BIG JOE WILLIAMS

superb photograph: apologies for not knowing who to credit

Big Joe Williams was born 110 years ago today. Here's his entry in my Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Williams, Big Joe [1903 - 1982]

Big Joe Williams, not to be confused with Joe Williams, singer with the Count Basie Band in the 1950s, was born in Crawford, Mississippi, on October 16, 1903 but began traveling beyond Mississippi in his youth, playing guitar and singing in lumber camps, and settled to an unsettled life  -  the classic roaming blues musician. He first recorded in 1935, gaining what was, in the Depression, an unusual 10-year contract with Bluebird.

            Linda Dahl, author of Stormy Weather, 1984, a book of profiles of women (mostly jazz) singers, claims that Mary Williams Johnson, not husband Big Joe, wrote his classic ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, but Dahl’s source is almost certainly careless assumption from the sleevenotes of a series of LPs on the Rosetta label, which were, like Dahl, trying to raise the profile of women’s contributions to music. This admirable aim is not served by dodgy assertions. (At another point the same Mary Williams was the wife of Lonnie Johnson. No claim seems to have been made for her as the composer of his material.)

            In any case, ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ is strongly based on the older common-stock number known as ‘Don’t You Leave Me Here’, which was at least 30 years old by the time Big Joe recorded ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’. It was recorded in its traditional form by Papa Harvey Hull & Long Cleve Rede, as by Sunny Boy And His Pals, in Chicago, on about April 8, 1927 (the same session that yielded the wonderful ‘Hey! Lawdy Mama - The France Blues’, which became one of the treasures of the blues revival era, covered, for instance, by Mark Spoelstra on that compilation album The Blues Project in 1964.)

            Either way, ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ was a big hit for Williams, and he had a lesser success with a 1941 version of ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’. Well-known for his unique 9-string guitar and his erratic delivery, he performed with many of the greats of his day and, unlike so many, continued as a working musician all the way through till the blues revival movement occurred. He didn’t need to be ‘rediscovered’: he was already around.

            When Dylan paid his return visit to Minnesota in December 1961, and was recorded in a Minneapolis apartment, one of his best song-performances was of ‘Baby Please Don’t Go.’ (Dylan has rarely performed this song since those early days; its most recent rendition was when Dylan came onstage and performed it during the encore of a Tom Petty set in Holmdel, New Jersey on August 10, 2003.)

            At some point, Dylan sought Williams out and played with him. According to Blues Revue magazine, the Chicago-based Delmark Records founder Bob Koester (pronounced Chester) got Williams booked into Gerde’s Folk City in Fall 1961, and over a two-week period Dylan sat in with him: and before the end of the run, they were being billed as Big Bill and Little Joe. But according to Robert Shelton’s Dylan biography No Direction Home, 1986, it was in early 1962 that Mike Porco was considering booking Williams, and Dylan pressed him on it, saying ‘He’s the greatest old bluesman. You gotta put him in here.’ Shelton says that he was given a three-week booking that February and that Dylan showed up each night and jammed with him onstage several times. This would seem the more likely version, especially since the album Big Joe Williams at Folk City was recorded there on February 26, according to its own sleevenotes.

            (Extra confusion is added by the Koester camp by his claim that Dylan first showed up at a Big Joe gig in Chicago back in 1957 and befriended him then; Williams makes it worse by claiming that he first met Dylan in the 1940s, when ‘he was very very young, probably no more than six.’ Dylan himself compounds the confusion by writing, as an aside in Chronicles  -  and it is the book’s only mention of Williams  -  that ‘I’d played with Big Joe Williams when I was just a kid.’)

            At any rate, soon after the Gerde’s Folk City booking, in March 1962, Big Joe was in Brooklyn recording for Victoria Spivey’s small label Spivey Records when Dylan asked her if she could use a little white boy on one of her records. She put him back with the almost 60 year old Williams (not an easy man to play with), and the result was a tremendous version of ‘Sittin’ On Top Of The World’ on which Dylan, aged 20, plays very convincing blues harmonica and is also allowed to sing back-up vocals on the title line  -  and indeed more than back-up, since twice in the course of the performance Big Joe is generous enough to keep silent and let Dylan sing the line alone.

            Since Williams was trying to sound still in his prime, and Dylan was trying to sound as ancient as the hills, it’s a comical moot point here as to who sounds the older of the two. Dylan also plays harp behind Williams on a less striking ‘Wichita’, and on a formless jam later titled ‘Big Joe, Dylan and Victoria’ and behind Spivey’s vocals and piano on ‘It’s Dangerous’.

            In 1980 Mike Bloomfield published a short memoir, Me and Big Joe, which not only portrayed the difficulties of their relationship very honestly but also, in Peter Narváez’ phrase, illustrated ‘the cross-cultural triumph of the blues tradition’. Bloomfield wrote: ‘Joe’s world wasn’t my world, but his music was. It was my life; it would be my life. So playing on was all I could do, and I did it the best that I was able. And the music I played, I knew where it came from; and there was not any way I’d forget.’

            As it turned out, Mike Bloomfield died before his mentor, in February 1981. Big Joe Williams died in Macon, Georgia on December 17, 1982.

[Big Joe Williams: ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, Chicago, 31 Oct 1935; Big Joe Williams: ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’, Chicago 27 Mar 1941, 1st vinyl-issued Big Joe Williams: Crawlin’ King Snake, RCA International INT-1087, London, 1970; Big Joe Williams at Folk City, 26 Feb 1962, Bluesville BVLP 1067, US, 1962. Papa Harvey Hull & Long Cleve Rede, c.8 Apr 1927, 1st vinyl-issued Really! The Country Blues, Origin Jazz Library OJL-2, NY, c.1961. Sunny Boy And His Pals: ‘Don’t You Leave Me Here’, Chicago, c.8 Apr 1927. Big Joe Williams & Bob Dylan: NYC, 2 Mar 1962, ‘Sittin’ On Top Of The World’ & ‘Wichita’, Three Kings & A Queen, Spivey LP 1004, NY, 1964; Big Joe Williams, Victoria Spivey & Bob Dylan, NYC, 2 Mar 1962, ‘Big Joe, Dylan & Victoria’ and Victoria Spivey & Bob Dylan, ditto, ‘It’s Dangerous’, Three Kings & A Queen Vol. 2, Spivey LP 1014, NY, 1972. Bob Dylan: ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, Minneapolis, 22 Dec 1961.

            Bob Dylan Chronicles quote, p. 182. ‘Big Joe Williams: Memory of the Road’, Blues Revue, Mar-Apr 1995, no further details given, précis seen online 5 Oct 2005 at www.expectingrain.com/dok/who/w/williamsbigjoe.html. Shelton ditto. Peter Narváez: ‘Living Blues Journal: The Paradoxical Aesthetics of the Blues Revival’, collected in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, ed. Neil V. Rosenberg, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Mike Bloomfield, with S. Summerfield: Me and Big Joe, San Francisco: Re/Search Productions, 1980.]

DAVE VAN RONK: 10 YEARS GONE

Dave Van Ronk died ten years ago today (10 February 2012). He's an important figure. This is a large part of the entry I wrote on him in my book The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

David Ritz Van Ronk was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 30, 1936, grew up partly in Queens, attended Richmond Hill High School, sang in a barbershop quartet at 13, dropped out of high school at 15, joined the Merchant Marines, learnt the ukelele, loved jazz, moved to Greenwich Village, and became a professional musician in 1956. He discovered pre-war blues via ‘a chance encounter with a recording of ‘Stackolee’ made by Furry Lewis’, as Van Ronk said himself: ‘Taking it to be a form of Jazz, in which I was primarily interested, I made some further investigations and discovered a whole field of music…. and so, having only such singers as Furry Lewis, King Solomon Hill and Leadbelly for models, when I tried to sing these songs I naturally imitated what I heard and, if I couldn’t understand a word here or there, I just slurred right along with the singer. At that time, nobody listened to me anyway.’

They soon did. He became a Washington Square regular and an established figure in the Village, recording, performing and keeping an open house several years before the young Bob Dylan came to town, slept on Dave’s couch, got Dave’s future wife Terri Thal to be his first manager, learnt some of Dave’s repertoire, stole some of Dave’s repertoire and generally looked up to him as the singer who ‘reigned supreme’. Except of course financially. He was almost always on small, worthy record labels. Hence his famous wry remark: ‘Other entertainers record for money; I record for Prestige.’

This is his friend Elijah Wald’s summary: ‘Dave Van Ronk was a founding father of the 1960s folk and blues revivals, but he was far more than that. For one thing, he was a marvelous raconteur, one of the funniest and most quotable figures on the Village scene…. Dave honed his tales along with his music, while holding court in cafes, bars, and from his apartment on Sheridan Square. As a musician, mentor, and barroom philosopher, his influence was so great that the block he lived on was recently renamed Dave Van Ronk Street. This is an honor that would have made him particularly happy, because much as he loved music, he loved the Village almost as deeply. From the time he moved there in the early 1950s until his death…he never considered living anywhere else.’

(He lived on MacDougal in the late 1950s, moved to 15th for a while after getting together with Terri, then ran back to the Village, specifically to Waverly Place, holding court there through the 1960s; he moved to Sheridan Place when he broke up with Terri, and lived there for the rest of his life. The ‘Dylan’ apartment was the one on Waverly Place.)

Van Ronk more or less invented the milieu of the young white city folk-blues, and though he wrote little material of his own, the entire East Coast singer-songwriter oeuvre would have been different without him. He set very high standards of guitar-playing, not least in demonstrating what richness of instrumentation could be achieved on the lone guitar. His own guitar mentor had been Rev. Gary Davis but Van Ronk made what he learnt his own, bringing a more modern consciousness to finger-picking without any loss of complexity or imaginative dexterity.

When people write, as they often do, of what tender guitar work he puts alongside his ‘rough voice’, they are half right: they’re right about the guitar. But the voice is not merely ‘rough’ - often there’s nothing rough about it at all. To listen to Van Ronk is to hear is one of the most resourceful, subtle, alive voices ever put on record. Hear his early cover of Dylan’s ‘He Was A Friend Of Mine’ - here is a great artist, communicating as directly as Dylan himself, his tone a unique mix of keening and shimmer.

It’s only very rarely indeed that someone cuts through as strongly and exhilaratingly as he can. Danny Kalb wrote that ‘Dave Van Ronk’s sound was unafraid, funky and a joyous challenge…. The challenge was, I think, to go for it all the way, and don’t look back.’ Tom Waits said: ‘In the engine room of the NY Folk Scene shoveling coal into the furnace, one Big Man rules. Dog faced roustabout songster. Bluesman, Dave Van Ronk. Long may he howl.’

Kalb’s ‘unafraid, funky…joyous’ describes the voice far better than Waits’ ‘howl’; but Waits’ affectionate portrait suggests the large man’s energy and impact around town while also putting his finger on one of the reasons why Bob Dylan ‘made it’ in a way that Van Ronk never could. Look at photos of the two of them together in the early ’60s and, a decade on, at the Friends of Chile Benefit Concert. Dylan is the lithe, sexy, charismatic one; Van Ronk is the awkward, fat-faced one with sweaty armpits and a beer gut. But if he didn’t have the right image for national celebrity, nor the songwriting ability, nor the killer instinct, no matter: he had everything else. He was an unforgettable live performer, a stratospherically gifted guitarist, an all-time great singer, a shrewd observer of other people (including of Dylan), a generous host whose place was where everyone came for all-night poker games, abrasive talk and good cheer, and with all this, he was also a figure of gravitas - a great man. In Chronicles Volume One, Dylan’s vivid, detailed portrait of Greenwich Village when it was new to him contains no other portrait half as long, half as warm, half as fulsome or half as respectful as of Dave Van Ronk.

Van Ronk was always shrewd and honest about Dylan. They fell out in a major way just once, and he said so: ‘We had a terrible falling out about “House of the Rising Sun.” He was always a sponge, picking up whatever was around him, and he copped my arrangement of the song. Before going into the studio he asked, “Hey Dave, mind if I record your version of Rising Sun?” I said, “Well, Bobby, I’m going into the studio soon and I’d like to record it.” And later he asked me again and I told him I wanted to record it myself, and he said, “Oops, I already recorded it myself and I can’t do anything about it because Columbia wants it.” For a period of about two months, we didn’t speak to each other. He never apologized, and I give him credit for it.’

Van Ronk was just as transparent about the younger musician’s stories and myth-making (or lies, as some call it), again stepping back and seeing it in the round, and speaking for others as if all were as generous-minded: ‘We accepted him not because of the things he had said he’d done but because we respected him as a performer. The attitude of the community was that it was all right, it was cool. He gets on stage and delivers, and that’s fine. His pose didn’t bother us. Nobody was turned off by it. Whatever he said offstage, onstage he told the truth as best he knew it.’

Van Ronk’s perspective was wide enough, too, that he could see sides of Dylan beyond the folkclubs. This, for instance, is accurate and at the same time very much his own judgment, independently arrived at: ‘Bobby is very much a product of the Beat Generation. Dylan really does belong in a rack with Kerouac. You are not going to see any more like him. Bobby came into Beat poetry just at the very tail end. He towers above all of them, except perhaps Ginsberg. But Bob was a latecomer and will have no successors, just as his namesake had no successors.’ Every bit of that is extremely shrewd, and there are few who have dared venture, in plain terms like that, that Dylan ‘towers above’ all those revered Beats.

...In the filmed interview with Van Ronk given to...Dylan’s office for the archives, and made available for use in Scorsese’s No Direction Home, the big bear-like figure, the Mayor of MacDougal Street, has become the mellow, shy, silver-stubbled, bronchitic, self-deprecating man with a laugh that makes the viewer laugh, a vulnerability that is touching (again, a strong contrast to that most steely interviewee, Dylan himself) and a generosity of spirit, a fondness for Dylan and an appreciation of his contribution to a whole musical community - all of which makes him one of the film’s most fragile yet valuable contributors: still, after all these years, giving out and being real.

‘Even now,’ wrote Danny Kalb, ‘I can almost hear him laughing freely and deeply, unfortunately still smoking those damn cigarettes, even as we, his friends left behind, weep and celebrate him at the same time.’

His many recordings cover a long, long period and vary enormously. If a ‘best’ has to be specified, then it is probably the work of the early 1960s that captures it most powerfully: yet whatever you pick out you’ll find yourself more than amply rewarded.

Dave Van Ronk died of complications arising from his cancer, in hospital in New York City, on February 10, 2002.

[Van Ronk quotes from various unfootnoted sources. ‘Dave Remembered’, Danny Kalb, 2002, online 14 Sep 2005 at http://members.aol.com/silvastr/danny/danny.htm (no longer working a link, 2012). Elijah Wald (to whom thanks for some information) quoted from the website page promoting Van Ronk’s memoir, edited with Wald & completed by him after Van Ronk’s death, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, a Memoir, New York: Da Capo, 2005; quote seen online 14 Sep 2005 at http://elijahwald.com/vanronk.html#whiff.]