Big Joe Williams

Festival fame alt=Big Joe Williams at the 1976 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Photo by Jeff Titon. Williams remained a noted blues artist in the 1950s and 1960s, when his guitar style and vocals became popular with folk blues fans. He recorded for Trumpet, Delmark, Prestige, Vocalion and other labels. He became a regular on the concert and coffeehouse circuits, touring Europe and Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s and performing at major U.S. music festivals.

Williams's guitar playing was in the Delta blues style and yet was unique. He played driving rhythm and virtuosic lead lines simultaneously and sang over it all. He played with picks on his thumb and index finger. His guitar was heavily modified. Williams added a rudimentary electric pickup, whose wires coiled all over the top of his guitar. He also added three extra strings, creating unison pairs for the first, second and fourth strings. His guitar was usually tuned to open G (D2 G2 D3D3 G3 B3B3 D4D4), with a capo placed on the second fret to set the tuning to the key of A. During the 1920s and 1930s, Williams gradually added the extra strings to prevent other guitarists from playing his guitar. In his later years, he occasionally used a 12-string guitar tuned to open G. Williams sometimes tuned a six-string guitar to a modification of open G: the bass D string (D2) was replaced with a .08-gauge string and tuned to G4. The resulting tuning was (G4 G2 D3 G3 B3 D4), with the G4 string being used as a melody string. This tuning was used exclusively for slide playing.

Back to Mississippi Williams died December 17, 1982, in Macon, Mississippi.

Remaining funds raised for Williams's memorial were donated by the Mount Zion Memorial Fund to the Delta Blues Museum, in order to purchase one of the last guitars Williams used from his sister Mary May. The guitar purchased by the museum is a 12-string guitar that Williams used in his later days. The last nine-string (a 1950s Kay cutaway converted to Williams's nine-string specifications) is missing at this time. Williams' previous nine-string (converted from a 1944 Gibson L-7 presented to him by Wilson Ramsay, known as Beef Stew, a name given to him by Williams) is in the possession of Williams's road agent and fellow traveler, Blewett Thomas.

Another of Williams's nine-string guitars is kept under the counter of the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago, which is owned by Bob Koester, the founder of Delmark Records. Williams can be seen playing the nine-string guitar in American Folk-Blues Festival: The British Tours, 1963–1966, released on DVD in 2007.

In 2003, Williams was honored with a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail in Crawford.

Discography Studio albums Piney Woods Blues (1958) Tough Times (1960) Blues on Highway 49 (1961) Nine String Guitar Blues (1961, later re-released as Walking Blues) Mississippi's Big Joe Williams and His Nine-String Guitar (1962) Blues for Nine Strings (1963) Back to the Country (1964) Ramblin' and Wanderin' Blues (1964) Classic Delta Blues (1964) Studio Blues (1966) Big Joe Williams (1966) Thinking of What They Did to Me (1969) Hand Me Down My Old Walking Stick (1969) Big Joe Williams (1972) Blues from the Mississippi Delta (1972) Don't Your Plums Look Mellow Hanging on Your Tree (1974)

Live album At Folk City (1962)

Collaborative albums Three Kings And The Queen (1962, P.1964 Spivey LP 1004) with Victoria Spivey, Lonnie Johnson, Roosevelt Sykes, Bob Dylan Stavin' Chain Blues (1966), with J.D. Short Hell Bound and Heaven Sent (1964), with John Wesley (Short Stuff) Macon Three Kings And The Queen, Volume Two (1970, P.2013) (Spivey LP 1014) with Victoria Spivey, Memphis Slim, Roosevelt Sykes, Lonnie Johnson

Selected compilations Crawlin' King Snake (1970) Malvina My Sweet Woman (1974) Big Joe Williams WarnerBlues Les Incontournables (1998)

Posthumous albums Shake Your Boogie (1990) Going Back to Crawford (1999), recorded 1971, with Austen Pete, John "Shortstuff" Macon, Glover Lee Connor and Amelia Johnson

Quotations

"When I went back down South, boy, they'd put me up on top of a house to hear me play."