| Columnist
Robert “Bilbo” Walker, one of the most colorful artists on the Delta blues scene — resplendent in colorful suits and a wig of flowing curls — died on Wednesday morning in California, where he maintained a residence and farmed cotton for many years. Walker was perhaps best known for his Chuck Berry-influenced performance style and stage show. He continued to “duck walk” after turning 80 earlier this year.
Earlier this year, Walker had opened up his own juke joint, “Wonder Light City,” in a remodeled Quonset hut just outside of Alligator. Walker and the club were featured on a episode on CNN’s “Great Big Story.”
Born in 1937, Walker grew up on the Bolden plantation in Clarksdale, and played piano before focusing on the guitar. An early influence was local musician Ike Turner, and like other early influences, Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters, he moved from the Delta to Chicago.
Walker’s distinctive style came about after a fellow Chicago musician whom he had taught, Little Monroe, intentionally humiliated him at a show by demonstrating his considerably advanced skills at performing B.B. King’s style. Knowing that he wouldn’t be able to upstage Little Monroe’s abilities with King’s music, Walker spent months studying the style of Chuck Berry, who was then on top of the charts, until he was ready for a return match.
“I went cross that stage like Chuck Berry and went to the end of the room and I skipped back and it backwards,” he told Jim O’Neal. That’s when I came up with the one-hand guitar playing that nobody never seen and nobody ever did it like me. Boy, they booed Little Monroe almost off the stage that night. So that’s what brought Robert Walker to the blues.”
After 17 years in Chicago, Walker, who became known as “Chuck Berry Junior,” returned to Clarksdale in the early ‘70s and began playing regularly with drummer Sam Carr and harmonica player/keyboardist Frank Frost. Following a gig in Bakersfield, California, where the country fans loved his Chuck Berry songs, Walker decided to live there part time, driving back and forth to Clarksdale in vehicles including a limousine and an RV with his image emblazoned on the side.
Walker didn’t make his first recordings until the mid-‘90s, when he cut the album “Promised Land” for O’Neal’s Clarksdale-based Stackhouse label. More than his other subsequent records, the album captured Walker’s distinctive stage show—in addition to a couple Chuck Berry numbers, songs by Waters, King, Cooke as well as a mix of the country classic “Wild Side of Life” and its answer song “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”
“I’d been hearing about him being in town,” O’Neal recalls,” but every time I’d look for him he’d have gone. I finally caught up with him and he was playing with Sam Carr in Merigold, and he started out playing “Hold That Train Conductor,” a slow moaning blues. He was a great rock’n’roll guy, but I had no idea he was like that too and it really impressed me,
“He played in the studio just like he was doing a gig, which is exactly what I wanted. He was dancing around while he was recording.”
Roger Stolle, who opened the Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art store in Clarksdale in the early 2000s, booked Walker annually at the Juke Joint Festival and the tri-annual Cat Head Mini Blues Festivals. Walked also appeared in the documentary “M For Mississippi" and the web series “Moonshine and Mojo Hands,” both of which Stolle co-produced with Jeff Konkel.
“He called me his overseas manager, which I always loved, but more than anything I was just a big fan. I took him overseas — Israel, the Netherlands and Brazil — as well to Florida Gulf Coast University and to a taping of World Café in Philadelphia.”
Walker was particularly excited to visit the Holy Land, says Stolle, who recalled that guards at the purported tomb of Jesus allowed Walker to cut into line, perhaps interpreting that his purple suit with a puffed up collar signified that he was an important religious figure.
“He was just one of my favorites. You’ve found this dinosaur who somehow wasn’t extinct, and in watching him you were able to experience a different time and place.”
Scott Barretta is the host of Highway 61, which airs on MPB on Saturday at 10:p.m. and Sunday at 6:p.m. He maintains a regional music calendar at highway61music.blogspot.org
https://eu.clarionledger.com/story/magnolia/entertainment/2017/12/01/chuck-berry-jr-mississippi-guitarist-robert-bilbo-walker-died/907279001/
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