Bobo Jenkins was a great blues guitarist who signed with Fortune in the 50s. Born in Alabama in 1916, the son of a sharecropper who died when Bobo was just a year old, Bobo was raised by his mother and his uncle but he argued constantly with the latter and received much physical abuse for it. Finally, at 12, Bobo told his mother he was leaving. She told him he’d be back as soon as he got hungry. “I’m already hungry and I ain’t left yet,” he said. Bobo went to Memphis. At 14, he married a 13-year-old girl. It was the first of 10 marriages. “Some of ‘em I loved,” he said, “Others I married just to get out of the cold; you’ve got to do it all when you’re hoboin’.”
Bobo worked odd jobs wherever he could find them and ended up in the Mississippi Delta region but the degrading conditions of Jim Crow were intolerable. Bobo wouldn’t kowtow to whites and demanded to be paid for any work he did for them and never backed down in an argument. Not surprisingly, he literally fled from Mississippi. “I have had to strangle bloodhounds who were chasing me through the woods. When they opened their mouths you could see where they’d had their teeth filled with gold, their masters thought that much of them, because they were so good at tracking down black people.” World War II had begun so Bobo joined the Army. Upon his release in 1944, Bobo vowed he would never again live in the South and decided either to go to Chicago or Detroit. September 1, he came to Detroit.
Bobo was a good mechanic and went to work for Chrysler where he would spend the next 26 years. He met John Lee Hooker at the Harlem Inn where a musician promptly stole his girl. Bobo didn’t play. “John Lee told me to get his guitar and go to playin’ it.” Bobo bought a guitar the next day at a pawnshop even though he couldn’t play a lick. The pawnshop owner asked to hear Bobo play but Bobo declined. “I couldn’t even tune it,” Bobo remembered. “So, this fella, Albert Witherspoon, tuned it for me and started me off to playin’ it. I said I’m goin’ to get this guitar and I’m goin’ pay somebody back. I started playin’ the guitar and have paid many of them back. (laughs) I took many a fella’s girl.”
Bobo was friends with Eddie Kirkland whom he had known before he started playing. He told Eddie he was going to learn but Eddie didn’t buy it. But after getting his guitar, Bobo stuck with it and frequently called Eddie over to his house for pointers. “He learned how to walk the bass from what I showed him,” said Kirkland, “but Bobo always did have the music in him, he just started playin’ at an older age.”
Bobo landed a contract with Chess Records in Chicago with Hooker’s help. Later, he started recording for Fortune. His “Democrat Blues” had made him something of a star in the blues circuit. He played with stars as Jimmy Reed, Mahalia Jackson, Illinois Jacquet, Lionel Hampton and Louis Jordan in various clubs in Detroit, Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Mt. Clemens. His house was always home to various bluesmen including harp legend Sonny Boy Williamson II (Rice Miller)—a personal friend of the legendary Robert Johnson—who was living in Detroit at that time.
Bobo single-handedly kept Detroit’s blues scene alive and received some help from WDET when they hired Bobo to play on a program called
Blues After Hours from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. Sunday mornings. The show was hosted by Bobo’s friend known only as the Famous Coachman. Bobo continued to play, record and tour and went to Europe in 1982. He fell ill, however, and returned to the States after only one show. His illness slowly progressed resulting in his death two years later at age 69.
Blues After Hours ended its run in 1997.
BOBO JENKINS - 10 BELOW ZERO - FORTUNE - YouTube