Son Bonds

Bonds maintained ties to Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon while working squarely within the rural Brownsville idiom that their partnership had established across the 1920s and 1930s. Every one of his sessions featured exactly one of the two men—Estes or Nixon, never both at once. The melody of his 1934 piece “Back and Side Blues” entered the standard blues repertoire once John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, who hailed from nearby Jackson, TN, adapted it for his landmark 1937 recording “Good Morning, (Little) School Girl.” Nixon later stated that a nearsighted neighbor, mistaking Bonds for another man, shot him dead while he sat on his front porch.