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Willie King & The Liberators: Living in a New World |
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Friday, 27 January 2006 06:53 |
Willie King & The Liberators
Living in a New World
Rooster Blues R 2647
The Secret History of the Blues
By John Sinclair
You talk about terror
I been terrorized all my days &
Willie King, Terrorized
The blues has never been about what's on the surface. It cuts deep below the crust of everyday life and reaches straight into the heart of things, from where all feeling lives and never lies. It speaks of bad luck and trouble, desperate love and abandonment, good times and bad times and every emotional shade in between.
But at the very bottom of the blues is the terrible sadness people feel when they are unjustly and mercilessly beaten down every day of all the years of their lives by the people over them.
The brutal harshness of life as a landless, cruelly exploited or either jobless and discarded American of African descent is what the blues is all about, and the things people do to make a life for themselves within this crushing social framework so that they may enjoy some small measure of happiness as relief from the constant battering.
But, in the long American experience of the blues people, there is and always has been great danger in speaking forthrightly where the white people might hear you and take offense, because their response to what they do not want to hear has never been nothing nice.
So the blues has always talked about everything but the oppressor in the second person it's addressed to the mean woman, or to the neighbor who's taken your mate, or to the gods of chance and fate.
Rarely, rarely has the blues been about the wicked master who steals your labor, takes your woman or wants to end your life the upstanding citizens upon whom the fates have smiled by making them your social superiors in every goddamned way.
This point is drawn very finely in a remarkable conversation between folklorist Alan Lomax and three Mississippi bluesmen who came up in the 20s and 30s, Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim and John Lee Williamson, recorded in the mid-1940s but never released under their own names until a dozen years ago or so, when all three men had passed on to their greater reward.
After the bluesmen describe the hopelessly severe social conditions under which they were raised in the Deep South, they are taken aback when Lomax suggests releasing the recording: Oh, no, we still got people down there.
In the modern world, where life in America's vast urban ghettos is even more brutally oppressive than the years of slavery and then of sharecropping in the South, where even children may be heavily armed and human life is at no premium whatsoever, it is commonplace to hear the rap artists talk about anything they want to, including their intentions toward the people who keep them down.
But in the blues, which continue to be sung and played by people who cling for their lives to an earlier aesthetic, the subject of the blues remains masked under the rubric of interpersonal relationships or the vagaries of fate.
It is simple to conclude that this misdirection is what lends the blues its poetic force, and this writer would be the last to argue that point. The blues is powerful in its rootedness in the circumstances of daily life in America, and the general absence in its lyrics of the oppressor who is always present in real life adds another layer of poetic depth to the idiom. That's as true for the great bluesmen and women of today as it was for Bessie Smith, Charley Patton, Memphis Minnie, Son House, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.
But when you hear a blues singer say it right out, like Willie King does on this album of northwestern Alabama blues direct from the 21st century, it raises the power of the blues to an even higher level, and you might even say to yourself, Oh, yeah, so that's what they were talking about.
It sounds so natural, to hear Willie King talk about all the places he's worked and how little he has to show for it, or how working in the rural environment seems not really to have changed since the days of slavery, even though it's almost a century and a half later now. It sounds so natural, because that's what you were hearing all along, as a subtext to the lyrics of the blues.
Willie King brings it all down front, as they say, and in his songs reveals the secret history of the blues. Born in Prairie Point, Mississippi, in 1943, Willie was raised by his grandparents and has lived and struggled in the Deep South for most of his life. He's worked in the fields plowing mules, in the sawmills, as a travelling salesman of shoes, cologne and notions, but he's never been resigned to accepting his mandated lot in life.
Thus he's been a civil rights activist for more than 30 years now and a student of the techniques of community organizing in the rural setting as taught by the professional agitators at the Highlander Folk Center in Tennessee where Pete Seeger, Guy Carawan and other important folk artists have been active for well over half a century.
A musician since he was a youth he was playing a one-string guitar at the age of nine by the late 70s Willie had started playing the blues in rustic local nightclubs and juke joints as a way to bring the struggling songs he was writing to the people of his community, hoping to inspire them to join the movement to gain more control over the terms of their lives.
He made music at night and by day he organized the Rural Members Association, sponsoring classes in music, woodworking, food preservation and African American cultural traditions and providing transportation, legal assistance and other much-needed services to the RMA's constituency.
Described as a field hand turned Field Marshal, King has combined his musical mission with his community organizing activities to give voice to the deepest feelings of his listeners and make a significant impact on their lives.
Willie's songs are remarkable: Never harsh nor doctrinaire, they state the realities of real life in the ordinary language of the blues, matter-of-factly telling the truth about the way things really are and tempering the songs of social criticism that call for serious change with tender pleas for love and compassion remembering, in the phrase of Che Guevara, that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.
Willie's music is wholly rooted in the blues tradition, and he utilizes the forms, rhythms and grooves endemic to northern Mississippi and Alabama which are familiar to his listeners through the works of Howlin Wolf, John Lee Hooker, R.L. Burnside and other bluesmen native to the area.
The band of musicians he has recruited to play his music is beautifully united around the vision of its leader and supports King's voice, songs and guitar with a warmth and empathy that is almost palpable. Willie's long-time partner and closest comrade is second vocalist Willie Lee Halbert, who echoes and underlines King's phrases in a manner which seems to be unique in the blues idiom to this particular ensemble.
Guitarist Aaron Hardhead Hodge and drummer Willie James Williams are fellow veterans of countless Sunday night stomp-downs at Betty Jean's jukehouse and other favorite local venues, sticking with King and Halbert through every sort of thick and thin. Keyboard man Henry Smith and bassist Robert Corbett at 19 he is 20 years younger than anyone else in the band are fairly recent additions, and alto saxophonist Kevin Hayes, a truck driver from Louisville, Mississippi, joins them when he can.
Willie calls them The Liberators, and watching the ensemble begin to assemble in the funky little Memphis recording studio where they ve driven from northwestern Alabama to make their new album, it's easy to see that this is not your standard-issue blues band. The core members have been together a long time and their easy camaraderie is readily apparent, while the newer guys are made to feel equally welcome.
They set up around their leader and get right to work, their familiarity with the material through regular performance giving them the kind of confidence needed to make things move along without a hitch, and by the end of their third day at Easley McCain Recording they re ready to pack up and head back home with the whole album safely in the can.
One of the reasons everything is able to proceed so smoothly is the production team, headed by Willie and Rooster Blues founder Jim O Neal and aided and abetted by Rooster staffers Jeff Loh and Brian Factor. Willie met O Neal at a blues festival in Eutaw, Alabama, in 1987 and kept in touch with Jim over the years.
He signed with the label at the turn of the century and cut his first Rooster Blues album, Freedom Creek, which garnered almost unanimous critical acclaim and was named Album of the Year by Living Blues in 2001. Willie was also named Blues Artist of the Year in the same poll, and the new album is eagerly awaited by everyone who had the good fortune to hear Freedom Creek
Well, no one will be disappointed here, because Living in a New World builds on the considerable strengths of the live album including great songs with a unique focus, soulful playing by a well-seasoned ensemble, and an overwhelming feeling of oneness with the audience to deliver an impressive program of music that's deeply steeped in the blues tradition yet as fresh as today and tomorrow.
All the songs here are Willie King compositions (his friend Peter O Hare contributed the lyrics to Ain t Gonna Work ), and the lyrics are full of King's trademark topics: the rigors of life as a working man with nothing to call one's own, the stultifying lack of progress toward social and economic justice, the need for oppressed people to unite under the banner of compassion and common purpose. And the band sounds even better in the studio than live on stage, which is not always so easy to achieve.
Willie King knows the secret history of the blues all too well, and he reveals it here so plainly and so naturally that there's no possible room for doubt. The blues have always been part of me, he sums up in the monologue that ends the album. I live it every day. And it's about love sharing, helping each other, caring for one another, that's what the blues life is all about. I m holding on to the blues life, because I found out that it's a good life to live. I just want to keep passing it down.
New Orleans
March 31, 2002
(c) 2002, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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