WILLIE KENT was one of the now dwindling band of Chicago bluesmen who brought their own brand of tough, Delta-hardened blues music from Mississippi to Chicago in the immediate postwar years. As a group they created an electrified and electrifying body of music that would go on to influence not only groups such as the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds and Fleetwood Mac but also create the bedrock upon which the foundations of modern rock music were built.

A distinctive and solid bass player and a powerful vocalist, Kent was always in demand and became a familiar face to those who frequented Chicago’s many blues clubs.

Born in Inverness, Mississippi, Kent arrived in Chicago in 1952. A day job as a truck driver gave him time to watch and learn from the blues greats he already admired — Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter. By 1957 he was lending his vocal talents to several local groups using vocal skills he had learnt at church. “My mother she didn’t drink, she didn’t smoke, she didn’t do nothing but go to church. We sang in the choir. So that’s where it came from,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2002.

By 1958 he was playing guitar as well but found his true career a year later when he deputised for a drunken bass player who had failed to turn up for a gig. During the 1960s he honed his skills by working with bands led by Hip Linkchain and Jimmy Dawkins, and he cut his first album with fellow bluesman Willie James Lyons in 1975.

It was not until the following decade, after Kent had been forced to give up his day job because of a heart complaint, that he really hit his stride as the impressive and influential leader of Willie Kent and the Gents, playing blues that kept its authentic Mississippi Delta edge. “So many people now are playing so much funk, it doesn’t sound like the blues,” he would later complain. A string of outstanding albums for labels such as Delmark and Wolf kept his sound alive and won critical acclaim as well as ten W. C. Handy awards.

On his website Kent summed up his music succinctly. “You can dance to it or just let it wash over you . . . This music touches you where it hurts, then heals you. In short, it is the blues.”

Willie Kent, blues bass player and vocalist, was born on September 24, 1936. He died on March 2, 2006, aged 69.