Listening to Prestige 412: Robert Pete Williams

November of 1960 was pretty much devoted to the blues at Bob Weinstock's label. Robert Pete Williams is another artist brought to Bluesville by folklorist Kenneth. S. Goldstein, Free Again is a more than apt title for the album: Williams had just been released from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where he was serving time for murder (he had shot a man in a bar fight in 1956: he claimed self defense).

By that time he had been playing music around Baton

Rouge, Louisiana, since the 1930. while he supported himself by working in a sawmill. He had never made much money from the local fish fries, dances an church picnics he played at, but he was developing a unique guitar style and a powerful if idiosyncratic command of the blues, composing his own material, largely on the spot and improvised. He was discovered in prison by folklorists Harry Oster and Richard Allen.

Oster had found a circuitous route to the Angola prison. The son of Polish-Russian Jewish immigrants, a WWII vet and a Columbia Business School MBA, he then switched directions and took a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Cornell in English, and following the route of the migrant academic, took a position in the English Department at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, in 1955. If he didn't exactly travel in the same Baton Rouge social circles as Williams, their paths would cross soon enough as his burgeoning interest in folklore (He co-founded the Louisiana Folklore Society in 1956)  took him inside the walls of Angola to record the songs and reminiscences of inmates.

Struck by Williams's talent, as John and Alan Lomax had been by Lead Belly a generation earlier, and like the Lomaxes, he successfully petitioned the governor of Louisiana to give Williams a pardon. But it came with more strings than had been attached to Lead Belly's pardon. He had been able to go to New York (officially listed as the Lomaxes' chauffeur) and create something of a career for himself as a musician. Williams was placed on something called "servitude parole," which was like indentured servitude, only worse. He was ordered to work 80 hours a week on a farm near Baton Rouge, with only room and board for compensation. In "Death Blues," he compares his life in prison to his life of so-called freedom:

You know, they, they do allow a man a break up there.  But I ain't had nary here, since I been here.   

So there was no flying to New York for a Bluesville recording session in Englewood Cliffs with some of Prestige's finest musicians. Dr. Goldstein had to come down to Baton Rouge to record him there, with just his guitar.

Which for a Delta blues singer like Williams, with a style as idiosyncratic as his, is probably the best way to present him. He doesn't often bother with niceties like rhyme, and his songs often drift between free associative asides and equally free-associative sung parts. "Death Blues" is mostly talking -- addressed to a loved one, confessing thoughts of suicide and revealing that he sometimes feels dead already, before breaking into song with the heartbreaking "I don't blame nobody, nobody but myself."

The early country blues of Charlie Patton, Peetie Wheatstraw and the like are rightly prized for their authenticity. Decades later, the focus of the blues had shifted from the Delta to places like Chicago,  and Po' Henry Dorsey, a valued octogenarian blues singer from Louisiana, was to tell a 21st century interviewer that his chief influences had come from John R., the popular rhythm and blues disc jockey from WLAC in Nashville whose shows went out over clear channel starting in the 1950s. Coming a generation after the blues pioneers, Williams's music is still as authentic as it gets. The subject matter of his songs as recorded by Oster and Goldstein is largely his prison experience, with titles like "Parole Renied Again."

One of his most powerful songs. "I've Grown So Ugly," dessribes what prison will do to a man, changing him to the point where his girlfriend no longer recognizes him:

I left Angola
1964
Go walking down my street
Knock on my baby’s door
My baby come out
She asks me who I am
And I say, honey,
Don’t you know your man?
She said my man’s been gone
Since 1942
And I’ll tell you Mr. Ugly,
He didn’t look like you

The song, also called "Grown So Ugly," has been covered a couple of times by more contemporary artists. The iconoclastic Captain Beefheart recorded it in 1967, probably drawn to its dysphoric theme. In 2004, it was recorded by the Black Keys,  a white rock duo known for its blues influences.They're a good band, and they do a creditable job on the song, but it is very much the blues filtered through the prism of white privilege. Hopefully Williams got some royalties from the Beefheart version; he died in 1980, so the Black Keys were too late for him. An arrangement of it by the modernist classical composer Steven Mackey has been recorded by the Brentano String Quartet.

Williams's servitude parole ended in 1964, and he was able to play the Newport Folk Festival that year, and continue touring and playing folk and blues festivals in the USA and Europe. He would make several more albums, but Free Again is regarded by many as his best recorded session.