Beverly Watkins, a rare woman among blues guitarists, who cleaned homes when music did not pay her enough and did not record her first solo album until she was 60, died on Oct. 1 in Atlanta. She was 80.

Her son and only immediate survivor, Stanley Watkins, said the cause was a heart attack that had been preceded by a stroke.

Ms. Watkins called her music lowdown, stomping blues and complemented it with crowd-pleasing antics into her 70s — playing her electric guitar on her back and behind her head, sliding across the stage. When she sang, it was often with a growl .

“She’d been doing all that since the late 1950s, but she wasn’t a star because she’d been a sideman most of her career, playing with bands that didn’t have hits,” Brett J. Bonner, editor of Living Blues magazine, said by phone. “She was a fabulous guitar player.”