MICHAEL GRAY is best known as the author of the celebrated books on Bob Dylan, Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan and The Bob Dylan Encyclopaedia, and it was after hearing Dylan sing about an obscure American bluesman which prompted Gray to go in search of Blind Willie McTell.
“I first heard about Blind Willie McTell from the Dylan song where he says ‘Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell’,” Michael tells me during our Tuesday afternoon conversation. “I wondered who he was and went and searched out the music.”
Blind Willie McTell (1903 - 1959 ) was a Georgia blues singer-songwriter who recorded for a variety of record labels between 1927 and 1935, for the Library of Congress in 1940, and later for commercial labels in the 1950s. He was highly popular with black and white audiences in his native US state but largely unknown outside it.
His best known song is the classic ‘Statesboro Blues’, later covered by The Allman Brothers, and when Michael heard this and ‘Mama ‘Tain’t Long Fo’ Day’, and others, it was a revelation.
“He didn’t sing in this dark Mississippi voice like Charlie Patton or Howlin’ Wolf, but with his beautiful, light, tenor voice, almost like Roy Orbison,” Michael says. “I was drawn to him by that and when I found how little information there was on him I began to want to search that out.”
Michael went on a journey in search of Blind Willie and the result was the critically acclaimed book Hand Me My Travellin’ Shoes - in search of Blind Willie McTell, and he will be talking about the book, Blind Willie, and his journeys in the American South as part of the Cúirt festival next week.
Gray admits that the search for information on Blind Willie was like “detective work”.
“There are only two official certificates on Blind Willie and both contain inaccurate information,” he says. However, he was fortunate in that he had a chance to meet and speak with people who knew blind Willie, one of whom was Sister Fleeta Mitchell.
“I found her just outside of Atlanta, Georgia,” he says. “She had been to the same school for the blind McTell had been to in the 1920s and I got a first-hand account from her. She remembered him as a lovely man and someone who also liked the ladies!
“Another story I got was from his cousin’s granddaughter. She as a teen had got to stay with Willie and his wife. Willie’s wife was seeing somebody else, a man who was much younger than she was, and Willie found out about it, found the guy she was seeing, and preceded to give him a complete beating up.”
Cheatin’, fightin’, machismo - it’s the stuff of great blues songs, but this was also an era in the American South characterised by racism and segregation, a place where blacks were looked upon by whites with suspicion and even hatred. For a black person it was a social reality which had to be negotiated very carefully.
“He was partly helped by the fact he was blind, if he hadn’t been be would have been born into a life of agricultural labour like everyone else in his family,” says Michael. “His father disappeared early and his family moved farther south to Statesboro which was a comparatively progressive place. The headmaster of the black school was admired throughout the community and the town had a female newspaper editor - white female - before women even had the vote.
“It was also a tobacco town and when Willie travelled around it was on the tobacco circuit so he played to people with the most money. He was an entertainer so he was more welcome than other black Georgians would have been. He had a sunny personality and was allowed play in the middle of the town where other black people couldn’t even own a house even if they had the money.
“He was popular. He was light skinned - he had a white grandfather - which made him acceptable to white audiences and respected by blacks as at the time it was ‘the lighter the better’. When he travelled on trains the conductors would let him perform in the whites only carriage.
“His blindness and music helped him, but if he had a different kind of personality he would have been slapped down. He was able to dodge his way through such a society in an adroit manner, but I’m sure he privately resented the racism and segregation.”
Blind Willie also had to be a crafty businesses man in order to secure money from record companies. As a result he operated under a number of pseudonyms such as Pig’n’Whistle Red, Hot Shot Willie, Georgia Bill, Barrelhouse Sammy.
“Mainly he did it as he was supposed to be recording for one label,” says Michael. “He would get the down payment on the recording session but had little hope of getting any royalties so he would record for other labels as a way to make money.”
Despite his fame and success being almost wholly confined to Georgia, McTell’s music managed to get to the ears of white blues fans in the 1960s and would subsequently have a profound impact on Bob Dylan, The Allman Bothers, Ralph McTell, and Jack White. Despite this Blind Willie McTell remains one of the least well known of the major blues singers of the 20th century.
“About 10 years ago I could write of him as the ‘last unrecognised superstar of the blues’,” says Michael, “but he is getting better known. He died at the wrong time. Most of the other blues musicians from that era, such as Son House, Sleepy John Estes, and Rev Gary Davis survived into the 1960s and the folk boom and were rediscovered.”
Yet more and more people are discovering Blind Willie’s music and his reputation continues to grow. So should we now place him alongside people like Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Bo Diddley, Jimi Hendrix, and Leadbelly, as someone who brought something unique to the blues table?
Michael Gray’s answer is a resounding ‘Yes’ and indeed he feels McTell deserves to be in that pantheon more than some others should.
“Robert Johnson is such a curious figure,” he says. “To white blues aficionados he is the bees knees but in his life he only completed two recording sessions and was in fact a failure as he never had a hit. If you ask black Americans to name old blues musicians most don’t know who he is.
“He also took so much from so many others. He is superb, but without Skip James and Son House there wouldn’t have been Robert Johnson. You could not say that about Son House, Leadbelly, or McTell. McTell is unique. He is as good a 12-string player as Leadbelly. He brought a great individuality and personality to his music and you cannot mistake him for anybody else, just as you can’t mistake Hendrix for anybody else.”
Michael Gray will present his talk Searching For Blind Willie McTell in the Druid Theatre on Saturday April 16 at 3pm. Tickets are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie Michael will also present talks on Bob Dylan in Athlone (April 12 ) and Carrick-on-Shannon (April 13 ); on Blind Willie in Castlebar (April 14 ); and Elvis in Limerick (April 15 ). See www.michaelgray.net
