Robert Nighthawk: Electric Slide Guitar Pioneer With Many Names

An artist vanishes in the mid-1940s and resurfaces years later with a new name, an electrified guitar and a heavy sound to rival the greatest legends of Chicago blues. This episode reconstructs the life of Robert Nighthawk, born Robert Lee McCollum in Helena, Arkansas on November 30, 1909, and father of bluesman Sam Carr. He left home young to busk through southern Mississippi, played with the Memphis Jug Band, and learned slide guitar from mentor Houston Stackhouse, with whom he performed on the radio in Jackson, Mississippi. In the mid-1930s, in the genteel wording of the historical record, he found it advisable to take his mother's maiden name, becoming Robert Lee McCoy, and relocated to St. Louis alongside Henry Townsend, Big Joe Williams and Sonny Boy Williamson.

We cover his May 1937 solo recording Prowling Nighthawk, the 1938 Victor session in Aurora, Illinois, radio work on WROX, and the Clarksdale years when he hired a teenage Ike Turner as a roadie. After disappearing from the recording trail, he returned in 1948 as Robert Nighthawk on Aristocrat Records, the label about to become Chess, where his electrified Delta slide sound competed head-on with Muddy Waters. With Ernest Lane on piano and Willie Dixon on bass, Annie Lee Blues reached number 13 on the Billboard R&B chart on December 31, 1949, but the label put its muscle behind Waters. The episode follows his long fade through United and States Records, his 1963 rediscovery busking on Chicago's Maxwell Street, his return to Arkansas and the King Biscuit Time radio show on KFFA, and his death in Helena on November 5, 1967 at age 57.

• How bottleneck slide bypasses the frets to reach the microtones of the human voice, and why it could only be learned in the same room as a master
• What the polite phrasing around his mid-1930s name change hides about the realities of the Jim Crow South
• How vacuum-tube amplification transformed sustain and distortion for a slide player in 1948
• Why Aristocrat backed Muddy Waters over Nighthawk: reliability and showmanship over raw capability
• His 1983 Blues Hall of Fame induction and the 2007 Mississippi Blues Trail marker in Friars Point