Robert Pete Williams
Robert Pete Williams (March 14, 1914 – December 31, 1980) was an American Louisiana blues musician, based in Louisiana. His music characteristically employs unconventional blues tunings and structures, and his songs are often about the time he served in prison. His song "I've Grown So Ugly" has been covered by Captain Beefheart, on his album Safe as Milk (1967), and by The Black Keys, on Rubber Factory (2004).
Williams was born in Zachary, Louisiana to sharecropping parents, and lived around the Baton Rouge area throughout his life. He was discovered in Angola prison, by ethnomusicologists Dr Harry Oster and Richard Allen, where he was serving a life sentence for shooting a man dead in a local club in 1956, an act which he claimed was in self-defense. Oster and Allen recorded Williams performing several of his songs about life in prison and pleaded for him to be pardonned. The pardon was partially granted in 1959, when Williams was released, although he could not leave Louisiana until he received a full pardon 1964. By this time, Williams' music had achieved some favorable word-of-mouth reviews, and he played his first concert outside Louisiana at that year's Newport Folk Festival. Williams went on to tour the United States, and played a number of shows with Mississippi Fred McDowell. He continued to play concerts and festivals into the late-1970s when his health began to decline. Williams died in Rosedale, Louisiana on December 31, 1980, at the age of 66.
Robert Pete Williams (April 1970) From BobHardy1
AllMusic Bio
Discovered in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Robert Pete Williams became one of the great blues discoveries during the folk boom of the early '60s. His disregard for conventional patterns, tunings, and structures kept him from a wider audience, but his music remains one of the great, intense treats of the blues.
Williams was born in Zachary, Louisiana, the son of sharecropping parents. While he was a child, he worked the fields with his family; he never attended school. Williams didn't begin playing blues until his late teens, when he made himself a guitar out of a cigar box. Playing his homemade guitar, Williams began performing at local parties, dances, and fish fries at night while he worked during the day. Even though he was constantly working, he never made quite enough money to support his family, which caused considerable tension between him and his wife — according to legend, she burned his guitar one night in a fit of anger.
Despite all of the domestic tension, Williams continued to play throughout the Baton Rouge area, performing at dances and juke joints. In 1956, he shot and killed a man in a local club. Williams claimed the act was in self-defense, but he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He was sent to Angola prison, where he served for two years before being discovered by ethnomusicologists Dr. Harry Oster and Richard Allen. The pair recorded Williams performing several of his own songs, which were all about life in prison. Impressed with the guitarist's talents, Oster and Allen pleaded for a pardon for Williams. The pardon was granted in 1959, after he had served a total of three and a half years. For the first five years after he left prison, Williams could only perform in Lousiana, but his recordings — which appeared on Folk-Lyric, Arhoolie, and Prestige, among other labels — were popular and he received positive word of mouth reviews.
In 1964, Williams played his first concert outside of Louisiana — it was a set at the legendary Newport Folk Festival. Williams' performance was enthusiastically received and he began touring the United States, often playing shows with Mississippi Fred McDowell. For the remainder of the '60s and most of the '70s, Robert Pete Williams constantly played concerts and festivals across America, as well a handful of dates in Europe. Along the way, he recorded for a handful of small independent labels, including Fontana and Storyville. Williams slowed down his work schedule in the late '70s, largely due to his old age and declining health. The guitarist died on December 31, 1980, at the age of 66.
by Cub Koda & Stephen Thomas Erlewine
From a Prison Cell to the Avant-Garde
The New York Times, Sunday, August 7, 1994
By MILO MILES
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.
Robert Pete Williams (Live - 1966) From BobHardy1
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.)
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Robert Pete Williams - Old Girl At My Door From lupine22
References
Discography
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