Sonny Boy Williamson, born Alex Miller on a Glendora plantation about 1912 and widely known as Rice Miller or Sonny Boy No. 2, became one of the premier artists in blues history as a singer, songwriter, and harmonica player whose mastery of the blues idiom shaped all phases of his work. Perhaps the greatest harmonica player born in the Mississippi Delta and one of the most remarkable and poetic blues composers, he built a lasting legacy through recordings including “Eyesight to the Blind,” “Help Me,” “Your Funeral and My Trial,” “Fattening Frogs for Snakes,” “Nine Below Zero,” “Mighty Long Time,” and “Unseeing Eye,” made for Trumpet Records in Jackson from 1951 to 1954 and for Chess/Checker in Chicago from 1957 to 1964. He was also the first star of blues radio broadcasting in the South, famed for live performances on Helena, Arkansas’s influential King Biscuit Time, which began in 1941. His exact birthdate remained uncertain, with an estimated date of December 5, 1912, based on census data and family recollections, while his gravestone gives March 11, 1908, and he further confounded authorities and interviewers by using various other names and birthdates. A trickster often in trouble with the law, he also carried a guarded, suspicious nature reflected in songs such as “Don’t Start Me Talkin’” and “Keep It To Yourself,” possibly shaped by a harsh childhood on a plantation owned by Selwyn Jones, whom Governor Earl Brewer called to task in 1915 for mistreatment of African Americans, in a county where at least a dozen lynchings had been reported in earlier years, including several in Glendora. During his career he worked with Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Robert Lockwood, Jr., Muddy Waters, and Buddy Guy, and in the 1960s he became somewhat of a celebrity in England, performing and recording with a young Eric Clapton, the Yardbirds, the Animals, and others. In 1965 he returned to Glendora, stayed for a few weeks with his cousin Willie James Stewart, and performed at Stewart’s juke joint, the King Place, before going back to Helena, where he resumed playing on King Biscuit Time and reportedly said he had come home to die. After revisiting places of his youth and seeing friends and family one final time, he died in Helena on May 25, 1965; artists in the United States and England recorded tributes to him, he was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, and he was buried in Tutwiler.