World Loses Legendary Bluesman Willie King

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World Loses Legendary Bluesman Willie King
March 2009
Alabama Blues Project



On Sunday, March 8, 2009, the outstanding Alabama blues musician Willie King passed away near his home in Old Memphis, Alabama, following a massive heart attack. His career started on a plantation with a one-string, homemade diddly-bo. Six recordings, a DVD, numerous national and international festival performances later, Willie King gained a substantial national and international reputation.

Ever since he first heard a blues musician play at his grandmother’s juke joint over sixty years ago, Willie King was consumed by the blues. His life story is about great music, but equally it is about care, interest and concern for the community he grew up in - King's own definition of the "blues life."

The loss of this great blues man will be felt by fans and musicians all over the world who have been touched by his unique juke joint blues and uplifting message of peace, love and social justice.

The funeral is scheduled for Sunday, March 15th, and will be held at the City Hall in Aliceville, Alabama, with viewing the day before at Lavender's Funeral Service, Aliceville. Timing and other details will be posted, when available, at Willie King's web site, www.willie-king.com.

The following is an article written to commemorate Willie King's selection for this year's prestigious Alabama Folk Life Heritage Award, one of the Governor's Arts Awards presented by the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

Willie King – outstanding bluesman and committed community activist.

Ever since he first heard a blues musician play at this grandmother’s juke joint, Willie King has been consumed by the blues. “It got all over me,” he says, “and wouldn’t let me go.” He has been mining a deep groove ever since and has never stopped practicing, performing, writing and developing the blues according to Willie King.

In recognition of a musical career that started on a plantation with a one-string, homemade diddly-bo and has led to a national and international reputation, the state of Alabama is awarding Willie King this year’s Folk Life Heritage Award.

Willie King’s story is about music but equally it is about his care, interest and concern for the community he grew up in and the cultural skills, which he calls “traditional survival skills,” that helped his oppressed community survive and develop despite some very hard times. King credits his grandfather with instilling him with these values and giving him the desire “. . . to do at least half-way right!”

Willie King was born in 1943 in Prairie Point, Mississippi, living first with his parents and later with his grandparents, the sharecroppers Fred and Sue Frazer. At age six his family moved to Pickens County, Alabama, to work on a plantation there, and apart from a brief sojourn in Chicago, King has lived in Alabama ever since.

Music was important to the King family - his father was an amateur blues guitar player, and according to Willie his grandfather “played both sides,” singing both gospel and blues, while his grandmother Sue ran a juke joint and was well known for being an entertainer, a comedian of the ilk of “Moms” Mabley.

Like many other aspiring guitarists in the poor South at that time, King’s first instrument was a homemade diddly-bo made by nailing bailing wire to a tree in the yard. By age nine he had graduated to a one-string guitar that he could bring indoors so that he could play at night. Willie was thirteen before he owned his first guitar, an acoustic Gibson, which was purchased for him by Mr. W. P. Morgan, the plantation owner who owned the land on which his family lived. King paid off the $60 price tag for the guitar by working with Morgan and helping out on the plantation. W. P. Morgan became a close friend and mentor to Willie King, an unusually close relationship at a time when segregation was the norm. Willie remembers Mr. Morgan with great affection and perhaps their friendship helped inform King’s often-repeated theme of coming together and loving each other regardless of any differences.

Soon Willie began studying guitar and blues with local veteran blues musicians like Po’ Andrew Harris, the Brook Brothers, Jessie Daniels and “Birmingham” George Conner. His music was influenced by contact with these regional blues musicians and by listening to his favorite recordings, especially Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and John Lee Hooker.

His first performance was aged eighteen at a Mississippi house party, where he played the only two songs he knew all night, for a fee of $2. By age twenty he was regularly performing solo acoustic country blues at house parties and juke joints in West Alabama and East Mississippi. Willie put his first group together when he was twenty-three, playing electric blues with local bluesman Jessie Daniels, who still performs at local events. By 1965 Willie was farming, playing the blues, and making moonshine.

In 1967, Willie King joined the migration to Chicago in an attempt to make more money than he could down South, and also to check out the thriving blues scene there. He lived with his sister on the West Side, just blocks away from Howlin’ Wolf’s home club, Silvio’s, which became King’s hangout during his stay in Chicago. He didn’t much take to city life, except for the times spent in the West and South Side blues clubs jamming and hanging out with the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, his long time musical heroes and mentors.

After a year Willie decided that the rough and tumble of big city life did not suit him and he returned to the beloved woods of his home in Old Memphis, Alabama, just across the border from Mississippi. Here he continued playing the blues, traveling the rural roads, talking politics and doing a variety of different jobs. Moved by the many injustices he saw around him, King soon joined the civil rights movement and later worked with the Highlander Center, where he met and shared a stage with the legendary Pete Seeger.

Spurred by his interest in civil rights and encouraged by his friend and fellow civil rights activist David Gespass, King started writing original songs that reflected the struggles of the times, which he called “struggling blues.” His songs told a story of direct experience which many could relate to. As King explains, “through the music I could reach more people, get ’em to listen.”

At the same time as King was gaining a local musical reputation, he was working to improve the life of his community. In 1989 he founded the Rural Members Association, a non-profit organization dedicated to passing on the traditional survival skills of his community to the next generation. That same year, he opened a community center located on Route 17 at the junction of Route 32, a focus of local interest and a place where he implemented a program of traditional skills workshops aimed at educating the younger generation in not only local skills but more broadly the whole set of caring and supportive values that helped a struggling community in the past.

Willie and the Rural Members Association have sponsored classes in blues music, farming, woodworking, food preservation, and other rural African American traditions. They have also provided transportation, legal assistance, and other services for the needy of Pickens County over the past two decades. Willie has also partnered with the Alabama Blues Project to provide blues education programs throughout Alabama and beyond.

Starting in 1997, Willie has organized an annual festival in Pickens County, called the Freedom Creek Festival. Willie explains, “We was targetin’ at tryin’ to get all walks of life, different peoples to come down and kinda be with us in reality down there, you know. Let’s get back to reality, in the woods . . . mix and mingle . . . get to know each other. Get up to have a workin’ relationship, try to bring peace . . .” The Freedom Creek Festival showcases many unrecorded and unrecognized regional back-woods blues musicians, more recently alongside such internationally renowned artists as Birmingham native Sam Lay, T-Model Ford and David “Honeyboy” Edwards. The festival has gained an international reputation for the authenticity of the music, and the warmth of its hospitality.

King’s first recording was in 1999 with local blues star “ Birmingham ” George Conner. It was an independently produced CD titled Walkin’ The Walk, Talkin’ The Talk. In 2000 he released the self-produced I am the Blues with all original songs. In the same year, renowned bluesologist Jim O’Neal recorded Freedom Creek for his Rooster Blues label, capturing many of Willie’s “struggling blues” songs. This CD was recorded live at Bettie’s Place, a small juke joint in Noxubee County, Mississippi, just over the border from Willie’s home in Alabama and won Living Blues magazine’s best contemporary blues album award. This was followed by the 2002 studio recording Living in a New World. Willie was again recorded at Bettie’s Place, both for Martin Scorsese’s movie Feel Like Going Home and for his first self-produced title, Jukin’ At Bettie’s. His most recent recording is the self-produced album One Love.

Willie’s priority has always been split between playing the blues and working diligently to serve his deprived community in the heart of the poverty-stricken black belt of West Alabama. To him, it is two sides of the same coin and his commitment to authenticity has greatly enriched Alabama ’s cultural heritage to all of our betterment and great enjoyment.

As we go to press we are saddened to hear that this great artist, ambassador of the blues and community spokesman, Willie King, passed away in the afternoon of March 8, 2009 .