Dock Boggs went back to the coal mines, Frank Hutchison went to work in a West Virginia grocery store, John Hurt went back to sharecropping in Mississippi. William Samuel McTell had nowhere to go except to the music he hadn’t even left, so he went back to Decatur Street and wherever his traveling shoes and traveling blues would take him. In the early 30’s, he sojourned all over the South with Blind Lemon Jefferson.
In 1934 he married Ruth Kate Williams, who long after McTell was dead would remember what he told her when she asked why he stayed on the road so much: “Baby, I was born a rambler. I’m gonna ramble until I die.”
Listening through McTell’s recorded work is almost like participating in a séance. Spirits come out of the dark, dead voices and the voices of folks not yet born when the recordings were made speak through the music, and amaze you at how much came from McTell.
The picking and strumming pattern he uses in songs like Mr. McTell’s Got the Blues shows up in Jimmie Rodger’s numbered blue yodels, and occasionally some of the words: She’s tailor made, she ain’t no handme-down. Eric Clapton uses the guitar lick and some of the words from Stole Rider Blues in his own Motherless Child. Taj Mahal and the Allman Brothers put their own spin on Statesboro Blues.
“Any good gal’s got a mojo but she’s tryin’ to keep it hid,” he sings on “Scarey Day Blues”, and over the years McTell had become adept at hiding his own mojo, swapping one mask for another, sliding adroitly from role to role as if simply changing clothes.
When word circulated that a new recording scout was in Atlanta, McTell immediately turned up with his guitar and a new persona, ready to make a record. He was Red Hot Willie Glaze for Bluebird, He was Blind Sammie for Columbia, and Georgia Bill for Okeh. He was also Blind Willie for Vocalion, Barrelhouse Sammy, and naming himself after a barbecue joint where the tips had been good, he was Pig n’ Whistle Red when he cut some sides for Regal.
When McTell was in his fifties he abruptly quit singing anything but spirituals. No more playful ribaldry like Let Me Play with Yo’ Yo-Yo, no more mojos Mama wouldn’t let him see. In 1957 he began preaching in the Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Atlanta. Maybe he heard the sand running in the glass. His widow said in an interview in 1977 that he was tired, that he said he wanted to get back to God.
His last recording session took place a year before he laid it all aside to follow religion. A man named Ed Rhodes, who ran a record store in Atlanta, heard that there was a blind guitar player singing for tips behind a bar called The Blue Lantern Club, a musician playing the twelve-string guitar and sounding just like Huddie Ledbetter.
Rhodes went to see for himself. It was McTell, and Rhodes, who owned some recording equipment, tried to persuade McTell to record for him. Considering that he had recorded for decades under a dozen different names, McTell was strangely hesitant, but ultimately he was talked into it. Over a period of several weeks, McTell loosened up and reprised an entire career’s worth of music. The songs were interspersed with accounts of his years on the road, an oral autobiography of his life and times.
Intentions here were good; the follow-through left much to be desired. The tapes languished for years in an attic, ultimately winding up in a garbage can. When they were discovered, only one salvageable reel of tape remained. (It was released on Prestige/Bluesville as Blind Willie McTell’s Last Session.)
He’d long suffered from diabetes, and complications from the disease brought on a stroke. He died in 1959 in the state hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia. When he was buried outside Thomson, his tombstone read: WILLIAM McTEAR.
So he never lived to see the 60’s, when the old blues giants were sought out and lionized, when necktied Yankees showed up on Mississippi John Hurt’s front porch and waited for him to come in from the field. He never worked the college circuit like Son House and Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. When he died, the great folk revival was still embryonic, the Kingston Trio in matching blazers were singing antiseptic versions of Appalachian ballads. Yet to be were Dylan, Elizabeth Cotton’s strung-upside-down guitar playing Freight Train on national television, Robert Johnson bubbling under Billboard’s Hot 100.
Blind Willie McTell was in the ground but his music wasn’t. Plunder his music and you’ll find the bones of other music not fleshed out.
Dylan, in particular, has been instrumental in keeping McTell’s music alive. He recorded respectful, loving versions of Delia and Broke Down Engine. Perhaps part of Dylan’s McTell attraction was the shifting personas, the Blind Sammies and Pig ‘n’ Whistle Reds. Dylan once recorded under the name of Blind Boy Grunt, and his own closets must be stuffed with masks he’s cast off and disguises he’s sent out to be altered again and again.
In 1983 Dylan wrote the ultimate eulogy, Blind Willie McTell, one of the most haunting songs, an impressionistic distillate of East Texas martyrs, Southern plantations burning, the ghosts of slavery ships.
Between the lines you can imagine Blind Willie McTell and Blind Willie Johnson working that Atlanta, Augusta, Macon, Savannah circuit, traveling the dirt roads in the darkness they are heir to, a quarter moon unseen over the trees, their guitar cases carried like credit cards that will get them a meal, a pallet on the floor, a woman’s smile they can feel rather than see, a poet’s voice forty years down the line that will sing: No one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.
SITTING ON TOP OF THE WORLD
THE WEEK BEFORE MERLEFEST I went by to check on Grady, and he was putting a fuel pump on his RV. It was a huge RV so ancient it looked like something the Joads might have fled the Dust Bowl in, and something was always going wrong with it. Grady had skinned knuckles and a half-drunk beer and a home-rolled Prince Albert cigarette stuck to his lower lip that waggled when he talked.
He was not in the best of moods.
I don’t think I’m going to this one, he said. It’s got to where all this traveling around costs too much money. I believe I’ve about seen everything anyway.
I looked at the RV. It was emblazoned with hand-pained legends memorializing bluegrass festivals past. The Bean Blossom Festival, the Foggy Mountain Festival, MerleFest ‘96, ‘97, ‘98. Maybe he had seen everything. He told me about Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, cracking a bullwhip and preening as the newly crowned King of Folk. Another time at Newport, his RV had been parked next to the one belonging to Mother Maybelle Carter. They had sat in lawn chairs and watched twilight come on, and she had shown him how to play the autoharp, placing his fingers just so to form the chords.
Grady told me a lot of things, but he had the goods to back it all up. The walls of the house he rented were papered with surrealistic collage of photographs of the high and the mighty, the late and the great: Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs, Don Reno and Red Smiley. Grady was in a lot of the pictures. Bill Monroe was embracing him like a long-lost brother in one, and there were pictures of Grady’s own band, the Greenbriar Boys, skinny guys in Hank Williams suits standing before old-timey WSM microphones as if they were frozen back in the back and white ‘40s.
If you go, go up and talk to Doc Watson, Grady said.
I may. I always wanted to know where he got that arrangement for Sitting on Top of the World.
He got it off that old record by the Mississippi Sheiks.
I heard that record. That’s not the arrangement.