Weldon was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and later lived and worked in Chicago, Illinois. He was one of the early musicians who recorded playing slide guitar. He played upbeat, hokum and country blues tunes. Playing a National steel guitar flat on his lap Hawaiian style, he was known as the "Hawaiian Guitar Wizard". Weldon was married to the singer and guitarist Memphis Minnie in the 1920s. Only recently it has been widely accepted that he is not the musician, Will Weldon, who recorded between 1927 and 1928 as a member of the Memphis Jug Band. Weldon cut over 60 sides for Bluebird and Vocalion. He was also an active session guitarist, performing on records by Teddy Darby, Bumble Bee Slim, Peetie Wheatstraw, and Memphis Minnie. On Memphis Minnie's last recording for Bluebird Records, in October 1935, Weldon accompanied her for the first time. He played on two sides, "When the Sun Goes Down, Part 2" and "Hustlin' Woman Blues". He had solo hits with his two best-known songs, "Somebody Done Changed the Lock on That Door" and "We Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town". After his divorce from Memphis Minnie, he married the blues singer Geeshie Wiley. They disappeared from the public eye soon after, and he had stopped recording by 1938. His date of death is unknown but is presumed to be sometime around 1970.
He played a National steel guitar flat on his lap Hawaiian style. His slide guitar solos were emotional and unique. His style of playing was influential on the emerging Chicago Blues style.
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By arwulf arwulf
Steel guitarist Will Weldon is remembered as Casey Bill Weldon, and was also known in his time as Kansas City Bill and Levee Joe. "Casey", like "KC" or "Kaycee," referred to his links with the Kansas City music scene, although he could just as easily have been named after Pine Bluff, AK where he was born in 1909, or Atlanta or Memphis where he made his first recordings in 1927 after performing in medicine shows throughout the south. Inspired directly by the great Peetie Wheatstraw, Weldon was equally adept at expressing himself as a passionate blues singer and as a honky-tonk "country" performer who contributed to the development of Western swing. He was sometimes billed as the Hawaiian Guitar Wizard. The "Guitar Wizard" handle was borrowed from Tampa Red whereas the Polynesian reference stems back through Sol Hoopi's influence on the transportation of guitars by Portuguese sailors in the 18th century, and the subsequent development of the steel guitar by indigenous Hawaiians. Weldon's use of the steel (as opposed to bottleneck slide) guitar as a blues instrument was innovative, and his stylistic choices have since made him difficult to pigeonhole. Events leading to the dissolution of his short-lived marriage to Memphis Minnie may have inspired his three best-known tunes, which are staples in the classic blues repertoire: "Somebody's Got to Go," "Somebody Changed the Lock on My Door," and "We Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town."
Weldon recorded extensively under his own name during the years 1935-1938. Additionally, a thorough examination of his 11-year recording career reveals collaborations with Memphis Minnie, the Memphis Jug Band, Charlie Burse & the Picaninny Jug Band, Vol Stevens, Ollie Rupert, Leroy Henderson, Arnett Nelson, Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, Charlie & Joe McCoy, Amos Easton (also known as Bumble Bee Slim); Blind Teddy Darby, the Hokum Boys, the Brown Bombers of Swing, Washboard Sam, and of course Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law. Although no studio recordings seem to have been made after December 1938, Weldon is known to have performed using an electrically amplified guitar in 1941, and following a move to Los Angeles, he is known to have provided incidental music for film soundtracks. In 1968, guitarist Ted Bogan ran into him in Chicago. Weldon told him he had given up being a musician and was engaged in some other line of work in Detroit. Perhaps that is where he died. Nearly 60 years after they first appeared, Casey Bill Weldon's primary recordings were reissued in three volumes by the Document label, and various selections of his works have since been presented by Document's offshoot Classic Blues as well as the EPM, Catfish, and Fremeaux labels. It is unfortunate that Weldon does not appear on Proper's Steelin' It: The Steel Guitar Story, but then neither does the amazing Ceele Burke, who recorded with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Fats Waller in the '30s. Nor does Luther Jones, whose Hawaiian-style steel guitar added luster to the provocative "Grunt Meat Blues" as recorded by the Memphis Seven in 1947 and reissued years later in Columbia's box set Roots n' Blues: The Retrospective 1925-1950, a multi-racial, multi-genre collection with a lengthy personnel listing which unfortunately does not include Casey Bill Weldon.