Listening to Prestige 327: Willie Dixon

Willie Dixon occupies a special place in the history of the blues. He is really the blues' first professional songwriter.

The early blues singers had no need for a songsmith. They were telling their own stories, and they were singing them essentially to audiences who lived like them, thought like them, felt like them, experienced life like them. Their
songs were so self-directed as to be almost solipsistic, and there are a lot of paradoxes involved with this, the deepest and most potent one being that this near-solipsistic music has become so universal, perhaps the most potent way of expressing pure emotion that any art form has ever devised.

The relationship between the blues singers and their audience was intimate. They might play dances for the white overseers, but essentially they were singing to their own people, or to the dusty intimacy of the street corner. As the blues and jazz merged, and singers became part of an ensemble and moved onto the stages of theaters or speakeasies, the songs were still personal, but a separation between performer and audience was an inevitable result. The blues singer was now a professional entertainer, and while audiences might still react viscerally to the emotional intensity of the songs, they viewed the emotional and biographical particulars as interested outsiders.

Starting in the 1930s, the blues began to move northward. When John and Alan Lomax brought Lead Belly to New York, they tried to introduce a traditional folk blues singer to a black audience that had little interest. They were listening to Jimmie Lunceford and Cab Calloway and Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald. So Lead Belly found himself performing for an audience primarily composed of white leftists, and now the audience was really the other. The subtext of the blues had always been hard realism. Life is hard, and it's going to win, You can't change it, and you can't beat it. The best you can do is celebrate small victories: women, getting drunk, killing someone, grabbing a train and riding.  That's why racism was not a dominant theme in the early blues. It was just another fact of existence. But the subtext, indeed the manifesto of the white leftists was hope. We can change the world.

So the blues adapted to its audience. Leadbelly challenged racists as bourgeois men living in a bourgeois town. Big Bill Broonzy told his audiences that we could all get together and break up the old Jim Crow.

In the Midwest, in Chicago and Detroit, the new blues singers were still singing to black audiences, but that was different, too. The audiences weren't farmers and sharecropper's from the singer's home region. They were factory workers and shopowners, and they were from all over the South. The division between entertainer and audience was wider.

And this is the world that Willie Dixon, born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, entered. He had grown up with the blues, but when Leonard and Phil Chess, European immigrant merchants who had started a record label aimed at the colored market, hired him to supervise their recording sessions, he had moved some distance away from the blues. He was performing with a cocktail jazz trio modeled after Nat "King" Cole.

And he became the first great professional songwriter of the blues, blazing a trail that would be followed by Chuck Berry, by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, by Curtis Mayfield. With Chess, Dixon wrote songs that were, rather than deeply personal expressions of self, carefully and powerfully crafted personae for others, most famously Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf: the good-hearted sensualist and the sexual predator. The natural born lover, the son of a gun who can make pretty women jump and shout. And the back door man, the one around whom you had better watch your happy home, who eats more chicken than any other man has ever seen. Or Koko Taylor, the sensual banshee who can play that wang dang doodle all night long.

With Willie Dixon, Bob Weinstock and Bluesville were really making a commitment to the blues, a commitment that they would keep: Bluesville was unquestionably a blues label. It was a commitment that was sort of slow in developing. Weinstock had recorded Al Smith in September. The Willie Dixon session came in December, but it would be held in the can for a while. It would become Bluesville's third release, following a Sonny Terry-Brownie McGhee session of the following August.

The session seems to have been organized on the fly--the liner notes say it was recorded in two hours at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, when Willie and Slim were between flights, on their way back to Chicago. How Weinstock and Esmond Edwards heard they were in town is anyone's guess, but they threw together a very decent session, and this became Willie Dixon's debut album, although he had put out a handful of 45s for the Chess subsidiary, Checker. Memphis Slim had been fairly widely recorded on 45 by a number of independent labels, often leading a jump blues band, and often with Dixon on bass.

Blues and especially rhythm and blues, which was considered the first cousin to rock and roll and therefore declasse, was slow to be recorded on LP. The audience for long playing records was seen to be the more sophisticated audience for classical music, jazz and original cast recordings of Broadway shows. Moses Asch of Folkways Records put folk music on LP, including some blues, but outside of Lead Belly most of his blues was on compilation discs designed to appeal to folklorists. Labels like Caedmon specialized in spoken word recordings, particularly the widely appealing poetry and mellifluous reading voice of Dylan Thomas. But the independent labels that specialized in rhythm and blues, rock and roll and country didn't release LPs, and the majors weren't really interested until 1956, when RCA Victor bought Elvis Presley's contract from Sun. So it's not really surprising that artists like Dixon and especially the popular Memphis Slim were late to the LP table, nor that they were first recorded on LP by a jazz label from New York,

Drummer Gus Johnson and tenorman Harold Ashby were both Midwesterners who worked out of Chicago a lot, so they may have been touring with Dixon and Slim. Johnson had gottten his start with Jay McShann. He would be back to New York over the next few years to play on some other Prestige sessions. Ashby was a protege of Ben Webster's. Webster would recommend him to Duke Ellington, and he worked off and on with Ellington for many years. Finally, starting in the late 1960s, he would become a mainstay of the Ellington orchestra.

Wally Richardson was probably a local pickup. He was new to the scene, having just made his recording debut on an Atlantic album with LaVern Baker, but he had an interesting career ahead of him. He became an in-demand studio guitarist for Prestige and numerous other labels, and it was on Prestige that he had his moment in the sun in the late 1960s, with what has been described as a psychedelic jazz funk album, Soul Guru.  

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The whole group is heard to particularly good account on the instrumental "Go Easy." The best known song to have come out of the session was certainly "Built for Comfort,: which became a hit for Howlin' Wolf and has been a staple for blues singers ever since.

The name of the album was Willie's Blues. Bluesville released one single -- not "Built for Comfort," but "Nervous" b/w "Sittin' and Cryin the Bluse."

Order Listening to Prestige Vol 2

 

Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.

Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have
lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since
fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind
reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this
music.

                                                                                                                        --Dave Grusin

An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time
period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of
the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The
stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and
give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.

                                                                                                                --Murali Coryell