Robert Pete Williams – Vol. 1 – I’m Blue As A Man Can Be / Arhoolie CD-394

Robert Pete Williams – vocals & 6- or 12- string guitar.
Recorded by Harry Oster at Angola State Penitentiary Louisiana in 1959 and 1960. Edited by Henry Kaiser.

This is volume one of two Robert Pete Williams CDs.

1. Pardon Denied Again
2. This Wild Old Life
3. Just Tippin’ In
4. Louise
5. Church On Fire
6. Texas Blues
7. I’m Blue As A Man Can Be
8. Up And Down Blues
9. So Much Is Happening In This Wicked World
10. Come Here Baby
11. Levee Camp Blues
12. Two Wings
13. Angola Special
14. Motherless Children Have A Hard Time
15. Please Lord Help Me On My Way

REVIEWS

“Other blues musicians created wonderful bodies of work; Robert Pete Williams created a whole musical world. The more one listens to his music the more deeply one is drawn into his unique vision. The dark fluid voice and directly powerful lyrical imagery build with studied intensity. The guitar accompaniments which often stay within one chord through a whole song are like nothing else in blues though they share characteristics with the playing of John Lee Hooker and the Malian Ali Farka Toure. Williams was `discovered’ in the Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana in 1959. He played music derived from the field holler tradition and by extension is closely tied to African roots. His songs were usually improvised unrhymed and in no particular metric pattern and his guitar tended to function as a rough second voice. Thus he was hailed as the embodiment of a mythic proto-blues that died before the age of recording. In fact far from being a primitive Williams had learned much of his craft from mainstream records. However in his late 20s he abandoned the standard forms for his own idiosyncratic flights. He hewed closely to the old holler tradition but not because he was unschooled in contemporary blues styles. His most personal musical excursions often include riffs and lines borrowed from the mainstream and when he wants to play a straight rhymed blues as on `Louise’ he can do it brilliantly. These two CDs include Williams’s greatest work.

`Pardon Denied Again’ is one of the early prison recordings a painfully direct meditation. At the other extreme `Wife and Farm Blues’ finds him singing about the troubles of farming while a woman partner humorously ribs and contradicts him his straight lines feeding her humor. A final monologue includes his own story of the circumstances that led to his incarceration. Half the tracks are previously unreleased and they are full of unexpected pleasures. Many are religious numbers a previously undocumented side of William’s work. Other singers turned to hymns and gospel numbers when they sang Christian material but Williams’ religious and secular songs are musically indistinguishable from one another using the same modal structure and free lyrical improvisation. If you have never heard this music there is no way to describe it. Williams was a one-of-a-kind genius who bred no imitators. These CDs are his legacy and they are among the masterpieces of American music.”

(Elijah Wald — BluesWire)

“The posthumous discovery of yet another rural blues guitarist is always welcome news. Robert Pete Williams who died in 1980 at the age of 66 never garnered much of a following primarily because his unorthodox and improvised guitar playing was unappreciated except by blues aficionados open to idiosyncratic stylings. This two-volume CD features Williams’ talking blues recorded in 1959 by Folklyric Records owner and producer Harry Oster at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana as well as a few songs recorded by Chris Strachwitz in 1970. Bear with the poor sound quality; Williams’ raspy emotional growl unusual rhythmic instrumental phrasings and surprising solos on 6- and I 2-string acoustics are well worth repeated listens.”

(CD Review)

Although Robert Pete Williams died in 1980 at the age of 66 he arguably remains the most avant-garde blues performer ever recorded. No punk rock band has ever matched the jagged acerbic fury of the riffs Williams played 35 years ago. No rapper has approached his ability to evoke the torment of life in prison or bend language to cast an eerie spell over a chance encounter with a seductive woman. Williams could improvise precise topical blues numbers with remarkable spontaneity. He had never been recorded when he was discovered in Angola penitentiary in Louisiana convicted of murder. Like the country blues titan Leadbelly Williams even sang his way to freedom.

Yet he was no more than a moderate success on the folk-revival circuit in the 1960s and the very density and originality of his blues must have been part of the reason. His decision to take up the slide guitar was also ill-advised. Today he is a shadowy memory unknown outside blues circles. The release of Williams’s prison recordings in 1959 caused a sensation with an earlier generation of fans. By rights equal excitement should greet the recent reissue of most of his earliest sides along with more than a dozen unreleased tunes on ‘I’m as Blue as a Man Can Be’ (Arhoolie CD 394) and ‘When a Man Takes the Blues’ (Arhoolie CD 395).

Blues revivals come and go and the establishment of the House of the Blues chain of nightclubs is one sign the audience for the style is healthy. But too many of today’s younger performers walk through the blues with a vocabulary imited to an ever-shrinking series of overused themes and guitar licks. Compared with such performances Williams’s blues comes as a draught of straight whisky after sips of warm soda. In particular each of the field recordings made by the folklorist Dr. Harry Oster while Williams was still an inmate is gripping testimony. The first shock is the peculiar form of these blues. Williams repeats the first line at the beginning of each verse but boldly disregards the rest of routine blues structure.

Williams grew up just north of Baton Rouge and like many Delta blues musicians he favors long spidery phrases spiked with hard beats. And like those of fellow eccentrics Big Joe Williams and John Lee Hooker his guitar accents twine around the particular cadences of his voice. ‘This Wild Old Life’ from ‘I’m Blue as a Man Can Be’ shows Williams at his most stubbornly independent.

While his singing could have a furry tone at times here it cuts like a rusty razor as he describes the turmoil of wandering from town to town homeless and alone. ‘I’m a poor boy here’ he sings. ‘Ain’t got no place to go/ I’ve been riding around here a little while now/ In a little old one-horse town/ I don’t know no one here baby/ No one but myself.’ The song consists almost entirely of a leaping riff that Williams expands contracts and tweaks with rhythmic variations. Though structured with care the performance conveys anxiety bordering on emotional chaos.

In ‘Please Lord Help Me on My Way’ the same free-flowing structure based on a more soothing guitar figure suggests dignified contemplation: ‘Lord when I’m in my cloak of gray/ For myself I don’t want no worry.’ Williams was as often prayerful as he was panicked. Most of the unreleased songs are Christian supplications at once calmly reverent and riddled with images of death.

As the guitarist Henry Kaiser points out in his perceptive notes to ‘I’m as Blue as a Man Can Be’ the sparse chords and webs of rhythm in Williams’s playing suggests the work of modern West African guitarists like Ali Farka Toure. Indeed the tune ‘When a Man Takes the Blues’ could be an English-language excerpt from one of Mr. Toure’s albums. And the jangly ‘Hot Springs Blues’ among others shows how much Williams inspired oddball white blues rockers like Captain Beefheart.

It is impossible to know why Williams’s blues sound so African but they do not support the old notion now discredited that so-called primitive blues were rough and shapeless and evolved into more regular melodic forms. Williams played more conventional blues arrangements until he was 28 when he decided to alter his style. In 1965 he gave a widely quoted explanation saying that ‘the sound of the atmosphere’ changed his playing. ‘It could be from the airplanes or the moaning of automobiles’ he said but anyway the wind blew a different music to him that transformed his blues.

A melancholy introverted man Williams had difficulty thinking of himself as a professional entertainer. By all accounts when the blues feeling descended upon him he could unearth tragedy and mystery in any subject in one famous example his horror at how old his face had become in the mirror. At other times he could scarcely force himself to play on stage or off.

Williams made a good number of albums after he was paroled but few of them are as harrowing as the prison sessions. He obsessively reflected on his years in jail a period he considered an unjustly harsh extension of his hard-bitten existence. An anthology of prison blues which will feature Williams’s masterpiece ‘Prisoner’s Talking Blues’ is due this fall from Arhoolie. It can only add to the chills he has provoked for decades.

(Milo Miles is a commentator on world music for National Public Radio.)