Blind Willie McTell - Thomson's ‘Statesboro Blues’ Man
William Samuel McTier, famously known world-wide as Blind Willie McTell, was born in Thomson, Georgia. Most sources give the date of his birth as 1898, but accurate birth records for a black child in the Georgia backwoods weren’t on anyone’s list of top priorities in the 19th Century. McTell was born blind in one eye and lost his remaining vision in his early childhood. He attended schools for the blind and showed proficiency in music from an early age, first playing the harmonica and accordion, learning to read and write music in Braille, and turning to the six-string guitar in his early teens. His family background was rich in music; both of his parents and an uncle played the guitar. McTell's father left the family when Willie was young. After his mother died in the 1920s, he left home to become a traveling musician.
McTell became a street performer in several Georgia cities, including Atlanta and Augusta. In late 1927, Victor Records struck gold in Atlanta when they recorded Blind Willie for the first time. Already over thirty, accompanied by his own guitar, ‘The Dean of The Atlanta Blues School’ recorded 4 sides for Victor. He never produced a major hit record, but he had a prolific recording career with different labels and under different names in the 1920s and 1930s. He was active in the 1940s and 1950s, playing on the streets of Atlanta. His last recordings originated during an impromptu session recorded by an Atlanta record store owner in 1956. McTell died three years later, having suffered for years from diabetes and alcoholism. Despite his lack of commercial success, he was one of the few blues musicians of his generation who continued to actively play and record during the 1940s and 1950s. He did not live to see the American folk music revival in which many other bluesmen were "rediscovered".
Willie was a regular at house rent parties, on street corners, at fish fries, as well as working the medicine and tent show circuit. In 1933 he is known to have worked street corners with Blind Willie Johnson, a formidable pair of performers. He continued to record up until 1936 for Victor, Vocalion and Decca, working with Piano Red, Curley Weaver and his wife Kate whom he married in 1934. She accompanied him on stage and on several recordings before becoming a nurse in 1939. For most of their marriage, from 1942 until his death, they lived apart (she in Fort Gordon, near Augusta, and he around Atlanta). Throughout this period he played for tips, down on Atlanta’s Decatur Street, as well as hoboing through the South and East.
In the years before World War II, McTell traveled and performed widely, recording for several labels under different names: Blind Willie McTell (for Victor and Decca), Blind Sammie (for Columbia), Georgia Bill (for Okeh), Hot Shot Willie (for Victor), Blind Willie (for Vocalion and Bluebird), Barrelhouse Sammie (for Atlantic) and Pig & Whistle Red (for Regal). ‘Pig & Whistle’ was a reference to a chain of barbecue restaurants where customers sat in their cars and ate. McTell often played for tips in the parking lot of the Atlanta Pig & Whistle (maybe Augusta’s too).
The symbol of the pig and the whistle was used on tavern signs in old England because so many people were unable to read and the sign stood for food and drink. The pig represents meat or food, and in early Anglo-Saxon, the whistle referred to the mouth or throat. Hence the expression ‘wet your whistle,’ as in “I need a drink to keep my whistle wet.” Over 150 years ago there was a tavern in England called the Pig ’n Whistle. It became quite famous for serving food and beverages to the hungry and thirsty travelers of that date, as did Atlanta’s first Pig & Whistle which was opened April 1, 1928.
Willie also played behind a nearby building that later became Ray Lee's Blue Lantern Lounge. Like Lead Belly, another songster who began his career as a street artist, McTell favored the somewhat unwieldy and unusual twelve-string guitar, whose greater volume made it suitable for outdoor playing. He played with a fluid, syncopated fingerstyle guitar technique, common among many exponents of Piedmont blues. Unlike his contemporaries, he came to use twelve-string guitars exclusively. McTell was also an adept slide guitarist, unusual among ragtime bluesmen. His vocal style, a smooth and often laid-back tenor, differed greatly from many of the harsher voices of Delta bluesmen.
In 1940, John and Ruby Lomax interviewed and recorded McTell for the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress in a two-hour session held in their hotel room in Atlanta. Those recordings document McTell's distinctive musical style, which bridges the gap between the raw country blues of the early part of the 20th century and the more conventionally melodious, ragtime-influenced East Coast Piedmont blues sound. In the interview, John Lomax asked if McTell knew any ‘complaining’ or protest songs, to which the singer, not wanting to get into politics, replied somewhat uncomfortably that he did not. The Library of Congress paid Willie $10 (the equivalent of $155 in 2011) for that two-hour session which was issued in 1960 as an LP and later as a CD.
McTell recorded for Atlantic Records and Regal Records in 1949, but these recordings met with less commercial success than his previous works. He continued to perform around Atlanta, but his career was cut short by ill health, mostly due to diabetes and alcoholism. In 1956, an Atlanta record store manager, Edward Rhodes, discovered McTell playing songs in the street for quarters and enticed him with a bottle of corn liquor into his store, where he captured a few final performances on a tape recorder. These recordings were released posthumously by Prestige/Bluesville Records as ‘Last Session’. In his recordings of "Lay Some Flowers on My Grave" and "Lord, Send Me an Angel" and "Statesboro Blues", he pronounces his name ‘MacTell’ with the stress on the first syllable.
One of McTell's most famous songs, "Statesboro Blues", was frequently covered by the Allman Brothers Band. Their rendition is ranked number nine on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time". In 2005, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ranked "Statesboro Blues" number 57 on its list of "100 Songs of the South".
The song’s lyrics, a first-person narrative, tell the story of a man pleading with a woman to let him in her house; the speaker calls himself ‘Papa McTell’ in the first stanza: "Have you got the nerve to drive Papa McTell from your door?" Throughout the song, the woman, addressed as ‘mama,’ is often pleaded with to go with Papa "up the country". Sometimes she’s threatened with "When I leave this time, pretty mama, I'm going away to stay". Throughout the non-linear narrative, the "Statesboro blues" are invoked. They are an unexplained condition from which the speaker and his entire family seem to be suffering: "I woke up this morning, had them Statesboro blues. I looked over in the corner: grandma and grandpa had 'em too". The Allman Brothers’ version has slightly shorter and simplified lyrics. As with many blues lyrics, it can be difficult to establish a definitive narrative order for the stanzas. In 2016, the song was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry due to its "cultural, historic, or artistic significance".
According to Bob Dylan, “And I know no one can sing the blues, like Blind Willie McTell.” Dylan paid tribute to McTell on at least four occasions. In the second verse of his 1965 song "Highway 61 Revisited," ‘Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose’ is a reference to one of McTell's many recording names. Dylan's song "Blind Willie McTell" was recorded in 1983 and released in 1991 on ‘The Bootleg Series.’ Dylan also recorded covers of McTell's "Broke Down Engine" and "Delia" on his 1993 album, ‘World Gone Wrong.’ Dylan's song "Po' Boy", on his 2001 album ‘Love and Theft’ contains the lyric "had to go to Florida dodging them Georgia laws", which comes from McTell's "Kill It Kid".
The Blind Willie McTell Music Festival
The Blind Willie McTell Music Festival is held annually in Thomson, Georgia. The citizens of Thomson maintain an unusually acute awareness of Blues music and its legacy. As home to bluesman Blind Willie McTell, Thomson celebrates its association with him. Every year, other talented artists follow in the footsteps of Blind Willie, one of America’s most influential musicians, as they perform live at the Blind Willie McTell Music Festival, promoted by the Activities Council of Thomson (ACT).
One has to maintain a certain tolerance for ambiguity to understand how a disabled African American from central Georgia in the early part of the 20th century could inspire the likes of the most successful and influential Blues, Jazz and Rock musicians of our time. While accomplished and appreciated in his day, Blind Willie was never truly successful by today’s standards. His real claim to success has been realized in his gift to future generations. In his lifetime, overcoming physical and social adversity was part of his program. Willie McTell was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame in 1981 and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 1990. Willie passed away in August of 1959, at 61 years old, having suffered a brain hemorrhage. He is buried at Jones Grove Church, near Thomson, and on his headstone is his birth name, Willie Samuel McTier.
Blind Willie McTell’s tombstone
David Fulmer, a music producer and author from Atlanta, respected Blind Willie for the genius he was and paid to have a more appropriate gravestone erected on Willie’s resting place. Everything went flawlessly, but after Blind Willie’s original concrete tombstone was replaced with the new polished granite marker, Fulmer noticed one of the trustees of the church walking to the back of the tiny Jones Grove sanctuary. When the man reappeared, he was carrying a large sledgehammer. As the man approached Willie’s gravesite, Fulmer asked him what he was going to do. The trustee said he was going to crush Willie’s concrete stone to use on their unpaved parking lot. “Wait just a minute,” Fulmer said, “we can’t do that. I’ll tell you what. I’ll trade you the new tombstone for the old one.” The trustees agreed and Fulmer took Blind Willie’s marker home. In 2011, Mr. Fulmer called the Thomson-McDuffie Museum and offered it Blind Willie’s headstone. He said he was moving again and he was tired of taking the heavy concrete tombstone with him. He said his only use for it was during Halloween to scare the kids. The Georgia Music Hall of Fame was where it belonged, he said, but they were closing (which they did). The museum director and his wife went to Atlanta the next morning, brought back Blind Willie’s tombstone and set it up on display.
Folk enthusiast Anne Evans, first Blind Willie researcher
Many recording enthusiasts estimate that up to seventy-five percent of what the world knows about Blind Willie McTell’s life is due directly or indirectly to the efforts of Anne M. Evans. She died Feb. 7, 2020 in Tennessee at 103 years old. She grew up in New England before moving to Savannah around 1974.
She had only a high school education and no experience or training in field research, other than a bit of prior amateur folklore collecting in New England, and no real knowledge of blues and folk music or any particular interest in it, but she was in the South and wanted to know if she could somehow help her son, David Evans, Jr. with his research. David suggested Blind Willie since his life was little known, at the time, other than that he had grown up in Statesboro not far from Savannah. He also suggested that Anne investigate around Thomson where McTell said he had been born. Anne and David Sr. set out on their fact-finding trip, first asking around Savannah where they turned up a few memories of McTell. Then they went to Statesboro and met and interviewed several informants who knew McTell, including McTell’s half-brother Robert Owens.
David Evans Jr. published a preliminary version of the McTell research in 1980 in an essay in the booklet notes to ‘Atlanta Blues: 1933,’ which won a Grammy nomination for “Best Album Notes.” Englishman Michael Gray, Willie’s primary biographer, converted McTell’s life into a travelogue of his own ‘voyage of discovery,’ using the road map that Anne’s research had largely laid out. Gray failed to give Anne Evans the credit for doing the initial research on Blind Willie for which she so richly deserves.
Written by McDuffie County historian and McDuffie Museum Director, Lewis Smith.