Robert Belfour

Robert 'Wolfman' Belfour remains an obscure yet intensely forceful blues guitarist and vocalist who calls Memphis, Tennessee home. Sharecropper parents raised him on a Holly Springs, Mississippi farm, and he first picked up the guitar in the late 1940s once his father passed away and bequeathed the instrument. Battery-powered radio broadcasts of John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and his idol Howlin' Wolf supplied the models he copied, while neighbor Junior Kimbrough supplied additional guidance. His approach stays firmly anchored in the North Mississippi region of his birth, delivering the same riff-driven, highly rhythmic attack heard from Jessie Mae Hemphill, R.L. Burnside, and the late Fred McDowell.

Belfour relocated to Memphis in 1968; at his wife’s urging he began performing on Beale Street in the early 1980s. Musicologist David Evans captured him for the German Hot Fox label in 1994, contributing eight tracks to the twenty-song anthology The Spirit Lives On: Deep South Country Blues and Spirituals in the 1990s, which also includes veteran barrelhouse pianist Mose Vinson, a longtime Memphis resident originally from Holly Springs. Although virtually unknown inside the United States, Belfour travels to Europe each year to play for fervent audiences that cherish authentic country blues, and he issued the album What’s Wrong with You in mid-2000.