In 1927, a Columbia Records promotional photo showed a man in a stark white chef’s hat and floor-length apron holding a massive 12-string guitar. He looked like a novelty act. He was Robert Hicks, better known as Barbecue Bob, and beneath the manufactured gimmick was one of the best-selling recording artists of the 1920s Piedmont blues scene. Born in 1902 in Walnut Grove, Georgia to sharecroppers Charlie and Mary Hicks, Robert learned the six-string guitar in the kitchen of neighborhood matriarch Savannah Weaver, known as Dip, alongside his brother Charlie Hicks and her son Curley Weaver. In 1924 he moved to Atlanta, switched to the booming 12-string to cut through noisy urban rooms, and took a job at Tidwell’s Barbecue, where he entertained customers until Columbia talent scout Dan Hornsby came to see him.

His debut Barbecue Blues quickly sold 15,000 copies, and between March 1927 and December 1930 he recorded 68 songs, outsold in Columbia’s race series only by Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters and Blind Willie Johnson. This episode breaks down his sound, open Spanish tunings with a bottleneck slide and a percussive right-hand frailing technique borrowed from banjo, and his role as an acoustic journalist who documented the 1927 Great Mississippi Flood in Mississippi Heavy Water Blues and the early Depression in We Sure Got Hard Times Now. We cover his duets with Charlie Hicks and Nellie Florence, the Georgia Cotton Pickers sessions of December 1930 with Buddy Moss and Curley Weaver, and his death in Lithonia, Georgia in October 1931 at age 29 from influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis, when mourners played Mississippi Heavy Water Blues at his graveside.

• How a 12-string guitar’s paired octave and unison strings create a shimmering wall of sound
• Whether the Barbecue Bob branding was exploitation, agency or the only way through the door in the 1920s race records market
• The stamina required to record 68 songs straight through into a horn or primitive microphone with no editing
• Why the finger-picked Piedmont style of Reverend Gary Davis and Curley Weaver soon eclipsed his heavier approach
• His echoes in Eric Clapton’s Motherless Child Blues and John Fahey’s Poor Boy, and the 2017 Killer Blues Headstone Project marker in Walnut Grove