Biography
Dallas-based guitarist, singer, and songwriter Bob Kirkpatrick has spent three decades quietly cultivating listeners through steady club work across Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, even though his name has never reached widespread recognition. After a 23-year recording hiatus that ended with the 1996 release Going Back to Texas on JSP, he remains a regional favorite throughout the Texas triangle, yet his emphasis on family has consistently placed his blues pursuits and studio output lower on his list of priorities. Born in Haynesville, Louisiana, in 1934, Kirkpatrick first encountered music at age six, beginning on piano before moving to guitar. While studying at Grambling, he accompanied Ivory Joe Hunter on several road engagements, but it was his 1958 encounter with B.B. King that fully committed him to the blues. Following a bout of illness that prompted his physicians to advise a break from studies, he relocated to Dallas, where he performed in clubs alongside a series of daytime jobs. Offered the temporary role of substitute guitarist for Bobby “Blue” Bland’s band in 1968, Kirkpatrick declined in order to remain with his young children. His brother’s connection to the Newport Folk Festival secured him multiple appearances beginning in 1970. That same decade, in 1973, he cut Feeling The Blues for Moses Asch’s Folkways Records, an album now distributed through the Smithsonian Institution. Kirkpatrick continued to raise his family in Dallas while holding down weekend engagements at the Elks Lodge in south Dallas for sixteen years. After retiring from his day job in 1986, a friend who owned a local club encouraged him to return to performing. From the mid-1980s onward he has resumed writing original material and appearing regularly throughout the region. Although his Folkways LP remains a collector’s item found mainly in used-vinyl outlets, the more accessible 1996 JSP album Going Back to Texas clearly reveals B.B. King’s impact on both his singing and guitar work; four years afterward he issued Drive Across Texas.
Albums
