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In 1963 he had almost half his stomach surgically removed as a result of a large ulcer. While

recovering, and severely affected by the civil rights riots and the assassination of John F Kennedy,
he began writing poetry, much of which was published in The Houston Forward Times, as well as
working days at RCA Records distribution in Houston.

When match fit, he resumed his recording career and went back on the road, featuring at The Ann
Arbor Blues Festival and The Montreux Blues Festival and touring Europe with The American Folk

Blues Festival and with Clifton Chenier and Magic Sam. Incredibly, this wonderful bluesman found
himself unable to sustain himself by playing music and had no choice but to take a badly paid day
job at a chicken processing plant in Houston.

His final performance was at the 1978 Juneteenth Festival in Houston at the Miller Outdoor

Theatre. Some two weeks later, Juke Boy Bonner died of cirrhosis of the liver in his apartment.

He was only 46 years old.

Possibly the very first of the one man blues bands was singer, guitarist and harmonica player Daddy
Stovepipe. Born Johnny Watson in Mobile, Alabama in 1867, he was, at various times, known as
Jimmy Watson, Sunny Jim and Reverend Alfred Pitts.

He first appeared in the late 1890s as the twelve-string
guitarist in a Mariachi band in Mexico, before touring the

southern states as a member of The Rabbits Foot Minstrels.
Come the 1900s he was playing on Maxwell Street in
Chicago which is where he acquired the Daddy Stovepipe
soubriquet in honour of the top hat he sported.

Stovepipe first recorded in 1924 in Richmond, Indiana then
three years later for Gennett Records in Birmingham,
Alabama in a duo billed as Sunny Jim and Whistlin' Joe.

Stovepipe was back in Chicago in 1931, but no longer a
one-man band. He recorded for Vocalion with his wife,

singer and jug player Mississippi Sarah, and again four
years later, for Bluebird by which time they were living in
Greenville, Mississippi.

Those recordings with Sarah are primitive but terrific, but sadly, in 1937 Sarah died and Stovepipe

went back on the road, initially with Cajun groups and Mexican mariachi bands before returning to
play the blues on the street corners of Chicago in 1948.

His last recordings were in 1960 at the tender age of 93 in Chicago, where he died three years later
of bronchial pneumonia.

Nearly fifty years later, the nonprofit Killer Blues organised a fundraiser at The Howmet Playhouse
in Whitehall, Michigan which enabled them to honour Daddy Stovepipe's unmarked grave with a
headstone.

Interestingly, there were two other near-namesakes of Stovepipe in the same era. Samuel Chambers

Jones, born in 1890, also recorded as a one man blues band in 1924, using the name Stovepipe
Number One while Thomas McKinley Peebles adopted the name Sweet Papa Stovepipe. He was born