Listening to Prestige 503: Big Joe Williams

LISTEN TO ONE: 38 Pistol Blues

This is not Joe WIlliams the smooth-voiced jazz singer who first wowed audiences with the Count Basie orchestra (and actually there was a third blues singing Joe Williams, who made at least one record in the 1950s, and a fourth, who made one record in the 1960s as Big Joe Williams, after Joseph Lee Williams started using that name. Unlike the the two Sonny Boy Williamsons, both of whom adopted that name, all of the Joe Williamses seem to have come by their name at birth).  This Big Joe Williams was the real thing, from the Mississippi Delta, singing and playing in the classic style with an anything-but-classic instrument.

Williams played a nine-string guitar, a jerry-built instrument created by adding three tuning pegs to the top of his guitar, and doubling up three strings.

A lot of rural blues musicians got their start on homemade instruments, frequently made from cigar boxes and whatever wire could be scrounged up around the family home. Joe Lee Williams made his first guitar that way, with one string. It took a lot of ingenuity to make a guitar like this, and perhaps even more ingenuity to play it and musical sounds on it. To graduate from a one-string guitar to a more advanced homemade model, perhaps with three strings, perhaps even with piano wire or someone's old, discarded guitar strings, would have been heaven to a youngster in love with music. To get a real guitar--perhaps from the Sears catalog, or perhaps by making some sort of deal with a music store in the nearest big town--would involve considerable sacrifice on the part of the young musician's parents, so he/she would have to have become really good on the homemade instrument. Anyone who has started to learn on an old Stella guitar with an unforgiving high action knows how hard it is to achieve competence, let alone virtuosity--and that's a store-bought guitar that cost real money, even if not as much as a Martin or a Gibson.

This latter was important to the early blues musicians. There was not a strong proprietary sense about  song lyrics, which is why the same or similar verses crop up in the recorded songs of different blues singers (and which is part of the reason why so many rhythm and blues and rock and roll performers got ripped off in music publishing deals). But guitar styles were a different matter, and they were jealously guarded. A lot of the stage tricks of early blues players (later adapted by showmen like Jimi Hendrix) were designed for that purpose--so no one could figure out exactly what they were doing with their fingers. And this practice wasn't limited to guitar players. Many of Fats Domino's recordings were slightly speeded up--partly so they would be sprightlier for dancing, but also so that he would not exactly be playing in any key, thus making his sound impossible to duplicate.

Stories vary on why Williams first built a 9-string guitar. Perhaps it was an inspiration while he was fixing a broken tuning peg on his six-string. Perhaps it was to create a sound that could not be imitated.

Big Joe Williams did succeed--partly through the uniqueness of his instrument, mostly through his talent--in creating a unique sound, one that carried him from his first (1930) recordings with the Birmingham Jug Band through to his final sessions in 1982, with recording action in each intervening decade.

A couple of things you should know about Williams.

One, he wrote one of the most enduring blues classics: "Baby, Please Don't Go." First recorded by him in 1935 by Joe Williams' Washboard Blues Singers on Bluebird, it has been covered close to 200 times by virtually every blues singer from Muddy Waters to T-Bone Walker to Big Mama Thornton, by rockers like Paul Revere and the Raiders and Aerosmith, by zydeco legend Clifton Chenier, and by Mose Allison on his first album for Columbia, The Transfiguration of Hiram Brown.

Second, there's his long and fruitful relationship with Bob Dylan, starting...well, that's up for debate. It may have started in Chicago in 1947, as Williams remembers it:

"I first met Bob about 1946 or 1947, in Chicago.  I disremember the

exact year, but he was very very young, probably no more than six.  He

looked the same that he looks now.  I think he was just born with that

talent.  He used to get up on his tiptoes and was cracking wise just

the way he do now.

Well, I was just working on the streets of Chicago then, the way I had

done since 1927.  Somehow or other he knew songs I had made on

records, like 'Baby, Please Don't Go' and 'Highway Forty-Nine.'  He

met me on the North Side, around State and Grand, and we just walked

down to State and Thirty-Fifth Street. I was working, singing, all the

way along.  If we came up to some cabaret where he couldn't get in

because he was too young, I would just leave him outside on the

curbstone.

Or maybe not, although Dylan, in a 1962 interview, offered a similar story about running away to Chicago when he was ten:

I saw a Negro musician playing his guitar on the street and I went up

to him and began accompanying him on the spoons. 

Dylan wasn't above making up stories about his life, especially back in 1962. Perhaps we should go with the version offered by Delmark Records founder Robert Koester, on the cover notes to a Delmark recording of Williams:

[Big Joe Williams] first session for Delmark was improptu (still

unissued), recorded at Jackovac's tavern.  Erwin Helfer, on his way

from college in New Orleans, played piano.  In the fall of '57, Big

Joe looked up Erwin in Chicago who booked a recording session for

Cobra Records and a night at the College of Complexes where Bob Dylan

befriended Joe.

A 16-year-old Dylan could have been in Chicago in 1957. He was a Midwesterner, and he was passionate about music (more rock and roll than blues at that point), and if you were from the Midwest and wanted to hear the blues, Chicago is where you went. 

This may be more apocrypha, but hey, this is the blues. And as with Liberty Valance -- "print the legend." So why not  6-year-old Bob Dylan roaming the streets of Chicago with an old blues singer?

This we do know: Dylan credited Big Joe Williams with being an important influence. We also know that Dylan and Williams must have had some sort of a history, because in the early 1960s Dylan, already the young heir apparent to Woody Guthrie as the beacon of the folk music world, convinced Mike Porco, the owner of Gerde's Folk City, already the epicenter of the new folk revival, to book Williams as a frequent headliner, and Dylan often sat in with him. In 1964, when Victoria Spivey's new label issued Three Kings and the Queen (tracks by Spivey, Williams, Roosevelt Sykes and Lonnie Johnson), two cuts were billed as by Big Joe Williams and Bob Dylan.

Martin Williams, on the liner notes to this album, tells us that the session came about very quickly and casually. Williams called up Ken Goldstein, told him that he was in town, would like to record, and would like a harmonica player on the date. Goldstein had studio time booked for the next day, but he canceled the scheduled act to make room for Williams. When Williams showed up in the studio, Goldstein had found a harmonica player: Larry Johnson, from Georgia, who would go on to study guitar with Gary Davis and become a recognized blues performer in his own right. He had also come up with a bass player: none other than Willie Dixon, the producing and songwriting genius of Chess Records. Dixon had made a Bluesville album of his own in 1959, with Memphis Slim.

Williams dips into that familiar pool of blues themes. The gal who is a jockey, and teaching him how to ride. The coalman and iceman as lovers who deliver to your door. The hard headed woman. The fool for love, and the .38 pistol. But he makes them his own, and drives them home with that 9-string guitar.

This was an all-day session that produced 22 songs, which were released on two Bluesville albums, Blues for 9 Strings and Studio Blues. They were later rereleased as a single CD package, as Walking Blues. Ken Goldstein produced.