Big Joe Williams: The Journey of a Delta Blues Pioneer

ByRichard Orlando

Big Joe Williams, born in 1903, made his first recordings in 1930 as a member of the Birmingham Jug Band and under his own name, Joe Williams in 1935. He had two singles released under the name Big Joe in 1937 before reverting to Joe Williams. A 1952 Trumpet single billed him as Joe Lee Williams, and a lone Vee-Jay release in 1956 came out under Po Joe Williams.

His debut LP “Piney Wood Blues” on Delmar, released in 1958, was the first time he was billed as Big Joe Williams, the name he would go by until his final recordings in 1980.

Among the songs that Williams wrote or are closely associated with him, ‘49 Highway’, ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’, ‘She Left Me a Mule’, ‘Stavin’ Chain’, and his most famous, ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’, have all become standards and have been adapted or covered for decades now –

Of course, Williams himself was far from adverse to doing covers of other’s recording, or re-recording his own songs as he moved from label to label over the years –

Upon his “rediscovery” in the late fifties, he continued both practices: recycling his back catalog and recording for multiple labels.

Williams’ idiosyncratic take on one of Robert Johnson’s best known tunes (two years before Clapton’s paradigm changing recording) comes from an LP that was intended to showcase Williams interpreting classic songs by some of his contemporaries in the late twenties and thirties. Recorded in July and September of 1964, Williams recorded four songs by Robert Johnson, along with numbers associated with Son House and Charley Patton.

The unimaginatively titled “Classic Delta Blues” was released on the Milestone label in the U.S.