Robert 'Bilbo' Walker - Rompin' & Stompin' (1998)

Blues guitarist and singer/songwriter Robert "Bilbo" Walker was raised in the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Born February 19, 1937, on the Borden Plantation in Clarksdale, Walker counts Muddy Waters, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry, and Ike Turner among his early stylistic influences. He lives in California and gets back to Mississippi frequently, and it shows. The music Walker and his bandmates produce on their two Rooster Blues releases, 1997's Promised Land and 2001's Rock the Night, is raw and in your face, straight out of the juke joints of the Delta. Walker was named after his father, Robert "Bilbo" Walker Sr., who was also nicknamed "Bilbo" -- that's how Walker Jr. acquired the nickname, which he hates. As he explains in the liner notes to Promised Land, people in his Clarksdale home would distinguish between his father and him by referring to them as Big Bilbo and Little Junior Bilbo. Later, after he began making a name for himself in Delta juke joints, Walker was called Chuck Berry Jr.
Walker is a completely self-taught musician who plays piano, guitar, and drums. He got his musical education thanks to his father, who would have "Little Junior Bilbo" playing piano behind a curtain at country juke joints around his native Clarksdale. His father paid three dollars and got Walker his first guitar, and he began playing at age eight. He began playing guitar professionally in church as a teenager, but after his sister started dating one of the guys in one of Ike Turner's early bands, he had the opportunity to learn showmanship firsthand from Turner. He began teaching himself Turner and Muddy Waters tunes on guitar. When Chuck Berry's first recordings were released in the 1950s, Walker modeled much of his guitar style after Berry's, he said in his liner notes to Promised Land, his debut for Rooster Blues. He began making trips to Chicago, formed a band with bassist David Porter, and the two have performed together much of the time since then.

Walker spent 17 years in Chicago, much of the time living with Porter. After a chance booking at the Rodeway Inn in Bakersfield, CA, Walker decided he liked that city enough to stay out there, because he had by this point also learned to play traditional country music. He bought land near Bakersfield and grew cotton and watermelons for the next few years, moonlighting as a musician in and around Bakersfield and making frequent trips back home to the Delta or Chicago. Walker was so successful as a farmer and entrepreneur that he was able to buy himself a limousine, a bus, and a motorcycle.

Rompin' & Stompin'Walker first developed his unique one-handed guitar style -- which he demonstrates a few minutes of at most of his shows -- while he was in Chicago, playing on Maxwell Street. As he explains in his liner notes to Promised Land: "Famous musicians like B.B. King and them, they done did about everything with a guitar could be done, as if you want to try to top them guys like B.B. King, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Buddy Guy, well, you really got to come up with somethin' the world maybe never seen did. And I'm the onliest man alive can put that kind of show on with the guitar with one hand like that....I wanted to be somethin' peoples could says, 'Well, no one else can do that but Robert Walker.'" Another 1990s release from Walker worth seeking out is Rompin' & Stompin' for the New York City-based Fedora label.