Doing The Best You Can-With Blind Willie McTell In Mind

 

By Zack James

 

“I heard Bob Dylan doing a song on one of his later albums, or maybe it was one of the songs in one of the endless bootleg series, yeah, now that I think about the matter I think it was one of the early bootlegs, you know when started putting out outtakes, mistakes and stuff which didn’t get onto to some earlier album for some reason, about a guy named Blind Willie McTell. I know a lot about the blues, the early country acoustic blues too but I had never heard his name mentioned. I know there was Blind Blake, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson and a few other Blinds that I forget the last names of but this one was off the charts for me. Do you know anything about him?” shouted Bradley Fox over the late night din in Jack’s in Cambridge as he posed the question to Fritz Taylor. They were having a heated discussion, nothing serious or life-threatening, just the norm when they tried to one-up one another in the battle of who knew more about the American songbook. Fritz of course having grown up in the South, having grown up in rural Georgia for that matter, having made something of a specialty out of knowing about the Southern blues experience, especially stuff from down the Delta had naturally heard of that particular Blind, as well as the others that Bradley had mentioned.

That reference to Blind Willie McTell by Bradley got Fritz to thinking about how he had gotten caught up in the great blues explosion back in the 1960s when he was just a kid. Got into it kind of by accident since the South that he had grown up in, the Mister James Crow South, did not really allow for young curious white boys to match and mingle with black kids, or listen to their music, listening instead to hokey country music and high holy Jehovah white-etched Protestant Reformation strait-laced gospel music (not the holy-roller kind prevalent in the black churches on the outskirts of town), not the blues, not devils’ music in the fundamentalist Seventh Day Baptist Congregation Taylor household anyway.

So Fritz had gotten into the blues the way a lot of white kids from the North whom he met later did who had told him of similar experiences in his case through a chance encounter late at night when his radio picked up The Bob Gibson Blues Hour out of Memphis over in Tennessee. Bob Gibson, who he would not find out until many years later was a black guy who had the idea of paying tribute to the great and mainly unknown and died broke black blues singers after he had met John and Allan Lomax when they were travelling down in the South during the late 1930s and early 1940s looking for what they called roots music (maybe folk is the term they used interchangeably as well), not just black music from the breeding ground Delta but the music of the hills and hollows country and the Piedmont too. Bob helped them dig out a lot of what they “discovered” among the blues musicians who dotted the South and played their music as much as he could on his weekly show (sponsored by Madame Dubois’ hair salons famous then in black Memphis). Fritz laughed when he thought about the accident of the airwaves then, maybe now too, with his battered little transistor radio that could barely get the Atlanta stations for the rock and roll music that he craved then in the wake of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and a lot of other good old boys all of a sudden on a late Sunday night usually picking up out of the vagrant airwaves a Memphis blues show.       

That experience though got Fritz into thinking about the first time he heard Blind Willie. Bob Gibson on his show would sporadically highlight an individual performer, maybe play one side of an album, or the two sides of a 45 RPM, five or six songs in a row. One night he did that with Blind Willie and ended the string with a hopped up version of Statesboro Blues. He couldn’t get that song out of his mind since it was a jump blues that he imagined would get plenty of play in the old cranky juke joints some miserable Saturday night after a long day’s work on some Mister’s plantation or in some Mister’s factory. Blind Willie’s picking was unusual and that drew Fritz’s interest even more.    

This is what Fritz told Bradley, as the whiskey, whiskeys started hitting the fan at Jack’s that late night,  about what he knew about Blind Willie and about why the recurring lyric in Bob Dylan’s tribute song was “And I know no one can sing the blues, like Blind Willie McTell,” really put the man’s work in correct perspective. Of course Blind Willie was born in the rural South, Georgia, Thomson, not many miles from where Fritz had been born in Millersville. Of course too although he was not born totally blind he became so by the end of his childhood. That condition combined with an inherited musical talent led his to the wandering streets of Atlanta after his mother died (his father had left for parts unknown when he was a child). Blind Willie first recorded with Victor Records in 1927, in those days the myriad small record companies went everywhere even the streets of certain cities looking for talent, went looking for talent in his case to put on the “race records” of the time. He never had great success although he recorded many songs for many labels (under many aliases as well due to contract limitations).

Blind Willie unlike Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Son House, Skip James and other old-time bluesmen did not live long enough to be “discovered” by the early 1960s folk revival and a trip to paradise, the Newport Folk Festival. His fame actually came later when artists from the folk revival like Dave Von Ronk started recording his work, and later the Allman Brothers.  Another case of a “died broke” bluesman said Fritz to finish up. Well not quite since Fritz forced Bradley to recognize that for that one night at Jack’s he was the king of the hill on the expansive American songbook.