Bluesman Willie King

As some of you may know we have started a blues camp up at The Full Moon Resort on Aug., 11. We have an unbelievable lineup, check it out:

https://www.crossroadsbluescamp.org/

Charlie Musselwhite, Bobby Rush, Duke Robillard, Luther Dickinson and on and on.

Given that it’s coming up in 3 weeks I thought I’d post this chapter from my book Pity the Genius. It tells a tale of an honest to god juke joint bluesman, last of a dying breed. The blues is behind so much of what I do, in all forms of music. It’s the bedrock of much of what we call American music.

I wrote the bulk of this piece in 2002 not long after my first journey south to the Delta. It was a hejira of sorts. I’d just broken up with my first wife, and I was lost. I visited Dockery Farms, Beale Street, B.B. King’s birthplace in Indianola, a juke called Po Monkey’s in Clarksdale, and Bettie’s Place, the one detailed below.

As I was considering writing about Charlie Patton, who as at the root of all Delta Blues, and possibly the hub of all American roots music, I wondered what more could be said about one of the most haunting, impactful, and prodigious talents in guitar history. Many a researcher has weighed in. It occurred to me I’d met someone who was a living link to that history, Willie King.

Patton was as far as we know the first “eclectic” guitar showman. He played hillbilly songs, deep blues, gospel, and nineteenth century parlor songs. Patton was mixed race, probably part Indian and Caucasian, and in that light we can see he was a prophecy, the blueprint for performers of all races who came after. It’s said that his voice was so loud you could hear it 500 yards away. His singing style, which influenced Howlin’ Wolf, has its aural roots in a type of African singing called voice chording. Though he played stages in New York and Chicago, his main gig was the plantations that surrounded him. When I hear his recordings, whether a rag, moaning blues, or a story song, I try to picture the physical space. What was a Saturday night like at Dockery Farms, where a one -man band brought brief respite to the plantation workers in some shack far from the Big House? What was that party like? No bass and drums, no PA, just a wild looking fellow in the corner wailing away on a steel guitar, singing as loud as he could as the folks drank, sweated, and danced, shedding the weight of the work week. My experience at Bettie’s place may have been as close as you can get to that scene in the 21st century.

Willie Smith, born in 1943, was part of that Delta lineage. He wasn’t an innovator like Patton or Robert Johnson. But you hear the line going all the way back to W. Africa, in the way he lays down a one chord boogie, patient and urgent at the same time, his rough-edged voice making you hurt and smile at the same time. Willie King never chose the touring life, and he hardly recorded at all. His calling was to show up at his neighborhood spot every week. This was his community, the fellow farmers. I’m indebted to his band member, TK, for inviting me to one of the most wondrous gigs I’ve ever done.

Heat’s filling my head to bursting. There’s a stone on my chest that I can’t relieve. Wheels are my consolation. “Who are you?” the spirits ask, and Charley Patton is laughing at me, perched atop a weathervane, wondering why I thought I was so special.

Guitarist/ bassist TK, is driving northeast towards the Alabama border. The vents in his 70’s Toyota won’t stop blowing hot air, so all the windows are open, and a fan sits beside him, powered by the cigarette lighter. We’re going to Bettie’s Place, a juke joint two hours from Jackson, Mississippi to play with the bluesman Willie King.

Out of Jackson on Highway 20 turning into Highway 56 past Meridien, then a Rubik’s cube of small roads through farmlands of soybeans and cotton, thumbnail towns, farther and farther from the highway. Every time I think we can’t make another turn, we continue onto more desolate trails, past tumbledown barns, two room shacks, a dog marooned on a lopsided porch, peeling paint on rotting eaves, a middle-aged man under a baseball cap on a rusted red tractor, illuminated swaths of green from shortstraw and longleaf pine. Now it’s dirt roads, with no human in sight. The radio’s on, mostly rock n’ roll and Christian shows. There’s a signal that comes in and out, a preacher howling prophecies, like a caged animal, exhalations that spew out of the speakers in waves of incantatory rhythm. TK says “We gonna make those ladies grind tonight, brother!” He stretches out the word “grind,” so it sounds like guhriiiiiiiiiiiind.

When we finally stop driving it’s as if we’ve arrived at someone’s house at the end of a 40 mile driveway. Except the house is a bare bones shack set on concrete blocks with the words “Bettie’s Place” scrawled across the front entrance.