It is difficult to exaggerate the historical significance of Armenter (Bo Carter) Chatmon in regards to the Mississippi blues. He was a blues singer and a guitarist most often, but sometimes he picked up the banjo, the string-bass, the clarinet, and the mandolin. While his brothers initially limited him to playing bass viol, or the “bull fiddle” in the family band, he eventually developed into a master musician and clever songwriter who logged an almost unprecedented amount of studio time. From 1928 to 1940, no blues artist from Mississippi made more pre-World War II records than Bo Carter.

Bo Carter's blues music proved some of the “most inventive” of all the recorded blues musicians. Considering the deep well of traditional material that he could have drawn from, his inventiveness is even more remarkable. The majority of his more than one hundred songs reflect the work of a prodigious composer and astute businessman who managed to work as a songwriter, recording artist, and entertainer long after the careers of his brothers had ended. Yet Bo also served as the central organizing force in the Mississippi Sheiks, a string band made up of his kin that has since achieved legendary status in the annals of American music.

Despite a massive recording catalog, Bo’s life and career have suffered from serious neglect among popular musicians and scholars of the pre-World War II music industry, whether due to his reputation for using sexual metaphors in his songs or his lack of adherence to the gendered cultural construct of a country bluesman. “Trite pornographic ditties,” according to Stefan Grossman, made up the “majority of his pieces,” which suffered from his “lack in taste in making up lyrics.” Samuel Charters lampooned some rhythms of the Mississippi Sheiks, especially with Bo on guitar, as “so dull” they were “almost as bad as the white music” he heard in Memphis. Myths, debauchery, romanticism of an itinerant lifestyle, and folklore proved too enticing for others who simply hoped to perpetuate a stereotype, or fit blues artists into a certain romantic image of some “authentic” blues. The professionalism, integrity, dependability, stamina, versatility, and creativity of Bo Carter, however, have proven easy to dismiss as a dull footnote in the career of a purveyor of hokum blues.