With record label. …Ed Wiley must have been a very busy musician that year, as his name also shows up on a number of Houston-based Mercury sessions at various times during 1951.” In late 1950, Wiley would leave Houston for good, heading to Baltimore to live with a relative and further his music education. It was at the Olde Mill in Baltimore that he met Brown. The two teamed up for a series of tours, adding pianist and fellow crooner Roosevelt Wardell. Wardell was just 16 years old at the time he met Wiley, but he had gained some notoriety of his own for the regional hit “Bernice” b/w “She Drinks Too Much Wine,” on the Melford label. It did not take long for the group to land a spot with the Shaw Artists agency, which booked them throughout the South and Midwest. After some months on the road, they again bumped into Shad, this time in Shreveport, La. At a radio station there, they cut four more sides for Sittin' In With, with Wiley as the leader: “Pack Up, Move Out” and “Molasses, Molasses,” both featuring Brown on vocals; and “West Indies Blues” and “Jumpin’ With the Blues,” instrumentals. The following year, Brown left the group, going on to record for various labels. But Wardell would remain with Wiley, recording together on numerous other occasions, including sessions for Atlantic, Rockin’, DeLuxe and King Records. Wiley and Wardell would remain close friends until Wardell died following a stroke-induced illness. Wardell died in 1999 at the Delaware Hospital for the Chronically Ill in Smyrna, Delaware. Birth of rock In 1952, the Continental booking agency paired Wiley with singer Jackie Brenston, who had released the hit "Rocket 88" for Chess one year earlier. Brenston had been one of pianist Ike Turner's Delta Cats, from Clarksdale, Miss. "Rocket 88," widely considered the first “rock-and-roll” record, had sizzled for a spell, but the fervor over the R&B hit soon died, about the same time that Wiley's stock was rising. Continental also suggested that Wiley include two other Clarksdale musicians, blues crooner "Screamin'" Johnny O'Neal and guitarist Earl Hooker, one of the most versatile and gifted guitarists of the early 1950s. In the Encyclopedia of the Blues, Gérard Herzhaft describes Hooker as a guitar “virtuoso.” Scott Stanton, in The Tombstone Tourist, effuses that Hooker had “a fretboard touch so smooth and clean, one would be