Big Joe Williams

Big Joe Williams stood out as perhaps the most difficult and quarrelsome individual ever to carry a guitar. Yet he also ranked among the finest blues performers of his era, distinguished by his talent for crafting songs, his commanding voice, and his wholly personal approach to the instrument. Though his combative nature was well known and captured in Michael Bloomfield’s eccentric booklet Me and Big Joe, fellow musicians who had spent time around him regarded him as an honored elder. Even those admirers, however, might hesitate to share a stage, since working with him, like collaborating with other veteran Delta players, meant accepting his strict conditions.

Protégé David “Honeyboy” Edwards recalled that in his early years Williams traveled constantly across the Delta, performing at work camps, juke joints, store porches, streets, and alleys stretching from New Orleans to Chicago. Over five decades he cut sides for Vocalion, OKeh, Paramount, Bluebird, Prestige, Delmark, and numerous additional labels. Charlie Musselwhite credited Williams and himself with launching the Chicago blues revival during the 1960s.

At Mike Bloomfield’s “blues night” held at The Fickle Pickle, Williams appeared with an electric nine-string guitar plugged into a battered little amplifier to which a pie plate had been fastened and a beer can suspended. During performance the entire contraption shook and clattered, while Big Joe himself remained motionless; the resulting sound was the most buzzing, sizzling, and African-inflected music imaginable.

Anyone studying Delta blues eventually confronts the fact that the guitar functions simultaneously as a drum and a source of melody. An unbroken African-rooted lineage that stresses percussive attack on stringed instruments, from banjo through guitar, runs through the work of such Delta figures as Charley Patton, Fred McDowell, and Bukka White, each of whom struck the body, rapped the neck, yanked the strings, or added rattling and buzzing devices to heighten rhythmic impact. No major recording artist, however, personified the guitar-as-drum ideal more completely than Big Joe Williams, who for more than sixty years hammered out powerful riffs on his G-tuned nine-string.