by Sean Wilentz
Brannen & Smith Statesboro Ginnery, cotton gin, Statesboro, Georgia, 1913 or 1914. (photo credit 6.5)
Compared with rural Thomson or Spread, Statesboro bustled—a major center for the sale of Sea Island long-staple cotton, and connected to the wider world by the Central Georgia and the Savannah and Statesboro railways. But young Willie was restless, prevented by his blindness from attending school. About the time he was twelve—or so he later claimed—he began periodically running away from home to join one or another of the circuses and road shows that came through Statesboro. “I run away and went everywhere: everywhere I could go without money,” he recalled decades later.5 “I followed shows around till I began to get grown.” Yet Willie always returned to one family member or another, and once he did “get grown,” by his own account, he settled down and turned to making bootleg whiskey, probably assisting his family members in Happy Valley—steady work for a poor man, and worth the risks.
“My mother died and left me reckless, my daddy died and left me wild, wild, wild,” Blind Willie McTell later sang in what would eventually become his best-known song, “Statesboro Blues.” How much truth there actually is, though, to the stories about his wild and reckless youth is far from clear. Like the young, dissembling Bob Dylan many years later, McTell could be unnervingly precise when he spun his stories about his boyhood circus days, skillfully dropping names and dates like any sharp confidence man. But Michael Gray casts doubt on all of this and presents evidence that young Willie may have lived quietly at home in Statesboro with his mother (whose boyfriend continued to live with his actual wife and family), working part-time doing odd jobs for a grocery store. It is also unclear who taught Willie about music and guitar playing.* But no matter whether he was homebound or hell-bent, Willie’s life changed dramatically during his late teens. In 1920, his mother died of a miscarriage, which may have been the result of a self-induced abortion. McTell later said he became an even wilder wanderer then, which is certainly plausible. But in 1922, a white benefactor in Statesboro—his identity remains unknown except for his last name, Simmons—intervened and arranged for the boy, now nineteen, to be sent for three years of schooling at the Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon. And by the time he left that academy in 1925, Willie McTier had developed into a superb young guitarist and singer, his talents honed by the academy’s strong music department, which taught him, among other skills, how to read and write musical notation in Braille.
Inside of two years after leaving Macon, McTier moved to Atlanta, the new hot spot for record company scouts—and no later than October 1927, when he made his first records for the Victor company, Willie McTier had become Blind Willie McTell. Allegedly, the similarities in the surnames, when pronounced with a Georgia inflection, had caused an official mix-up at the Macon academy; alternatively, McTell may simply have seemed more felicitous for a professional singer. In any event, over the ensuing two decades, McTell built a singular career as a performer, sharply at odds with the stereotype of southern bluesmen as poor, illiterate geniuses, living on the edge of despair.*
Atlanta, Georgia, 1940. (photo credit 6.6)
Despite his physical handicap—and in some respects because of it—McTell was clever, educated, well-spoken, and upbeat, and he was far from lonely or propertyless. Having developed acutely sharp senses of hearing, touch, and direction, he could navigate Atlanta, unassisted, with remarkable ease, and on a good weeknight he could earn as much as a hundred dollars playing regular gigs at places such as the Pig ’n’ Whistle (his steadiest earner) and at a small club called the Silver Slipper. Saturday usually found him at one of his choice regular locations or playing either at the matinee or on the evening under-bill at the 81 Theater on Decatur Street (where Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, when she was passing through, had performed with the pianist Thomas “Georgia Tom” Dorsey before she relocated her base to Chicago in 1923, and where Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters, among others, were headliners in the 1920s). When he was in his prime, McTell also plotted out the schedules that would take him far and wide on the road, sometimes alone, sometimes with companion musicians (including McTell’s wife, Kate, and Curley Weaver), and sometimes with traveling troupes and medicine shows.* His regular routes took him up through Georgia and the Carolinas at the height of the tobacco harvest season in July and August, when dealers and salesmen were numerous and flush; in winter, he headed east and then south to the Sea Islands and to Miami, to play for wealthy white tourists. Occasionally, he also visited northern big cities as distant as New York and Chicago. McTell wandered—“Baby, I was born to ramble,” he told his wife—but not aimlessly or impulsively; he was highly methodical.6 He was likewise exact in his financial dealings with record companies and theater managers. “He always had him a contract,” Kate McTell recalled.7 “He’d say, ‘I’m not going to pick my fingers off for nickels and dimes.’ ”
Robert Fulton Hotel, circa 1940s, postcard. Blind Willie McTell met John and Ruby Lomax here and recorded his Library of Congress sessions in their room on November 5, 1940. (photo credit 6.7)
McTell earned enough money from his music to support himself quite well—and after he married Kate, then a nursing student, early in 1934, the couple resided in a series of rented apartments in northeastern Atlanta not far from the Sweet Auburn district, the commercial hub and most fashionable residential area for black Atlantans. (The couple’s first residence in 1934, at 160 Hilliard Street, was about four blocks from the home of the Martin Luther King family, whose boy Martin Jr. was five.) The neighborhood was close enough to the dives and “trick” houses of downtown Decatur Street and to the Black Bottom area around South Bell Street to allow McTell to congregate easily with his fellow Atlanta musicians in some of their low-end haunts, yet McTell’s own domicile was eminently respectable. (Musicians would also visit McTell at his home, among them the great blues singer from South Carolina Josh White, who stopped by going to and from concert dates before heading back to his adopted home in New York City.) “They lived a very normal life,” Kate’s younger brother, Andrew, recalled of the McTells many years later.8 McTell was also fastidious in his personal appearance, sporting a carefully groomed mustache and wearing an everyday wardrobe of a suit and tie and a fashionable billed cap. “He never allowed himself to believe that he was dressed,” Andrew said, “until he put on his necktie.” Fleeting acquaintances and close friends alike described him as a warmhearted, generous man, curious about people and the world at large, and devoted to his art.
McTell’s decorousness and work ethic marked him, at least outwardly, as an orderly, even straitlaced striver. So did his spiritual life: McTell was not just a believing Christian, but had what his brother-in-law called “a keen sense of scripture” and read the Bible in Braille just as he read many secular books. (For a time, late in his life, he would perform only sacred music under his own name.) Yet through the 1940s, McTell also remained attached to the barrelhouse world of hard drinking, gambling, and prostitution, in Atlanta and on the road—and none of this was contradictory to McTell, at least until he grew older. An unusually intelligent, up-from-under country boy, he became neither rich nor (in his own time) famous—but by the mid-1930s, he had made himself into a successful, consummately professional entertainer and something of an urban sophisticate. That urbanity, and the shrewdness that lay behind it, molded his music.
When he first turned to performing folk music in 1959 and 1960, Bob Dylan immersed himself in the blues but could not have known too much, if anything, about Blind Willie McTell. Unlike John and Alan Lomax’s premier discovery, Leadbelly, McTell had had no great promoters and devotees among the nation’s leading folklorists or in the overlapping world of the folksy Popular Front Left. None of his songs had appeared on Harry Smith’s influential Anthology of American Folk Music LP collection in 1952. Other blues veterans of the 1920s and 1930s, rediscovered in the 1960s, would get to enjoy a last taste of acclaim, including McTell’s Atlanta friend the guitarist and harmonica player Buddy
Moss, but McTell did not live to see the folk revival. Were it not for the English émigré and tireless blues collector Samuel Charters, McTell might have been forgotten by the younger generation far longer than he was, and might have been forgotten altogether.
Charters reissued three of McTell’s most striking early recordings, “Statesboro Blues,” “Mama, ’Tain’t Long Fo’ Day,” and “Southern Can Mama,” on two compilation recordings whose quality and influence deserve more recognition than they have received: The Country Blues, released in 1959, and a double LP, The Rural Blues, released a year later. In his groundbreaking book, The Country Blues, which accompanied his record with the same title, Charters offered little solid information on McTell but did describe him as a “brilliant but elusive blues singer, with an almost indestructible quality about him”—a mixture of reticence and praise that created an alluring aura of obscurity.9 “On Blind Willie McTell, our imaginations really went to work,” the distinguished music historian Peter Guralnick recalls of his high-school years as a blues fan in Boston at the start of the 1960s.10 “A sensitive, oddly wistful singer, he was, to us, a figure of mystery and determination.” Bob Dylan almost certainly listened to “Statesboro Blues” and “Southern Can Mama,” on Charters’s compilations, from which he took two songs for his own first album, Bukka White’s “Fixin’ to Die Blues” and Tommy McClennan’s “New Highway 51.” Still, Dylan showed no signs that McTell’s music had yet touched him very deeply or that he had been caught up by McTell’s mystique.
In 1960, the small Prestige/Bluesville label released, with little obvious impact, McTell’s Last Session, a selection of fourteen songs taken from a tape recording made in 1956, three years before McTell’s death, by an Atlanta record store owner, Ed Rhodes. Soon thereafter a handful of McTell’s commercial recordings appeared on some obscure blues reissue compilations. Then, in 1966, thanks to the rising musicologist Dick Spottswood, the short-lived Melodeon label issued a slightly clipped version of the Lomaxes’ Library of Congress tape of McTell from 1940, and two years after that the young, intense (and later legendary) Greenwich Village record collector Nick Perls issued an album on his new Belzona label consisting of fourteen of McTell’s early recordings, dubbed from the original 78s. A new cohort of big-city blues enthusiasts—they called themselves the blues Mafia—had fixed its seal of approval on McTell’s reputation. And soon thereafter, thanks largely to performers in Bob Dylan’s ambit, McTell’s music would find an audience far larger than even his greatest admirers could have possibly imagined.
Album sleeve of Last Session with Blind Willie McTell, Prestige/ Bluesville Records, 1956. (photo credit 6.8)
In 1964, the offbeat East Village folk duo of Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber, recording as the Holy Modal Rounders, included “Statesboro Blues” on their second album, and two years later the Boston-based singer-songwriter Tom Rush recorded the song on an album for Elektra. Dave Van Ronk (who was a good friend and collaborator of Sam Charters’s as well as one of Dylan’s mentors) also took a liking to “Statesboro Blues” and recorded his own powerful version of it for Verve Records in 1966. Schooled, in part, by Charters and the young blues aficionados, the singers had prepared the way for the complete recovery of McTell’s music. Two years after Van Ronk, the evolving folk and blues musician Taj Mahal’s first album included a rock rendition of the song with a bottleneck electric guitar line, which riveted and inspired an up-and-coming guitarist from Macon, Duane Allman. Leading off the Allman Brothers Band’s blockbuster album, At Fillmore East, in 1971, “Statesboro Blues” almost immediately entered the rock-and-roll canon—and soon the bulk of McTell’s original recorded work began appearing on LP reissues. Through the end of the 1970s, hardly a year passed without the appearance of a new album of McTell recordings or of a compilation that included at least one of McTell’s originals. In 1977, the British magazine Blues Unlimited featured an extensive interview with Kate McTell about her husband, which, although not always trustworthy, filled in some of the large holes in his biography. The last remaining original McTell tracks finally appeared in LP form in 1983—the same year that Dylan recorded “Blind Willie McTell.”
With virtually all of McTell’s recordings now easily accessible, Dylan, like the rest of the world, could hear him in full as a guitarist, singer, and writer of singular talent. (Five years earlier, Dylan had included McTell among a select group of blues and country artists to whom, he told an interviewer, he most enjoyed listening.) And although a great deal about McTell remained to be revealed as of 1983, enough was known for Dylan to have been able to notice some curious convergences with his own life—and, more important, with his art. To be sure, until the early 1980s, McTell and his music appeared to have had little direct influence on Dylan’s work, no matter how much Dylan had come to enjoy McTell’s recordings. Even when his song “Blind Willie McTell” finally surfaced in 1991, long after Infidels appeared, the title seemed to pop out of nowhere. Dylan might have been expected to write a song that honored Muddy Waters, Big Joe Williams, Mance Lipscomb, Robert Johnson, Sleepy John Estes, or any other of his obvious and long-acknowledged influences, but choosing McTell seemed a little odd. Perhaps it really was no big deal; perhaps McTell’s name simply fit Dylan’s lyrical needs, in rhyme and meter, better than any of the others. But the way that Dylan’s song beckoned to McTell—invoking him over and over as a blues singer like no other—indicated a much deeper personal engagement. For Dylan, McTell’s music had become a touchstone, a standard of excellence for comprehending the world.
Although McTell could playact the folklore historian, he was, as Dylan would later be, a musical modernist with strong roots in traditional forms. Here and there McTell tipped his hat to older blues musicians. His partiality to the twelve-string guitar was in keeping with the Atlanta blues associated with Barbecue Bob. But McTell was beholden to no particular performance or composing style (including that of his far less melodious Atlanta friends), and he excelled in numerous genres, including amalgamated genres of his own devising. It is misleading, in fact, to think of McTell narrowly as a blues musician. Like some other southern singers of his time—including Blind Blake, Mance Lipscomb, Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, and (among whites) Charlie Poole and Jimmie Rodgers—McTell is better described as a songster. Working in a tradition, indebted to minstrelsy, that dated back to the vagabond musicians of the Reconstruction years, the songsters mastered all kinds of popular forms, from spirituals to the latest hits from Tin Pan Alley. They certainly played the blues, in part because the blues were popular, and in part because the name became attached, in the 1920s, to most black music that was not labeled jazz. But the songsters did not define themselves as bluesmen.
McTell was one of the geniuses of the blues-singing songster style, a well-traveled performer who provided his customers and the record companies with what they wanted, but also an artist who made his own brilliant musical innovations. And unlike most of the songsters, McTell, from the very start of his professional career, was a city entertainer who heard every conceivable sort of music and sang to all sorts of people. At the simplest level, he was adept at rewriting blues standards and thoroughly transforming them, in seemingly endless variation. Thus, the old slide-guitar standby “Po’ Boy” served as the foundation for one of McTell’s most startling early songs—and most beautifully performed recordings—“Mama, ’Tain’t Long Fo’ Day.” (The song is also notable for its vivid imagery, one of McTell’s other strong points, in lines like “The big star fallin’, mama, ’tain’t long fo’ day.”) But “Po’ Boy” also inspired the music for two other, very different McTell songs, “Three Women Blues” and “Love Changing Blues.” Alternatively, McTell might play an entirely different melody, then jump to one of the blues standards—as in his semi-talking blues narrative “Travelin’ Blues,” where a rapid virtuoso accompaniment suddenly gives way, for one verse, to “Po’ Boy.” The inventiveness and spontaneity of McTell’s rearrangements required exceptional dexterity, mental
and physical, but it also required his songster’s mastery of numerous popular forms, including vaudeville hokum (with its spoken repartee), jug band romps, ragtime, country folk songs, modern spirituals, and pop songs.
McTell was a sponge—the word would later be applied to Dylan—who soaked up every kind of music he heard and then expressed it in his own way. Although not always punctilious about giving due credit, McTell made no bones about being a borrower, while he also insisted upon his musical integrity. “I jump ’em from other writers,” he said of his songs shortly before he died, “but I arrange ’em my own way.”11 McTell’s touring stints affected his style, and listening to phonograph records gave him even more material, including some lines and sequences that have come to be regarded as his own.
Blind Willie McTell, 1927. (photo credit 6.9)