Dapper, articulate, sophisticated in his presentation of material ranging from blues to ragtime to spirituals to a breezy form of recitatif that could pass for the rap of its day, Blind Willie McTell would be the stuff of legend even if his own improbable tale of artistic and commercial survival did not warrant a romantic myth of its own.
I first encountered his music among the very earliest of my blues discoveries around 1959, at age fifteen, thanks entirely to the great good taste of writer/producer/ethnomusicologist Sam Charters, who included McTell’s 1928 masterpiece, “Statesboro Blues,” on the Folkways/RBF anthology, The Country Blues, which accompanied the book he had just written of the same name.
Propelled by McTell’s ringing, delicately accented twelve-string guitar, “Statesboro Blues” is an epic tale of dislocation and commonality (“Brother got ‘em, friends got ‘em/I got ‘em/ Woke up this morning, we had them Statesboro blues/I looked over in the corner/Grandma and grandpa had ‘em, too”) familiar to most contemporary listeners in the Allman Brothers’ inexorably anthemic version. Here, though, it is presented with such charm, such casual beauty, such utter lack of predictability that it surprises every time. There’s a plaintiveness, too, not normally associated with the blues, not just in the high, slightly nasal voice that delivers the lyrics with uncommon precision but in the lilting, melodic approach to a number that possesses inarguable authenticity as “deep blues”
“Statesboro Blues” was recorded at McTell’s second recording session for the Victor Recording Company, in October of 1928. He returned to the studio on October 30 the following year for a new label, with a brisk new ragtime focus, and with a new name as well, Blind Sammie, intended among other things to hide his recording activities from his previous label. This session came one week to the day after the first of the seismic shifts that marked the beginning of the Great Depression, and for many of the downhome blues singers who had benefited from the broad-based prosperity that fueled the blues craze of the 1920s, it marked the end of any commercial recording career. Blind Willie McTell, however, continued to record for the next quarter of a century, cutting records as Georgia Bill, Barrelhouse Sammy (The Country Boy), and Hot Shot Willie, among others. In 1940 he recorded a tantalizing session for the Library of Congress, that came about only because folklorist John Lomax’s wife spotted “a Negro man with a guitar” at a Pig ‘n’ Whistle stand (another of Blind Willie’s latter-day sobriquets was Pig ‘n’ Whistle Red) and Blind Willie agreed to record some numbers, since business at the drive-in stand was slow that night. The result was a mélange of folk songs, rags, spirituals, pop, and pre-blues material, interspersed with monologues revealing not just a photographic memory but an analytic approach to the “history of the blues, life as a maker of records,” his own extensive education in blind schools in Georgia and Michigan, and exactly where and for whom (and under what names) he had previously recorded.
By the time this session was finally released on LP,it had been firmly established that Blind Willie McTell was dead. In fact he had died at almost the same time that Sam Charters’ book and record, The Country Blues, were released. For my friend and me, who had discovered the blues initially through Charters’ work, mundane reality was not so easy to accept, particularly in the face of Blind Willie’s persistent refusal to disappear. Indeed his voice had surfaced once again just as his death became widely known, with a 1961 album, understandably entitled Last Session, recorded five years earlier for an Atlanta record collector. The record was not without its disappointments, revealing some degree of deterioration due to age and drink, but it included characteristic moments of brashness and beauty delivered with all of McTell’s familiar insouciance and wit. Since then, nothing – at least nothing bearing any resemblance to resurrection – so that might very well be the end of the story. But then again, who knows? Blind Willie McTell may yet reemerge, exhibiting that same winning combination of invention and self-delight, that same ability to put across the deepest of blues, the wittiest of social satires, with an enthusiasm that can transport the listener, like the best of Charles Dickens, like all great art, to a world of the artist’s own creation.