01.Eula Mae 02:45
02.Kings Highway 02:24
03.Baby Please Dont Go 03:26
04.Baby Left Down 02:36
05.Peach Orchard Mama 02:44
06.Brother James 02:55
07.Crawlin King Snake 02:53
08.Break Em Down 03:13
09.Rootin Ground Hog 02:58
10.I Know You Gonna Miss Me 03:02
11.Someday Baby 03:12
12.Wild Cow Blues 03:21
13.Higway 49 03:19
14.Going Back Home 02:53
15.Im Getting Wild About Her 02:48
16.Stepfather Blues 03:11
17.Meet Me Around the Corner 02:59
18.Please Dont Go 02:49
Biography: Big+Joe+Williams
* Born: October 16, 1903, Crawford, MS Died: December 17, 1982, Macon, MS Period: `30s, `40s, `50s, `60s, `70s, `80s
Biography:
Big Joe Williams may have been the most cantankerous human being who ever walked the earth with guitar in hand. At the same time, he was an incredible blues musician: a gifted songwriter, a powerhouse vocalist, and an exceptional idiosyncratic guitarist. Despite his deserved reputation as a fighter (documented in Michael Bloomfield`s bizarre booklet Me and Big Joe), artists who knew him well treated him as a respected elder statesman. Even so, they may not have chosen to play with him, because -- as with other older Delta artists -- if you played with him you played by his rules.
When I saw him playing at Mike Bloomfield`s "blues night" at the Fickle Pickle, Williams was playing an electric nine-string guitar through a small ramshackle amp with a pie plate nailed to it and a beer can dangling against that. When he played, everything rattled but Big Joe himself. The total effect of this incredible apparatus produced the most buzzing, sizzling, African-sounding music I have ever heard.
Anyone who wants to learn Delta blues must one day come to grips with the idea that the guitar is a drum as well as a melody-producing instrument. A continuous, African-derived musical tradition emphasizing percussive techniques on stringed instruments from the banjo to the guitar can be heard in the music of Delta stalwarts Charley Patton, Fred McDowell, and Bukka White. Each employed decidedly percussive techniques, beating on his box, knocking on the neck, snapping the strings, or adding buzzing or sizzling effects to augment the instrument`s percussive potential. However, Big Joe Williams, more than any other major recording artist, embodied the concept of guitar-as-drum, bashing out an incredible series of riffs on his G-tuned nine-string for over 60 years.
