Mississippi Joe Callicott

Joe Calicott spent his entire life in the small Mississippi community of Nesbit, where he earned recognition as one of the least documented masters of the Delta’s solo acoustic blues style. He first took up the guitar at fifteen and made his earliest appearance on 78s in 1929, serving as second guitarist behind Garfield Akers. The next year he joined Jim Jackson for two sides, “Traveling Mama Blues” and “Fare Thee Well Blues,” both of which later turned up on numerous anthologies, among them the second volume of Blow My Blues Away. Those performances featured an assertive vocal approach that gradually softened over the decades.

After Akers died in 1959, Callicott largely set the instrument aside, returning to it only in the mid-1960s for his own satisfaction. In 1967 researcher George Mitchell found the musician and recorded eleven selections from the slower yet still commanding player; the material eventually surfaced through Fat Possum’s George Mitchell Archive and on the 2003 album Ain't A Gonna Lie To You. Shortly before his death in 1969, Callicott began teaching ten-year-old Kenny Brown, who regularly skipped school to study with the unassuming master living down the street.