The steel guitarist born Will Weldon lives on in memory under the name Casey Bill Weldon and answered during his lifetime to Kansas City Bill and Levee Joe as well. The nickname “Casey,” interchangeable with “KC” or “Kaycee,” pointed to his ties with the Kansas City music world, yet it might equally have derived from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where he entered the world in 1909, or from Atlanta and Memphis, the sites of his earliest recording sessions in 1927 after he had worked medicine shows across the South. Directly influenced by Peetie Wheatstraw, Weldon moved with equal assurance between the role of an impassioned blues singer and that of a honky-tonk “country” artist who helped shape Western swing; promoters occasionally advertised him as the Hawaiian Guitar Wizard. The “Guitar Wizard” tag itself came from Tampa Red, while the Hawaiian allusion traced to Sol Hoopi’s impact on the steel guitar, an instrument carried to the islands by Portuguese sailors in the eighteenth century and then refined by native Hawaiians. Weldon’s decision to employ the steel rather than bottleneck slide guitar within a blues context proved forward-looking, and his resulting stylistic range has resisted easy classification ever since. Circumstances surrounding the brief marriage to Memphis Minnie that ended in divorce are thought to have supplied the impetus for his three most enduring compositions, now regarded as cornerstones of the classic blues canon: “Somebody’s Got to Go,” “Somebody Changed the Lock on My Door,” and “We Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town.”
Between 1935 and 1938 Weldon cut numerous sides under his own name. Across the full eleven-year span of his recording activity he also appeared alongside 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 (better known as Bumble Bee Slim), Blind Teddy Darby, the Hokum Boys, the Brown Bombers of Swing, Washboard Sam, and Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law. Although no further studio dates are documented after December 1938, Weldon was observed playing an electrically amplified guitar in 1941; after relocating to Los Angeles he supplied incidental music for motion-picture soundtracks. In 1968 guitarist Ted Bogan encountered him in Chicago, where Weldon stated that he had abandoned music for another occupation in Detroit; that city may have been the place of his death. Nearly sixty years after their original release, Weldon’s principal recordings were reissued by Document in a three-volume set, with additional selections later appearing on the Document subsidiary Classic Blues as well as the EPM, Catfish, and Fremeaux imprints. Weldon is absent from Proper’s Steelin’ It: The Steel Guitar Story, as is the noteworthy Ceele Burke, who recorded with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Fats Waller during the 1930s. Luther Jones likewise does not appear, although his Hawaiian-style steel guitar graced the Memphis Seven’s 1947 recording of the provocative “Grunt Meat Blues,” later included in Columbia’s multi-disc anthology Roots n’ Blues: The Retrospective 1925-1950, a racially and stylistically diverse collection whose personnel listing, regrettably, omits Casey Bill Weldon.
