Washboard Sam

Robert Clifford Brown (July 15, 1910 – November 6, 1966), known professionally as Washboard Sam, was an American blues musician and singer. [....] He was reputedly the half-brother of Big Bill Broonzy. He moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1920s, performing as a street musician with Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon. He moved to Chicago in 1932, performing regularly with Broonzy and other musicians, including Memphis Slim and Tampa Red on many recording sessions for Lester Melrose of Bluebird Records.

In 1935, he began recording in his own right for both Bluebird and Vocalion Records, becoming one of the most popular Chicago blues performers of the late 1930s and 1940s, selling numerous records and playing to packed audiences. He recorded over 160 tracks in those decades. [...] By the 1950s, his audience had begun to shrink, largely because he had difficulty adapting to the new electric blues. His final recording session, for RCA Victor, was in 1949. [...]. Brown made a modest and short-lived comeback as a live performer in the early 1960s. (Read more at Wikipedia)

Links to Peel
The young John Ravenscroft was a collector of blues LPs and it was this enthusiasm which got him his first radio job in the early 1960s, on the Kat's Karavan show on station WRR in Dallas, Texas. As Peel recalled on the show of 07 October 1986 when playing a track by Washboard Sam, the first record he ever played on the radio was by the artist - a familiar name to blues record collectors like himself, but not one of the best-known bluesmen.