The Rough Guide to Barbecue Bob

Proving that rappers and hip-hop artists weren’t the first African-American musicians to adopt street names was Robert Hicks: he cooked, served and sang at Tidwell's Barbecue Place in Atlanta in the mid-1920s and was discovered there by a Columbia Records scout when the label decided to base its ‘race’ recordings field unit in the city in 1927. Hicks died of pneumonia in 1931 at the age of 29, but by then he had recorded 65 sides as Barbecue Bob, singing in a rough but expressively warm voice over a heavily percussive 12-string guitar style with a deft bottleneck technique.

Two dozen of those sides are included here, including several blues standards that later became rock standards, such as ‘Going Up the Country’, ’Motherless Chile Blues’ and ‘Poor Boy a Long Ways from Home’. That Hicks was an entertainer is evident in his jaunty, upbeat approach. There's a little more dread when he sings the spiritual ‘Jesus Blood Can Make Me Whole’ and a deeper foreboding when he's joined by the rasping voice of Nellie Florence on ‘Midnight Weeping Blues’. But tracks such as ‘Doin’ That Scraunch’ and ‘Honey You’re Going too Fast’ are pure, delightful hokum.