In 1930s Clarksdale, Mississippi, crowds on the Sunflower River bridge reportedly could not tell which guitarist on the opposite banks was Robert Johnson and which was his teenage protege. That protege was Robert Lockwood Jr., born in 1915 in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, whose mother Estella was romantically involved with Johnson for about a decade. This episode traces a seventy-plus-year career that began as the stepson of the blues, saddled with the resented nickname Robert Jr., and ended with a National Heritage Fellowship, honorary doctorates, and a Grammy Award.

We start with the church organ Lockwood played at eight in his father’s church and how polyphonic thinking let him treat the guitar as a miniature piano. From fish fries around Helena, Arkansas, we move to 1941 and King Biscuit Time on KFFA with Sonny Boy Williamson II, a daily broadcast sponsored by King Biscuit flour that carried Delta blues across county lines and influenced a young B.B. King. In 1950 Lockwood reached Chicago, replaced Louis Myers in Little Walter’s band, and became a Chess Records session anchor alongside Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Sunnyland Slim, and Otis Spann. He relocated to Cleveland in 1960, switched almost exclusively to a 12-string guitar in 1975 at age sixty, pushed saxophones and progressive swing into his sets, and held a Wednesday night residency at Fat Fish Blue until two days before the illness that ended his life in 2006 at 91.

• How Robert Johnson’s oral-tradition teaching covered timing, stage presence, and reading a room
• Why a white-owned Arkansas radio station handed daily airtime to Black blues musicians in 1941
• Lockwood’s character-actor approach at Chess: walking bass lines and jazz chords that made soloists shine
• The 12-string pivot at sixty, the custom blue guitar now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and his refusal to be a museum piece
• Late honors including the 1995 NEA National Heritage Fellowship and a 2008 Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album