Jesse Onland

This somewhat bizarre version of “Banty Rooster Blues” was reissued on Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton. It was recorded before Charley’s version, but I’m under the impression that the song was written by Patton. I can’t find any information about this Walter Rhodes fellow besides this song.

Another documentary short, this time one about Charley Patton included in the box set “The Definitive Charley Patton – 75th Anniversary Edition”.

Blues Maker is a public domain documentary short produced by the University of Mississippi consisting mostly of a performance by Fred McDowell.

Alan Lomax recorded a young Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress on his trips to the South in 1941 and 1942. The results have been published as Down on Stovall’s Plantation and The Complete Plantation Recordings. They feature two versions of the song that would eventually become “Can’t Be Satisfied” and strike a strong contrast between the Delta blues/stringband style and the electric Chicago blues for which Muddy would be best-known.

Here’s more early post-rediscovery Son House. This has never been re-issued, which might be understandable given that it’s not his best material (even compared just to his post-rediscovery output). You can really tell that he’s just re-learning his way around his old songs.

In 1980, the famed underground comix artist R. Crumb produced a series of 36 cards featuring images of famous pre-war blues artists, drawn from photographs. You can (low-res) scans of each of them here. See also my post about his comic biography of Charley Patton.

Word (and the photo above) comes from Tommy’s niece Vera in Jackson, Mississippi via the folks at the Weenie Campbell forum that Tommy Johnson’s headstone has been broken by vandals. The headstone was only installed a few months ago after a decade-long legal battle to reopen the cemetery.

1. “D. T. Moan”, based on “Guitar Rag” by Sylvester Weaver.

2. “Hobo”.

3. “Pony Blues”, AKA “Shetland Pony Blues”, “Saddle My Pony”, etc. originally by Charley Patton.

4. “A Down The Staff”, similar to “American Defense” from his 1942 session for Lomax/Library of Congress.

This post is an expanded version of a 2009 post about Big Joe Williams, by far the most popular material on this blog.

I love the look and sound of Big Joe Williams’ guitars. He took a regular 6-string guitar with a raised pick guard, doubled the first, second, and fourth strings (like on a 12-string guitar or a mandolin), and then added a pickup and tone pot. With duct tape and paperclips, it seems. He would apparently play these guitars through amps jerry-rigged with pie tins and beer cans. The story is that he modified his guitars this way and tuned them to unusual variant tunings to keep others from playing them.

Besides his unusual guitars, he is best known for writing the popular blues standard Baby Please Don’t Go. From his Wikipedia article:

Born in Crawford, Mississippi, Williams as a youth began wandering across the United States busking and playing stores, bars, alleys and work camps. In the early 1920s he worked in the Rabbit Foot Minstrels revue and recorded with the Birmingham Jug Band in 1930 for the Okeh label.

In 1934, he was in St. Louis, where he met record producer Lester Melrose who signed him to Bluebird Records in 1935. He stayed with Bluebird for ten years, recording such blues hits as “Baby, Please Don’t Go” (1935) and “Crawlin’ King Snake” (1941), both songs later covered by many other performers. He also recorded with other blues singers, including Sonny Boy Williamson I, Robert Nighthawk and Peetie Wheatstraw.

Williams remained a noted blues artist in the 1950s and 1960s, with his guitar style and vocals becoming popular with folk-blues fans. He recorded for the Trumpet, Delmark, Prestige and Vocalion labels, among others. He became a regular on the concert and coffeehouse circuits, touring Europe and Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s and performing at major U.S. music festivals.

Williams’ guitar playing was in the Delta blues style, and yet was unique. He played driving rhythm and virtuosic lead lines simultaneously and sang over it all. He played with picks both on his thumb and index finger, plus his guitar was heavily modified. Williams added a rudimentary electric pick-up, whose wires coiled all over the top of his guitar. He also added three extra strings, creating unison pairs for the first, second and fourth strings. During the 1920s and 1930s, Williams had gradually added these extra strings in order to keep other guitar players from being able to play his guitar.

He died December 17, 1982 in Macon, Mississippi.

This performance is one in a series originally broadcast by a public television station in Seattle.

This is a clip from Legends of Country Blues Guitar Vol. 2. The artist featured in the end of the clip, after Big Joe’s performance, is Houston Stackhouse.