Release Date: 1974.
Recording Time: 45 minutes.
Release Info: BG-2013, Vinyle, LP.
Produced for Blue Goose Records, a Div. of Yellow Bee Productions, Inc.
For a guitarist of such uncommon ability Bill Williams enjoyed an all-too brief period of public recognition. Within fifteen minutes of the time he first picked up an instrument in 1908 he was accomplished enough to play a song, but he was still completely unknown beyond his home town of Greenup, Kentucky before Blue Goose recorded him in the fall of 1970 and issued an album (Low and Lonesome) that brought him unqualified acclaim as a 73-year old folk find. A brief series of concert engagements (notably at the Smithsonian Institution and the Mariposa Folk Festival) followed, along with an extended recording session in New York, before a heart ailment brought about his musical retirement. In October of 1973, nearly three years to the day of his recording debut, he was fatally stricken in his sleep. This memorial album and its soon to be released sequel will constitute the remainder of Bill's musical legacy.
At the time of his death Williams unquestionably ranked as one of America's two or three finest traditional guitarists, and his passing serves as a bleak reminder that the forms he specialized in have all but perished in their original settings. Yet he would have sounded exceptional even in the heyday of country blues and ragtime, and the debut album that drew such comments as "incredible" from reviewers would have done credit to a far younger musician. It is difficult to eulogize Bill's musicianship, however, for there has never been a provision for anyone quite like him within the customary framework of blues or folksong research. Having made no 78 recordings in the Twenties, he had no status as a living or "lost" legend. Nor was he the product of any discernable blues tradition: the musician he most resembled was himself. He was sometimes labelled an "East Coast bluesman", but he had spent the last fifty years of his life in midwestern Greenup, far removed from his Richmond, Virginia origins.
Ultimately, Bill was not even a blues guitarist in the strict sense of the word. In the fashion of Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, and Sam Chatmon, he worked within a myriad assortment of folk forms (blues, spirituals, ragtime, and hillbilly music) coupled with numerous adaptations of pop pieces. He was somewhat bewildered, in fact, by the disproportionate attention his blues received from younger listeners, and liked to chastize his New York admirers for their preoccupation with the form. "I know they're crazy about blues here in New York," he stated during his last recording session, "but if you go anywhere else in this country, you'll find people mostly like patriotic tunes."
A "patriotic" tune, in Bill's lexicon, was any pop or white folk standard. To the end of his life he enjoyed playing such diverse pieces as the Star-Spangled Banner (which he considered the most challenging piece in his repertoire) and Jingle Bells. Although he once recalled that in his native Richmond, "... all you hear ... was blues, because everybody down there played blues," his original guitar effort was the "patriotic" Yankee Doodle Dandy, and his teenage repertoire included such works as Casey Jones (a vaudeville hit from 1909) and Long Ways To Tipperary (an English import popular during World War One), both learned from his older brother James, who strummed his instrument. His Greenup audience, which often heard Bill at square dances accompanying a white fiddler and banjo player, "never paid no attention to blues ..." But for all his dutiful patriotism he was never basically a traitor to the blues idiom: he approached nearly all of his material from a blues perspective, rendering it with what he called "diminished chords" (partial chords), and always fingerpicking with a heavy rhythmic bounce. "There's songs that you could strum a guitar," he told Rob Fleder in an interview for Sing Out, "but I never did believe in the strumming ones so I didn't do much strumming. Once in a while I'd get tired of using my finger, and they'd be dancing and making a lot of noise so I'd strum it." Unlike most blues guitarists, however, he put an equal premium on key variations.
With the self-depreciation that was so typical of him, he said: "I never did like to see nobody play for no dancing or party or nothing and just play in one key. You can't call anybody no musician - course, I'm not really a musician as far as that goes - a person can't call himself a musician that plays in just one key."
As Bill never played professionally (or even for hire), there was no practical reason for his versatility or even his departures from blues norms. Most of his peers in Richmond, he noted, were limited to blues in the key of E, and in the course of his provincial existence, he met few guitarists of any stature. He recalled once seeing Blind Lemon Jefferson (as did, it would seem, nearly every performer of his generation) and the hillbilly great Riley Puckett, but only in passing. His oft-recounted association with the legendary Blind Blake meant much less to himself than to blues researchers, and there were only tenuous musical connections between them. He always seemed to have greater difficulty with the handful of given Blake motifs he played than with daredevil works like Pocahontas or The Chicken (both of which appeared on his first album).
Whether Bill's perfunctory recollections of Blind Blake were plausible or not is still open to question. For example, he once remarked that Blake had joked about wanting to marry his sister, and had begun a correspondence with her after moving to Chicago to make records. When the sister was located near Richmond she proved to have no knowledge whatsoever of Blake's existence.
Perhaps Bill's very claim to have known Blake in the first place was a figment of imagination or an elaborate private joke, for it was often difficult to tell when he was being serious. In order to produce groans from his listeners (whose eventual skepticism made no impression on him) he would make ominous threats to quit guitar-playing, or harp upon how much he despised the activity, even though it appeared to occupy most of his leisure time. Towards the end of his first recording session in Greenup, he made a dramatic announcement that a compelling appointment in nearby Vanceburg would make it impossible for him to complete his album. When first offered a tour of folk clubs in the east, he similarly pretended to balk at the prospect of traveling. With the air of a used-car salesman he would offer to teach his entire repertoire to younger guitarists for forty dollars, making progressively lower offers as his high- pressure sales pitch met with resistance. The purpose of this ruse (if anything, he would have given lessons for free) was never clear. He liked to be mildly scandalous in respectable company, as when he would suddenly recite a ribald toast or recount episodes of barnyard bestiality, giving the impression that it was his favorite outdoor sport. His assortment of quirks seemed no less formidable than his guitar techniques; one recalls his incurable habit of grinding his teeth while playing guitar (which posed a considerable engineering problem during his recording sessions, as it produced a squeaking sound), his perpetual insomnia, and his Spartan diet (he seemed to subsist entirely on cheese, crackers, and baking soda). Locally, it was rumored that Bill had become slightly "touched in the head" after having suffered a fall.
That Bill's musical faculties remained spectacularly intact at an age when most of his contemporaries had gone musically senile is amply illustrated by the songs on this album. Perhaps the true measure of his capabilities was his knack for converting a shopworn staple like Salty Dog into a guitar masterpiece instead of playing it in routine fashion.
The predominant key of Bill's works was C, and he usually tuned a half step (sometimes a full step) low on the guitar. Railroad Bill, a ragtime song in C, is a salute to a once-notorious Alabama train robber and one of the most famous pieces in black folk tradition. Bill's susceptibility to unabashedly sentimental songs (he was capable of shedding tears while listening to a maudlin lyric like Lonnie Johnson's There Is No Justice) is illustrated by his renditions of I'll Be With You When The Roses Bloom Again and Blue Eyes (a piece associated with A.P. Carter), two traditional white ballads in the key of C. While the prohibition era recalled by the former piece (which is said to actually date to the nineteenth century) now seems remote, Greenup County still bans the sale of liquor.
Darktown Strutter's Ball which is played in the key of F, was Bill's recapitulation of the famous ragtime hit by black composer Shelton Brooks, which originally appeared in 1917 and was popularized by Sophie Tucker. The spiritual Some Of These Days (not to be confused with another Brooks standard) ranks with the classic Jaybird Coleman recording I'm Gonna Cross The River Of Jordan (cf. Yazoo L-1022) and is played in the key of C. That's The Human Thing To Do, a pop vehicle, is played in the key of E. Blake's Rag was Bill's impression of an unrecorded Blind Blake instrumental and remains something of a curiosity because Blake never recorded any ragtime instrumentals in the same key (Germany). Bubblegum, a blues in D, is likewise an evocation of an unrecorded Blake theme.
Mockingbird, one of Bill's supreme instrumental efforts (he considered it almost as difficult to play as the Star- Spangled Banner) was an American pop song of 1855 vintage; though it became a white fiddle standard (from whence Bill derived it), its original composer was a black Philadelphian who played the piece on guitar. Bill's interpretation is played in the key of A. Salty Dog and Corn Liquor Blues (the latter was inspired by a Papa Charlie Jackson recording) are both in the key of G, while the twin ragtime standards, Pallet On The Floor and Nobody's Business, are played in their usual key of C. While many of Bill's songs are traditional, they ultimately illustrate less about blues traditions than about the wizardry that was once Bill Williams. ~ Stephen Calt
Reviews: Like so many folk artists the late Bill Williams from Greenup, Kentucky was best appreciated in person. Deprived of that opportunity forever, you can hear him to good advantage on The Late Bill Williams: Blues, Rags and Baflads (Blue Goose 2013). Williams' repertoire spanned blues, ragtime instrumentals, hymns and "patriotics" (a term he used for almost any white or pop standard), Bill played in an intricate guitar style with lots of syncopation and doubletiming, although it lacked the harmonic diversity or "contrapuntal" ideas of many blues musicians. Williams' voice had the edge and brilliance of the Memphis songbird, Frank Stokes, but with a richness all its own. This album captures the very best in his playing from the quickfingered treatment of "Salty Dog" and the lively instrumental "That's the Human Thing To Do" to the bluesy "Bubblegum" ("my tongue feels like Bubblegum!"). He even pulls off the sentimental country spoof "When the Rows Bloom for the Bootlegger." An added bonus is the fine cover art. A fine memorial album. ~ Rob Fleder (Sing Out! 23/4 (1974), S. 46)
Credits:
Arranged By (P.D. Arr.) - Bill Williams (tracks: A4, B2, B4, B6); Design (Cover) - Bob Aulicino; Engineer, Recorded By - Nick Perls; Guitar, Vocals - Bill Williams; Liner Notes - Stephen Calt; Producer - Nick Perls, Stephen Calt; Written-By - Bill Williams (tracks: A2, A5, A6, B3, B5, B7); Richard Milburn (track: A3); Shelton Brooks (track: B1).
Tracklist:
- A1. Salty Dog (4:37)
- A2. Corn Liquor Blues (3:18)
- A3. Listen To The Mockingbird (3:05)
- A4. Make Me A Pallet On The Floor (3:47)
- A5. That's The Human Thing To Do (4:00)
- A6. Bubblegum (3:53)
- B1. Darktown Strutter's Ball (4:59)
- B2. Nobody's Business (2:01)
- B3. Buckdance (2:10)
- B4. Some Of These Days (3:43)
- B5. Blake's Rag (2:51)
- B6. Railroad Bill (3:06)
- B7. When The Roses Bloom Again (3:41)
Notes:
A1,A4, B2, B4, B6: P.D.