Barbecue

Born Robert Hicks in Georgia in 1902, Barbecue Bob was an early exponent of the Piedmont style of blues, and was a contemporary around the Atlanta scene of artists like Blind Blake, Josh White, Curley Weaver, Blind Willie McTell, Buddy Moss and others. He had a distinctive guitar style, using the frailing technique as well as using a bottleneck on a 12-string guitar, and acquired his stage name because he was working as a barbecue chef when he did his first recordings, and publicity shots featured him in his chef's outfit. His career was tragically curtailed when he died from tuberculosis and pneumonia in 1931 at the age of 29. This 47-track 2-CD collection comprises a significant proportion of his career recordings on the Columbia label, and includes recordings with his brother Charlie Laughing Charley Lincoln, and with Curley Weaver and Buddy Moss as The Georgia Cotton Pickers. It includes his Motherless Child, a song regularly performed by Eric Clapton, along with his famous song Mississippi Heavy Water Blues, inspired by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. He is one of those blues artists who is not widely known but whose music helps to appreciate the nuances of the Piedmont blues tradition.

“Barbecue is a simple food. Don’t mess it up.”
As the winningest man in barbecue, a New York Times bestselling cookbook author, and a judge on the hit show BBQ Pitmasters on Discovery’s Destination America, Myron Mixon knows more about smoking meat than any man alive.