POET
By T. E. Mattox
I miss Willie Dixon. I had the tremendous good fortune to sit and talk with him on several occasions during the 1980’s, and he never failed to amaze, entertain and enlighten me. During those years you couldn’t go into a Southern California club, blues venue or attend a music festival without seeing the man surrounded by an entourage of adoring friends and fans. He was finally acknowledging his role as blues ambassador and accepting it with his natural ease and grace. Willie Dixon had become everybody’s favorite uncle; the elder statesman whose dues had all been paid. As a bluesman who had been there and done that, Willie lived his life exactly like he wrote songs; simply, without pretension and at gut level. A huge man both in girth and talent, he became a voice for the broken man and the troubled woman. He had a genuine gift for musical arrangement and composition and is, to this day, still considered one of the blues’ most prolific songwriters. He was incredibly intuitive when it came to pairing songs with musicians and musicians with sessions, then successfully capturing on vinyl, the best from both. Just look through any of the Chess or Cobra libraries. As a studio producer, songwriter, session player and stage performer, Dixon had few peers. His remarkable body of work remains the watermark for today’s generation of blues players. A keen ear for talent and ribald sense of humor made him versatile, but Willie’s observations of the human condition and flair for innuendo, made him legendary. Born seventh in a line of fourteen Dixon children, Willie could trace his education and understanding of the blues directly to his family upbringing. “One of the phrases my parents used to teach me, especially my mother, ‘Think twice before you speak once, and think the third time before you act.’ And another thing she always said was, ‘Anybody can get mad, but anybody can’t get smart. It pays to get smart but it don’t pay to get mad.’ When I was a youngster I couldn’t understand it because it didn’t make sense. But today it makes sense because the world can make anybody mad.” “Another thing, ‘If you don’t listen you can’t learn’ and those are three things in life that a person have to do to really understand and learn to enjoy life, because if people make you angry you will never enjoy it. And these are the kind of things that had a great influence on me after I got grown, even though I knew them as a youngster.” Shaking his head, he admitted, “But many a-times I done things without thinking.” Willie had the unique ability to relate life’s experience through his music. A twelve bar documentary of the world around him. “That’s why I wrote so many songs, because I’ve been writing about the true facts of life that exist today and what I hope, tomorrow, will be a better future. I’ve been writing songs all my life, you know? I used to walk around with a gunny sack full of songs. I couldn’t get nobody to do them. I used to sell them outright for $10.” If there has ever been a central figure or seminal root of the blues, that list of names would begin with Willie Dixon. From a dirt-poor youth in Mississippi to the revered and respected elder of America’s only indigenous music, Dixon began his pursuit at the tender age of eight. “I was a kid in Mississippi and we used to be outside of a place called Zack Lewis’. He had a little tavern; they called it a barrelhouse in those days, and Little Brother Montgomery would be in there playing piano with his band. We used to follow Little Brother all over town. I’d be bare-footed, running up and down the road behind them, they’d be up on a wagon bed or a T-model Ford truck and he had a piano up there. Little Brother was short and little at that time and we always thought he was a kid, but he was several years older than we was. I know every time we chased him all day long, I’d go back home and get a whippin’ for missing school and following the band all day.” Those first short, dusty steps would begin a lifelong journey for Willie Dixon. A path he embraced with open arms and sometimes clinched fists. Occasional brushes with the law and time spent in reform school exposed Dixon to the serrated edge of life. “I used to be a fighter, you know?” I used to train at Eddie Nichol’s Gym in Chicago. Fightin’ is a hard job. Of course, I won the Golden Gloves in 1937 and I fought pro a few times. After I found out everybody was getting money but me, my management company was taking advantage of me, so we got into quite a hassle and it caused both of us to get expelled. Fights get into your system like everything else, you know? Until you finally get beat enough to give up. I got a chance to train with the ‘Brown Bomber’ (Joe Louis) down to Eddie Nichol’s gym I was supposed to go on a tour with them, but I never did go. My manager didn’t want me to get shell-shocked before I got out there too far, you know?” Shell-shocked is the pivotal word here. As often happens with dramatic and unforeseen turns in life, Willie, while somewhat disappointed, began to contemplate his options. “After sparring with Louis, I knew from that point on, and for the rest of my life, that I wanted to be…..a songwriter. The music don’t fight back and you don’t have to be ducking and dodging and running and keeping yourself together, you know?” Eddie Nichol’s place may have witnessed the end of Willie’s fight game, but it also provided the catalyst for his next career. A fellow musician and delta native, who was also a ringside regular, would steer the impressionable Dixon in a totally different direction. That fight fan was Leonard ‘Baby Doo’ Caston. “He was the one teaching me about the musical things, you know? He used to come around the gymnasium where I was training and sitting around there playing guitar and singing all day. The first instrument I started on was a one-string tin can ‘Baby Doo’ Caston made for me. I had been singing bass in the south as a youngster on the spiritual side, I knew a pretty good bass line and I’d learned how to play that on one string, so it wasn’t hard for me to learn.” As part of the short-lived ‘Five Breezes’ in the late 30’s and later “The Big Three Trio”, Dixon and Caston were fast becoming Chicago’s original blues brothers. The Windy City was experiencing post-war prosperity where jobs were abundant and high-paying. The continuous migration of southern laborers and struggling musicians along with the sudden influx of returning, cash-laden military personnel combined to make the south side of Chicago an entertainment flashpoint. Venues materialized as quickly as the crowds. Clubs, bars and boulevards (Maxwell Street) beckoned to blues players from every region of the country, especially the talent-rich Delta. Some clubs were more prestigious than others. “Playin’ in some of them old dives in Chicago, every night when you walked in you was lucky to get out. I could name a lot of places we used to play, you know? Like 708 when they was first gettin’ out, and they used to have a place down on Indiana they called ‘the Hole’. You’d have to look goin’ in and look comin’ out because you didn’t know whether you were gonna’ make it goin’ in or comin’ out. I remember the I Spy Lounge, that was on 43rd street. Richard Stems owned the I Spy. The Green Door was another place; they used to have a lot of those rough places. People now days don’t even know what rough stuff is. A lot of times guys you were workin’ with had their guns and things and I was more afraid of them than I was the folks out there.” Chicago, in the late 40’s, was Mecca for blues players but their styles were diversifying and experimentation produced a new, amplified city sound. On any given night you could find Willie, Big Maceo, Sleepy John Estes, Sonny Boy, Memphis Slim, Memphis Minnie or Son House hanging out at Tampa Red’s place. “Tampa Red had a big old room back there, he lived right up over a pawn shop on 35th and he had an old, raggedy bed sitting in the corner and a broke-down piano in another corner. Everybody could get in there and could sit on the bed or on the floor or on the piano and they’d all be in there arguing about songs, you know and making songs, like that. Lester Melrose would be in the front room and he’d always have the old lady cooking something; chitlins or something. He’d come back there, ‘What you fella’s got?’ And each one would come up with what he got.” Creative juices flowed like hot grease down the Melrose stove. Working with Leonard Caston and Ollie Crawford at local clubs, The Big Three would occasionally find themselves on stage with another Delta musician. Willie’s personal association with this one time plantation resident would last a lifetime and their collaboration would become legendary. McKinley Morganfield and Willie Dixon were about to alter the world’s perception of the blues. |