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By Garth Cartwright
Joe Perry Tillis was born in Alabama's Talladega County and raised in Coffee County, near Elba. His family were sharecroppers, and Tillis's father had him picking cotton from a young age. The family found relief in music and religion; Tillis's plantation often hosted a Saturday-night fish fry with blues accompaniment, while on Sunday morning the family attended the local Pentecostal church.
Tillis took up music when he was 14; his first instrument was a ukulele. Having saved for months for an acoustic guitar, he was soon busking on the streets, while still working as a farm labourer. Then he found that playing country blues, the style that flourished along the Mississippi Delta from the late 1920s into the mid-1930s, paid better. By the early 1940s he was working with legendary Texan musician Blind Willie Johnson.
Tillis sang and played slide guitar. "I always did play alone," he later told an interviewer. "I never did like no band. If I went off and things didn't go good, nobody would know it but me."
Tillis travelled all over the US as a bluesman, initially hitchhiking or riding freight trains. The reason he never got recognition from the largely white audiences who have embraced blues music since the 1960s is that he refused to record.
"I never did want no records much," he said. "There just wasn't enough in it. See, I could get out there with my guitar, I played the blues and I'd get out there in a club or some building and make myself $2000 a week. I couldn't get that on records."
Living on the road meant that Tillis often played with his more famous Mississippi brethren, men such as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.
In the late 1940s, Tillis drove trucks for a local firm, but had to retire after the onset of blindness in 1954. He focused on playing blues again and employed a neighbour to drive him around the country until 1967, when a religious conversion returned him to the church.
Instead of giving up music, he turned his talents to making gospel music at Our Saviour Jesus Holiness Pentecostal Church in Samson, Alabama. In 1970 he began playing electric slide-guitar to accompany his hymns and preaching. Never ordained, he adopted the title "Bishop" and until recently gave services on the first and third Sundays of every month.
It was his unique gospel-blues style that drew the attention of folklorists, and Tillis eventutally allowed himself to be recorded by Dutch and American musicologists who were intent on preserving the now largely extinct rural forms of music that he played.
He is survived by his third wife, daughter, son and several stepchildren.
Joe Perry Tillis, musician, born July 29 1919; died November 3 2004.