Information about Walter "Buddy Boy" Hawkins remains quite fragmentary, but there does seem to be a consensus that he was probably born in Blytheville, Arkansas sometime in the 1880s or 1890s. Although much of the state bears cultural and geographic similarities to northeastern Texas and northwestern Louisiana, his hometown's proximity to the Mississippi River meant that it was more in the Memphis-Mississippi Delta sphere of influence. As Paul Oliver theorizes in his excellent notes for Document's William Harris & Buddy Boy Hawkins - Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order CD, Hawkins may have operated primarily in the Jackson, Mississippi-Birmingham, Alabama corridor since these two cities are prominently mentioned in some of his songs. He was unique among recorded blues singers in terms of his playing. Jerome Epstein, author of this album's liner notes explains,

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