himself. Stepping back up to the stage with his bright blue, semi-hollow bodied 12-string, Lockwood finger picked his way through a series of Robert Johnson songs with the chilling feel of somebody who had lived them.

In order to understand Robert "Junior" and his legacy, you first have to be familiar with his "stepfather," the mythic 1930s bluesman Robert Johnson. Johnson was born in Mississippi in 1911, and while many of the details of his life remain hazy, his persona is epic. According to legend, Johnson was a struggling guitar player living on a delta plantation when he received instructions to take his guitar to a rural crossroads at midnight. There he supposedly made a pact with the devil, who tuned the guitar for him, and within a year Johnson's skill was unparalleled. Word of his virtuosity spread quickly, and as his fame increased, so did his reputation with the women. Shortly before traveling to New York City for his debut in Carnegie Hall, Johnson was murdered on the stage of a juke joint, probably poisoned by the husband of a woman he had been sleeping with. Onlookers testified that before he died, Johnson frothed at the mouth and ran around the room, snapping like a rabid hound dog on all four - the devil had cashed in.

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