Biography
Born on 22 February 1933 in Royse City, Texas, USA, Rankin received early encouragement from his uncle T-Bone Walker to take up blues guitar. The elder musician later brought the teenager along on tour as a valet during the late 1940s. Rankin performed and recorded alongside Walker throughout the 1950s and acquired the nickname ‘T-Bone’ Walker Jnr. around 1955; under that billing he cut sides for the Midnite label in 1962. Although he maintained a lower profile in music after the mid-1960s, Rankin appeared at the T-Bone Walker Memorial Concert in Los Angeles, California, in May 1975, prompting Blues Unlimited to observe that ‘he did a fantastic job on his uncle’s classics’.