BOBBY PARKER 1937-2013

Bobby Parker was a soul-blues singer and guitarist whose recordings from the late 1950s and 1960s - notably the propulsive groove of Watch Your Step - influenced performers as varied as John Lennon, Carlos Santana and the band Led Zeppelin.

The Washington-based bluesman cut a swaggering figure on stage with his preacher-like exhortations to “say yeah, children”, his shiny suits and his lacquered, James Brown-style hairdo. His tenor voice both caressed and screamed the blues over his powerful, stinging - and sometimes over-amped - lead guitar. And he loved to walk the bar or walk through the crowd as he worked the strings.

Reviewing a 1993 nightclub performance, music critic Peter Watrous of the New York Times wrote that Parker would “play beautifully formed blues ideas, then throw in be-bop lines worthy of George Benson. ... Though slightly ruffled by distortion, his notes, pearly and fat, skip along to their own undulating rhythms. And his singing, a high tenor moan, conveys more musical authority than emotional weight. ... He was showing off his virtuosity there, as well.”

A veteran of the “chitlin' circuit” of black theaters, Parker wrote two much-covered hit recordings on the rhythm-and-blues charts, Blues Get Off My Shoulder (1958), a somber blues ballad enlivened by his trenchant guitar work, and Watch Your Step (1961).

Watch Your Step, recorded at Edgewood Studios at 16th and K Streets for V-Tone records, was a hit in the United States and England. The song's insistent riff, which Parker said evolved from the Afro-Cuban jazz composition Manteca, caught on with the mod subculture in London.

Jefferson Airplane, Santana and the Spencer Davis Group (with singer Steve Winwood) all covered the song. Its guitar motif was reprised in Led Zeppelin's Moby Dick and the 1962 instrumental The Black Widow by fellow Washington guitarist Link Wray.