MUSIC It’s never too late to give soul-blues master Bobby

Jonz his flowers

When he died from COVID in July 2020, the country could barely spare a moment to revisit the gritty, funky, passionate music he’d spent decades making.

By STEVE KRAKOW

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

We Americans don’t seem to want to deal with this pesky pandemic anymore—not to take precautions and certainly not to grieve our country’s losses, which topped one million lives almost a year ago. Even our president, who at first seemed to have our backs, has declared the crisis over. Meanwhile the body count keeps climbing, and this poorly understood virus leaves more and more people with ongoing health problems, some of which may never go away.

It seemed like everybody heard when John Prine and Fountains of Wayne cofounder Adam Schlesinger died from COVID. Without going further into the racial inequities of the pandemic, I’ll just say that the passing of Black artists such as Charley Pride and Manu Dibango got far less attention. And when COVID killed blues and soul man Bobby Jonz in July 2020, it barely made a ripple. Though he’d had a long, varied career, attracting an audience of blues and soul-blues fiends, Northern Soul fans, and lovers of gritty R&B, his passionate songs never caught the ear of the general public.

Bob Willie Jones (or possibly Bob Willy Jones) was born in Farmerville, Louisiana, in 1936. He was raised till age seven by the plantation owners who’d hired his mother, at which point his grandparents took over. “Basically all we had to listen to was people like Eddy Arnold, Hank Williams and Roy Acu ,” Jonz told Soul Express in 2004. “I was also involved in gospel, when I was younger and going to church.” Lore has it that a teenage Jonz once worked as a driver for countrymusic patriarch Hank Williams.

In 1959, Jonz moved to Chicago. “My dad and my uncle were there,” he told Soul Express. “I started working at Republic Steel, a steel mill, and I was always singing at work. Everybody was consistently saying that ‘you sound so good, you need to go sing professionally.’”

Jonz had a fateful encounter while looking for a shop to repair his shoes near 43rd and Drexel—he happened upon a blues club. “The name of the club was [Frader’s] Juke Box Lounge,” he said. “I heard the music coming out the door. [Baby Face Willette] was playing.” Jonz talked the skeptical owner into auditioning him as a singer. “I told them to play a Ray Charles tune. When I came down, he said ‘listen, let me tell you, you got a bright future ahead of you. We have talent shows down here every Monday night, and if you win the talent

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