Earnest “Guitar” Roy, Jr.

Written by Grayson Haver Currin

Perhaps Earnest Roy’s parents should have simply named him “Guitar.”

After his first day of school in Clarksdale, Miss., soon before his sixth birthday in 1964, Roy returned home to find a flat top acoustic waiting for him. It was a gift from his father, Earnest, Sr.—a Mississippi blues ringer who loved to practice so loudly at home the cops used to stop by and listen. Young Earnest paid attention, learning to play bass by following along on the flat top. Shortly after Earnest turned eight, his father scooped him from the swimming pool and told Duna, as he called him, to get ready for his first gig. Earnest made $8: “That was money to me,” he says, “because everything was a quarter.”

By the time he was a teenager, Earnest was playing lead, again thanks to careful study of his father and his Clarksdale Rockers. But Earnest, Sr., insisted that his son not stop with the blues, that he learn as many instruments and idioms as possible. (He started playing what he calls “Bluejazz” around that time, too.) After turning down an offer to perform on Soul Train to finish high school instead, he left the Delta for Ohio when he was 17, enlisting in a funk-soul band before enlisting in the Army Reserve.

The late ’80s became a crucial pivot point for Earnest. He toured with Albert King after Big Joe Turner scouted him on Beale Street, but he turned down a long haul with the tempestuous King to focus on a solo career that started with a 1988 single on Rooster Blues, the label that first coaxed him into singing. Going by “Guitar” by then, he kept moving, becoming a long-distance trucker who kept his rig in his cab and a touring instrumentalist for a popular televangelist. But Mississippi and the blues continued to beckon. Back home, he performed all the instruments on 2011’s self-produced Going Down to Clarksdale himself.

Two decades ago, Roy fell on hard times. Amid a separation, he lagged on his rent and faced eviction. For the first time, Music Maker Relief Foundation stepped in to help. And then, in 2023, Roy and Music Maker reconnected, this time with a plan to make a new record, with Jimbo Mathus and a band he’d built in Mississippi backing Roy. The 10-song This Is Earnest “Guitar” Roy—the first record cut in Music Maker’s new studio, in May 2024—is a showcase not only for his good humor and soulful singing but also his lick-loaded playing.

He is, after all, Earnest Guitar Roy.

Earnest “Guitar” Roy was born on September 25, 1958.