Linden: T-Bone Walker’s Cass County

B.B. King heard T-Bone Walker’s recording of “Stormy Monday” and thought Jesus Himself had returned to earth playing electric guitar. That’s how far Walker’s Linden, Texas upbringing traveled.

Aaron Thibeaux “T-Bone” Walker was born in Linden on May 28, 1910, in the piney woods of Cass County, deep in the same East Texas timber corridor that was generating boogie woogie in the lumber camps down the road. His parents were both musicians. His stepfather, Marco Washington, played with the Dallas String Band and taught young Walker guitar, ukulele, banjo, violin, and mandolin before the boy was ten. The musical vocabulary of the Piney Woods went into Walker early and came out as something nobody had heard before.

The family moved to Dallas, and Walker left school at ten to work the street corners and medicine shows. By fifteen he was a professional performer on the blues circuit — guiding Blind Lemon Jefferson, the most important Texas bluesman of the previous generation, around the clubs of Deep Ellum. It was as Jefferson’s guide that Walker first learned the electric possibilities in the guitar, the way the instrument could do something that a voice alone couldn’t: sustain, bend, cry, and cut through a noisy room.

What Walker did with that knowledge changed everything. He was the first musician to make the electric guitar a true centerpiece of a live performance — playing it behind his head, with his teeth, in splits, while holding a note that said everything the words couldn’t. He recorded “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)” in 1947 and handed rock and roll its language. Chuck Berry named Walker as his main influence. Jimi Hendrix imitated Walker’s trick of playing with his teeth. Steve Miller said Walker taught him, at age eight, to play guitar behind his back.

Linden itself is a quiet Cass County town — the county seat, population under 2,000, deep in the pines. There’s no monument to Walker here that matches what he left behind. That’s the Piney Woods way: the music goes out into the world and the forest gets quiet again. The Harrison County barrelhouses down US 59 in Marshall were where the style Walker absorbed was being built, piece by piece, before he was born.