Edwin "Buster" Pickens born 3 June 1916

Edwin "Buster" Goodwin Pickens (June 3, 1916 – November 24, 1964) was an American pianist. Pickens is best known for his work accompanying Alger "Texas" Alexander and Lightnin' Hopkins. He also recorded a solo album in 1960. 

Edwin "Buster" Pickens, blues pianist, was born in Hempstead, Texas. He was the son of Elias “Eli” Pickens and Bessie Gage. As an itinerant musician in his early life, Pickens along with Robert Shaw and others, was part of the "Santa Fe Group", named after touring musicians utilising the Santa Fe freight trains. This helped him to shape his own blues piano style, which partook of the Texas idiom, what some would call "sawmill" piano. From that time, Pickens described people doing the slow drag to "slow low-down dirty blues" in barrelhouse joints. 

Following service in the United States Army in World War II, Pickens settled in Houston, Texas. He appeared on his first disc recording on January 13, 1948, providing backing for Perry Cain on his single "All the Way from Texas" backed with "Cry Cry", released by Gold Star Records. Further recording work followed over the next eighteen months, as Pickens played in different sessions as part of the accompaniment to Cain, Bill Hayes, and Goree Carter. Pickens had a fine sense of harmony and tempo with his own personalized style. It was style that can be placed between the older Texas style of the Santa Fe group, with its strong ragtime influences, and the urban boogie piano with elements of the more sophisticated, jazzy bar-blues piano. His favorite key was B #, but he also played in many other keys like A, A#, G, C, or E# and often made use of minor chords similar to the playing of Montana Taylor. 

                                     

                              Here's "Ain't Nobody's Business."

Pickens later accompanied Alger "Texas" Alexander in the latter's final recording session, for Freedom Records in 1950. Later Pickens regularly performed with Lightnin' Hopkins and played on several of Hopkins's albums in the early 1960s, including Walkin' This Road by Myself (1962), Lightnin' and Co. (1962), and Smokes Like Lightning (1963). Pickens had by this time also recorded his own debut solo album, Buster Pickens (1960) that showed his thorough knowledge of the Texas blues style. He is known to have contributed to at least 17 blues albums and was featured in the short movie “The Blues” in 1962.  

Just when it appeared that he might finally attain the recognition he deserved, his promising new career in the blues revival was ended when he was shot and killed at age forty-eight by a cousin at the N.R. Lounge, a beer joint in Houston, as a result of a barroom dispute about a dollar on November 24, 1964. The report of his murder reached Hopkins, touring Europe at the time, who was deeply distressed by the news. 

(Edited from Texas State Historical Association, Wikipedia & Sunday Blues.org)