📍Third Ward, Houston, TX, USA
1941 – 1958“I was born in Leona, Texas, in October 1932, and when I was a boy my family moved to Houston, settling in the Third Ward, the heart of the city's Black community, a neighbourhood of small wooden houses, churches and clubs along Dowling Street. My cousin was the great bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins, who would play at family reunions, and I went to Jack Yates High School. I grew up in the Third Ward with friends who became great guitarists too, Johnny Clyde Copeland and Johnny Guitar Watson. At first I wanted to play keyboards, and I took lessons; my idol as a teenager was the Hammond organist Jimmy McGriff. But my cousin Willow Young loaned me his guitar and taught me the open tuning I used all my life, and I learned from Frankie Lee Sims and from watching my cousin Lightnin'. By sixteen I was playing my first professional gigs, and at eighteen I switched to the guitar for good and formed my own band, the Rhythm Rockers. I went to the Houston clubs to hear my heroes, Gatemouth Brown, T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker. I played with my fingers, not a pick, with a capo high on the neck, and my sound was sharp and clear. In 1958 I recorded my first single, The Freeze, and my icy, stinging guitar made people call me the Iceman, the Master of the Telecaster. I had records like Frosty and Frost Bite, and later, on Alligator Records, I won a Grammy with my album Showdown!, with Robert Cray and Johnny Copeland. The Third Ward remembers me as one of its many great bluesmen.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today