Sonny Boy Williamson II
Aleck Miller took another man's name and made it bigger than the original. Born around 1912 near Glendora, Mississippi, he taught himself harmonica as a child and by six or seven was playing local parties billed as "Reverend Blue." He spent the 1930s on the Delta juke-joint circuit with Robert Johnson, Elmore James, and Sunnyland Slim, and taught his brother-in-law Howlin' Wolf his first harmonica licks. By the early 1940s he was calling himself Sonny Boy Williamson, borrowing the name of a famous Chicago star who traveled to Arkansas to confront him. His real break came that November, partnering guitarist Robert Lockwood Jr. on King Biscuit Time, the South's first daily blues radio show, out of Helena's KFFA. Through Trumpet and Chess sides like "Help Me," and a European tour with the Yardbirds, Williamson spent three decades handing his sound outward — the era's headwater, not one of its tributaries.
Robert Johnson had lived on and off with Lockwood's mother, and by his teens Lockwood had learned guitar the way Johnson played it, at Johnson's own hand. "I learned how to play the guitar like Robert," he said later, "and I didn't touch the organ no more." In November 1941 he carried that schooling onto KFFA's King Biscuit Time as Miller's on-air partner for two decades, into the Chess and Checker years — "we were the first to play amplified blues over the radio," Lockwood said — making him the one man in Miller's circle whose specific training is documented as feeding straight into the sound Miller broadcast and recorded.
listen forLockwood's 1941 debut side is just him: a Delta-picked bass line rolling under jazz-tinged chords, cut the same year he joined Sonny Boy Williamson II on King Biscuit Time, the daily blues radio show the two ran together for two decades. By "Nine Below Zero," cut for the Jackson, Mississippi label Trumpet Records in 1953, Williamson fronts a full studio band — no source confirms Lockwood himself plays this particular side, but the arrangement sits inside the vocabulary they built on air: short, chordal guitar stabs behind harmonica lines bent and phrased almost like a voice, the radio partnership's chemistry carried onto wax.