Robert Garrett

Born in 1916 in Free Hill, Tennessee, USA, Garrett pursued numerous occupations apart from music. Throughout most of his life he has remained in Free Hill, the remote settlement established by freed slaves around 1830. For Excello Records he cut a splendid electric blues single in 1962 and, from the 1980s onward, appeared at occasional festivals. By then he was Free Hill’s sole exponent of live music, an art form otherwise displaced by disco and cable television. A handful of his own pieces followed the talking blues format, yet the bulk of his performances drew on blues standards associated with Little Milton and T-Bone Walker as well as country material by artists such as Don Williams and Merle Haggard, recast in blues arrangements.