Columbia Records talent scout Dan Hornsby assigned the stage name Barbecue Bob to Atlanta blues singer Robert Hicks. No performer contributed more than Hicks toward establishing Atlanta blues during its earliest phase. Born into a sharecropping household in Walnut Grove, Georgia, Robert Hicks moved with his brother Charley “Lincoln” Hicks to Newton County, where the pair met Savannah “Dip” Weaver and her son Curley Weaver. From the Weavers the Hicks brothers acquired guitar skills and vocal technique. Around 1922 harmonica player Eddie Mapp settled nearby and began performing with Robert, Charley, and Curley. Throughout the early and middle 1920s, this core group or subsets drawn from it supplied music for parties and dances across Atlanta and its environs.
Robert Hicks became the first member to gain wider attention. By 1926 he was employed at Tidwell’s Barbecue Place in the prosperous Atlanta suburb of Buckhead, where he prepared food, waited on customers, and performed for them. His local popularity drew the interest of Columbia’s Dan Hornsby, who photographed Hicks in chef’s attire and chose the name Barbecue Bob for the singer’s debut Columbia release, “Barbecue Blues,” cut in Atlanta on March 25, 1927. The record sold well, prompting Hicks to travel to New York for its sequel, “Mississippi Heavy Water Blues,” plus seven additional titles on June 15 and 16. Columbia recognized a hitmaker in Barbecue Bob; over the next three years the label’s mobile unit visited Atlanta repeatedly to record him, yielding a total of 62 sides, only six of which were rejected, with one title later remade and three others eventually located and released.
Hicks was joined by his brother Charley on four of the sides; the November 9, 1927 coupling “It Won’t Be Long Now, Pts. 1-2,” issued as Barbecue Bob and Laughing Charley, remains a landmark and ranks among the most frequently reissued blues recordings of the decade. In December 1930 Hicks also took part in a QRS session released under the pseudonym Georgia Cotton Pickers, which produced additional sides featuring his longtime associates Curley Weaver and Eddie Mapp, and possibly a younger colleague, Buddy Moss. Hicks had completed his final Barbecue Bob session for Columbia on December 5 of that year. Earlier in 1930 his wife succumbed to pneumonia; less than a year afterward Hicks himself died of the same illness following an attack of influenza, at the age of 29.
On record Hicks used a 12-string Stella guitar, though he performed equally often on six-string instruments and occasionally employed bottleneck technique. He excelled at reworking older repertoire, supplying definitive renditions of such standards as “Poor Boy a Long Ways from Home,” “Fo’ Day Creep,” and “Goin’ Up the Country.” Eric Clapton later drew on Hicks’ arrangement of “Motherless Chile Blues.” Hicks’ style shaped the broader development of early Atlanta blues, placing him second only to Blind Willie McTell in that regard.
