‘Elder statesman’ of Boston blues

“Weepin’ ” Willie Robinson, 81, who sang the blues with B.B. King in the 1950s but recorded his only solo album decades later as part of a project to preserve the stories and sounds of aging bluesmen, died Sunday in a fire at a rest home in Jamaica Plain, Mass. The fire was started by a cigarette he was smoking in bed, the Boston Fire Department said.

Robinson’s CD, “At Last, On Time,” was released by Blue Heaven Studios, which tries to preserve the music of “the most authentic, real blues guys,” label founder Chad Kassem told The Times when the recording came out in 2000.

Of his late-in-life recording, Robinson said in 2000, “It’s kind of like a kid who ain’t ever had a piece of candy in his life and he finally got one.”

The singer was “the elder statesman” of Boston blues, Holly Harris, host of a blues radio show in Boston, said in the Boston Globe obituary.

Born in Atlanta, Robinson grew up picking cotton and fruit on the East Coast. After serving in the Army in the 1940s, he became an emcee and doorman at blues clubs in Trenton, N.J., where he met King and other legends and eventually sang with King.

Robinson settled in Boston in 1959 and played in clubs but by 2005 was homeless. Blues performers held a benefit concert for him, and he was rediscovered by such musicians as Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and Bonnie Raitt.