Beverly "Guitar" Watkins (April 6, 1939 – October 1, 2019) was an American blues guitarist. She performed in relative obscurity for many years, but she made up for lost time after recording her first solo album at the age of 60. Sandra Pointer-Jones wrote, "Beverly Watkins is a pyrotechnic guitar maven whose searing, ballistic attacks on the guitar have become allegorical tales within the blues community."
Watkins was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1939.When she was 3 months old, her mother died and she went to live with her maternal grandparents, Luke and Phyllis Terrell, sharecroppers in Commerce, Ga., about 70 miles northeast of Atlanta. She was surrounded by music: Mr. Terrell played banjo and harmonica, and her aunts were performers. Her earliest influences included Rosetta Tharpe, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Memphis Minnie, and she was exposed to the music because of her grandmother, who would play their recordings on the family Gramophone.
She began playing guitar as an eight-year-old, learning by listening to the records that were played for her. Later, she was exposed to the records of touring bands, including Louis Jordan's and Count Basie's. She began to model her playing after Charlie Byrd and Basie's rhythm guitarist, Freddie Green. Throughout high school, she participated in a variety of talent shows and played trumpet in the school band. Her high school band master helped broaden her knowledge of jazz and blues guitar, and piano. She played bass for a band called Billy West Stone and the Down Beats.
Around the year 1959, she was introduced to Piano Red, who had a daily radio show on WAOK, and she subsequently joined Piano Red and the Meter-tones, who played in a number of towns in the Atlanta area, and then Atlanta clubs such as the Magnolia Ballroom and the Casino, before starting to tour throughout the southeast, primarily at colleges.
About the time the group renamed itself Piano Red and the Houserockers, they started touring nationally. The group had two successful singles: "Dr. Feelgood" and "Right String but the Wrong Yo-Yo". After recording "Dr. Feelgood" the group was known variously as Piano Red & The Interns, Dr. Feelgood & The Interns, and Dr. Feelgood, The Interns, and The Nurse. The group also included Roy Lee Johnson (composer of "Mr. Moonlight", later recorded by The Beatles), and Albert White.
After the breakup of the band in about 1965, Watkins played with Eddie Tigner and the Ink Spots, Joseph Smith and the Fendales, and then with Leroy Redding and the Houserockers until the late 1980s.. She played guitars that she named Red Mama, Sugar Baby and the like as if she were on a mission, even when the gigs paid little. In the 1980s, while performing at nights and on weekends, she cleaned houses and offices and worked at carwashes. Late in the decade, she began playing in the retail and entertainment district Underground Atlanta. Sometimes she worked with other musicians, sometimes accompanied by a drum machine. She made as little as $30 a day, as much as $600 on Christmas Eve.
Watkins had a long and continuous musical career, and worked with artists including James Brown, B.B. King, and Ray Charles. However, like many roots musicians, she found it difficult to crack the airwaves, and achieved recognition much later in her career, after the advent of the internet made it possible for musicians not backed by major labels to be heard by a wider audience.
She was re-discovered by Music Maker Relief Foundation founder Tim Duffy, who started booking her in package shows, and in 1998, with Koko Taylor and Rory Block, was part of the all-star Women of the Blues "Hot Mamas" tour. Her 1999 CD debut, Back in Business, earned a W. C. Handy Award nomination in 2000.
Watkins was playing internationally (for example, the Main Stage at the Ottawa Blues Fest in 2004) as well as in her hometown Atlanta until temporarily sidelined by surgery in 2005, but recovered. She performed a set at the 2008 Cognac Blues Festival.
Watkins’s latter career was hindered by health issues including cancer, a heart attack and a brain aneurysm, but she never stopped performing. Indeed most of the footage of Watkins that you’ll find online shows her in her 70s, still rocking hard, still inciting audience sing-along’s.
Right up until her stroke in 2019, which preceded the heart attack that killed her at the age of 80, she continued to play in clubs and nursing homes across Atlanta, and, on the first Sunday of each month, at the church in Commerce, Georgia, where she was raised.
(Edited from Wikipedia, The New York Times & loudersound.com)