Blues musician best known for his work with Canned Heat.

The blues s… Read Full Bio ↴Blues musician best known for his work with Canned Heat.

The blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player Robert Lucas, who has died aged 46, apparently from a drug overdose, spent the last five years of the last century as the front man of the seemingly everlasting blues band Canned Heat.

Lucas grew up in Long Beach, California, where he began playing harmonica at the age of 13 and slide guitar three years later. He also worked in a band led by the guitarist Bernie Pearl. By the late 1980s, he was being hailed in the blues press as "by far one of the brightest new blues talents on the road today ... he gives knockout performances in both solo acoustic country blues style and the electric Chicago style band blues." At various times he shared a stage with such eminences grises of the blues as Big Joe Turner, Lowell Fulson, Pee Wee Crayton, Percy Mayfield and Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson.

His first album, the mostly solo Across the River (1989), proved to be a fairly accurate template for several that followed it, in its mixture of original songs and blues by Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Fred McDowell, sources to which he would return on Usin' Man Blues (1990), Built for Comfort (1992) and the more elaborately produced Layaway (1994).

Working with a band under the billing Luke and the Locomotives, he recorded an eponymous album in 1991 that earned an approving comment from the veteran bluesman Robert Lockwood, Jr: "This record has that old sound, that old Chicago sound." The foremost Chicago-based songwriter and producer Willie Dixon also spoke well of them: "This young man and his band brought back so many good memories to me ... The wisdom of the words in Lucas's songs is that of a true bluesman."

By the time he came to make Layaway, Lucas was writing more and more of his material, and his last album in his own name, 1997's Completely Blue, consisted almost entirely of original songs. By then he was ensconced in Canned Heat, which he had joined in 1995, the 30th anniversary of the band formed by two blues record collectors, Bob "The Bear" Hite and Henry Vestine, and the talented guitarist and musicologist Al Wilson. Wilson, who sang the band's best-remembered numbers, On the Road Again and Going Up the Country, died in 1970, and Hite in 1981, and the position of lead singer had been taken by Mark Skyer, Walter Trout and James Thornbury.

Lucas's burly frame - he described himself in one of his songs as "50 pounds of bone wrapped up in two hundred pounds of ham" - and rasping, undisciplined voice production made him a particularly apt inheritor of Hite's role, and the Canned Heat of the later 1990s faithfully recreated the band's trademark sound, described by one critic as "the where-I-step-a-flower-dies boogie". Two years into Lucas's spell with the band, the last founder member, Henry Vestine, died after their final date on a tour of Europe, where the band has always had a devoted following.

Lucas left Canned Heat in 2000 to return to a solo career, but little had been heard of him in recent years. His former manager Skip Taylor said, "His unequalled fury and stage presence, together with his earth-shattering vocal delivery, gave him the ability to channel many of the blues masters through his words, songs and musical ability."

He is survived by his parents, his sister and a teenage son.

• Robert Lucas, blues musician, born 25 July 1962; died 23 November 2008