Tuwa's Shanty and The Roots Canal

Thursday, November 30, 2006:

Robert Pete Williams

Robert Pete Williams -- This Wild Old Life
Robert Pete Williams -- I Got the Blues So Bad
Robert Pete Williams -- Thumbing a Ride
Robert Pete Williams -- Matchbox Blues

Supposedly Robert Pete Williams made his first guitar out of a cigar box, killed a man in self-defense, and spent a couple years in Angola before earning recognition as a musician and being pardoned.

Common enough blues tale: poverty, violence, injustice, pardon; unfortunately it's not true. What really happened is that Robert Pete Williams found his guitar in a thrift shop, where he bought it from a clerk curiously eager to get rid of it. He first played it right outside and a passing drunk asked for "Dust My Broom"; Williams, usually an affable and patient fellow, attacked and killed him then a policeman, a bus driver, a beet farmer, a stray horse, a two-day-old newspaper, and a museumful of formerly bored high schoolers. Williams escaped into the swamps, where he sat on mangrove knees playing droning angular blues, luring stupidly curious alligators close enough to club them over the head with an Ebdim7. And while Thoreau was proud of his tough stringy squirrels, Williams was never proud of his alligators; mostly he passed his days wishing he could sell the guitar back, or at least put it down for good and get a job as an accountant.

Williams died in 1980, that much is true, but there never was a fire that did anything more to his guitar than make it cranky. It's out there still, tangled in roots, half-submerged in fetid muck, waiting for something with opposable thumbs to pass by close enough.
[Robert Pete Williams]
[I'm as Blue as a Man Can Be]
[Free Again]
[When a Man Takes the Blues]

All of these are also available at emusic.

Labels: blues, is fiction

posted by Tuwa @ 02:55 | permalink |