Weepin' Willie Robinson

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By Noah Bierman and Alex I. Oster Globe Correspondent / December 31, 2007 Weepin' Willie Robinson smoked his last cigarette in bed yesterday morning at a Jamaica Plain rest home. The cigarette sparked a fire that ended the legendary blues man's rich and textured life. Robinson, 81, had been a sharecropper, an Army veteran, a friend of famous entertainers like B.B. King. He had been homeless and then was rediscovered as a treasure who played with the likes of Susan Tedeschi, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, and Bonnie Raitt and won local music honors. Even when he was homeless on the street, too tired to stand, or losing his memory, Robinson never stopped performing. "He was truly the elder statesman of the [Boston] blues. He was our godfather. He was the most dear man," said Holly Harris, host of "Blues on Sunday" on WBOS radio. When he sang, "you knew he meant it because he had passion," Harris said. Born in Atlanta in 1926, Robinson picked cotton and fruit with his family up and down the East Coast. After spending some of the 1940s in the Army, he wound up in Trenton, N.J., as an emcee and doorman at blues clubs, according to friends, a biography posted on his website, and a 2005 interview with the Globe. There, in the 1950s, he rubbed shoulders with King, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and other luminaries. King suggested he try singing, but Robinson shot back, "I don't know but three songs and all of them are yours," according his biography. Robinson sang with King's 21-piece orche

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