Roosevelt 'Booba' Barnes dies at 59

" I thought he had the best band in the Delta. "

Staff Report

Roosevelt 'Booba' Barnes, a Mississippi native and semi-regular on the Memphis blues scene, died April 8 in Chicago. He was 59.

Barnes made a name for himself on Nelson Street in Greenville, Miss., eventually opening Barnes' Playboy Club, where he held court for nearly a decade. He died of lung cancer.

"He had cancer and had been sick about a year. But he kept going, kept touring, right up until the end. He played the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in February," said Jim O'Neal, one of the founders of Living Blues magazine and founder and owner of Rooster Blues, the label for which Barnes cut his only single and record. According to O'Neal, Barnes got his nickname from a brother who'd come home from the Army and had worked with booby traps. Barnes altered the spelling himself.

Born Sept. 25, 1936, in Longwood, Miss., Barnes learned to play music on a toy harmonica at age 8. By the time he was 16 he was earning money playing juke joints. Barnes began playing guitar in 1960. The harmonica, though, remained his main instrument.

The Heart-Broken Man, recorded by O'Neal in Memphis and Holly Springs, was released in 1990. When asked about what kind of person Barnes was, O'Neal bursts out laughing and says, "Oh, he was a character."

"We put the album out, got him a manager who was getting him gigs, and then he moves to Chicago," O'Neal says still laughing. "I guess that's what he always wanted to do all along."

O'Neal first met Barnes before O'Neal moved to Clarksdale from Chicago.

"I saw him playing on Nelson Street in Greenville. I was still living in Chicago at the time, and I'd come down to the Delta to check things out. After I moved down here, I went back to see him and he was really hot. I thought he had the best band in the Delta," O'Neal said.

"He had the Playboy Club on Nelson Street," O'Neal says. "I think that if he had stayed there and kept the club, you know just gone out on tour, he could have done a great business. But he followed the traditional blues path and headed to Chicago, just like Howlin' Wolf, his idol." Barnes truly considered Howlin' Wolf to be the best. "That's the man I used to try to imitate all the time," Barnes said in the liner notes to his lone album. "I have sat in and played with him. He admired me, too. He said I was the little wolf."

O'Neal says has fond memories of making The Heart-Broken Man.

"We made part of the record in Memphis," O'Neal said. "Making that record was the reason we realized we had to get our own studio in Clarksdale. Little Milton agreed to be on the record with Booba, and Milton was in Memphis. Booba's van broke down on the way up, so Milton didn't end up on the record.

"That was one thing about Booba, he was always breaking down on the road. He'd wear those flashy rings, then drive a rag-tag van around."