BIG JOE WILLIAMS THE MASTER BLASTER OF MISSISIPPI BLUES

https://youtu.be/OnndO2RGN_4?si=a0Pyg_R9L48cTXB_

Before I get started on Big Joe Williams and the brilliant live album I have of his featuring some of the best delta blues in
recorded history, allow me to say that the blog game at the present time, at least in Australia, has really hit a brick wall
of apathy as far as readership goes. 

Times are tough and only the tough will survive the advent of newspaper editions on
iPad and other forms of mainstream media saturation which News Ltd. especially is attempting to exert upon the population to the point where people dont even bother reading any blogs. 

So the pressure is on me and dozens of other blog writers to step up to the challenge and offer a quality product which is free, and you will never get that from a mainstream
media outlet. 

OK, talking about Big Joe Williams, who was a quite obscure but incredibly talented guitar picker from way down in Missisippi. 

Joe was born in 1903 and passed away in
1982, he was one of the few `country bluesmen` to not take up an electric rhythm and blues style after World War 2. 

He didn`t need to actually, because his acoustic strumming was.electrifying without an amp. By the mid 1940`s, Joe was big in Chicago and was performing in clubs alongside the likes of Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson No. 1, not Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2 for all you blues buffs out there. 

The manner in which he made a guitar talk was no less hypnotising than Blind Willie McTell or the much more celebrated Robert Johnson. 

The thing which arguably made Joe even better than Johnson was his more upbeat approach to mix rhythm and blues chords with pure Delta picking melody. 

Eric Clapton often sights Robert Johnson as being the quintessential Delta bluesmen, maybe Slowhand himself hasn`t listened to Big Joe Williams properly. 

If he had I`m sure he would have to put him in the same elite category which he put Johnson in long ago. 

Big Joe generally did not deviate too much from his simple style of picking the blues with little or no accompaniment, he did make an album which was a bit unique in 1965 that I have got in my collection, it`s called `Back to the Country`, and it features Jimmy Brown on fiddle and guitar and also
Willie Lee Harris on harmonica. 

Like the album sleeve describes it, `Back to the Country` has a country dance hall feel to it, like the way blues was played back in the 1920`s and 1930`s, before electric came to being in Chicago in the 1940`s. 

Really old fashioned stuff and even on CD is sounds like you are playing a 78, or maybe it`s because this album is one of the worst watermarked CD`s i have in my collection, re: Badrick Unadulterated post about the great compact disc deception going back a week or so if you want to know more about that.

Anyway, `Back To The Country` is a good introduction to ancient country delta blues, but my favourite Big Joe Williams recording is one which only cost me $4.95 at HMV years ago and whats more the CD isn`t watermarked, yippy doo! 

`Back to the Country`cost me $40 and the CD itself isn`t worth a cracker anymore. The definitive Big Joe album, in my opinion, goes
by the name `Blues From The Southside`, and it come out on a shitty record label called Golden Blues, and the company which made the CD was called Pilz Entertainment. 

As I said, it cost me $4.95 and it has become one of my favourite blues CD`s over the years. The album is a recording of a live Big Joe gig in the 1960`s, it just sounds so acoustic, the clapping of the audience alone
which made it onto reel is incredibly acoustic and you feel like you are there with them after listening to the first song. 

I dont think I have ever heard of a live performance which draws you in and makes you feel like you there with the performer like this magical Big Joe gig that became the album `Blues From The Southside`.

And just so you know, Big Joe Williams is not the slick Kansas City bluesmen Joe Williams. I love him as well, but their style of blues was worlds apart.

Joe Williams was the `Black Sinatra`, he was a blues singer, smooth as silk and normally with a be-bop jazz accompaniment behind him playing jazz while he sung the blues.

I don`t think there was anything too sophisticated about Big Joe Williams, but not many people could a strum a guitar like he could. Simplicity alone was his magical ingredient.