Roy Dunn born 13 April 1922

 Roy Dunn (13 April 1922 - 2 March 1988) was an American blues guitarist and singer. He was also credited as a major source of information and contacts by researchers into the blues of the east coast states. 

Roy Sidney Dunn, born in Eatonton, Georgia, a town in Putnam County, was one of twelve children of Willie and Estelle Dunn. He moved to Kelly in Jasper County when near the age of nine and started messing around with the guitar, being first taught by one Jim Smith. A later move to Covington put Roy in contact with Curley Weaver and Jonas Brown – it was the former that taught him to tune a guitar himself – who played at times then with fiddle-player Ollie Griffin and guitarist Cliff Lee. This was about 1935. 

He stayed around Curley until 1938, when he left Newton Co. Music was definitely a part of the rather large Dunn family, and among the relatives so inclined were uncles as well as his father and a few of his aunts. There definitely was some music around. Through the influence of his choir-leading father, a singing group was formed from the family, logically called the Dunn Brothers and made up of Roy, Fred, Oscar, and Edward. Quartet singing was to play an important part in Roy’s musical life, and its influence can be heard in his excellent singing. On top of all this, there was the influence of the ubiquitous phonograph record – Blind Blake, Jimmie Rogers, Barbecue Bob, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Buddy Buy Hawkins, Willie Walker, and Lonnie Johnson are all older names well-remembered. More recently, the influences were the many Atlanta artists he heard, as well as records from Blind Boy Fuller, and Lightnln’ Hopkins. 

                                    

For some ten years, Roy traveled through the southern states, going into Alabama and Tennessee, and some further west – Atlanta was just a stopping-off place for these years. Much of the time on the road was with quartets, either traveling with a particular group or joining one in an area . . . among them were the All National Independents, the Victory Bond Spiritual Singers, the Rainbow Gospel Four, the Galilee Four, the Keystone Four, and the Golden Gospel Singers. When in Atlanta, he played often with Blind Willie McTell, Curley Weaver, or Buddy Moss (of the known artists) and he claims to have seen Blind Boy Fuller one time in the Atlanta area, a possibility pointed to by others. 

Among the “unknowns” that Roy has known or played with over the years are Paul McGuiness, Bunny Tiller, Glenn Gates (known as “Baltimore” and a cousin of the Rev.), Eddie Lee Johnson, Connie Jackson, Link Paul, “Bo Weavil”, “Popcorn”, William Jolly, Buddy Keith, R.W. Lawson, and Edward “Chicken” Knowles. One of the major talents of the man is not only his recall of the names of musicians, but also when and where he saw them last and often what kind of car they were driving! Rather an Atlanta encyclopedia with two legs. 

Roy settled back into the Atlanta area again about the time of the Korean War, staying with his parents who ran a cafe on the corner of Butler and Decatur Sts. He was there when Buddy Moss got back into town, but it was not too long afterwards that Roy got into trouble and spent four years in jail for manslaughter, where he was made a trustee. In jail, he worked on his guitar technique, and also learned how to drive heavy equipment – this latter being useful after his release in 1960. Prior to this, he had been a peripatetic jack-of-all-trades, but now he was able to get steady work on the machines building highways through the central part of the state. 

Running the big stuff was the main thing, with music a weekend affair, until Christmas of I968 when a lady plowed into the driver’s side of Roy’s car. He suffered a broken back, arms, collarbones, right leg and foot, and a skull fracture; his wife Myrtis had her jaw broken and her teeth knocked out, and their baby was killed. It took him a good year to recover from the damages after which he and his wife (and four new children) had been subsisting on state disability payments and whatever else he could scrape from what light work that he could handle. Weak-limbed from all this, Roy was never able to return to work.

He was still able to play music, however, and in the early 70s, he recorded an album, and appeared at a number of blues festivals also performing in clubs around Georgia and North Carolina. He still performed occasionally up until his death in Atlanta on March 2, 1988.  (Edited from article by Peter Blowry)