Jody Williams
It was his second “Lucky Lou” of the evening. The earlier version had sounded playful–spiraling ascents, cackling single-note spurts laid over the tune’s dark minor-key chord structure–but this time, as he guided the song from a rumbalike lurch into a 4/4 shuffle and back again, his attack became increasingly harsh. By the end his chords had taken on a clanging metallic timbre. He was smiling, but his brow was furrowed and his eyes were squeezed nearly shut. If you looked closely, you could see he was fighting back tears.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Williams melded the diverse styles he heard into his own distinct take on blues guitar. He was one of the first Chicagoans to appropriate B.B. King’s sensual string bends, and he also learned from the advanced harmonic construction of King’s leads, which King himself had adapted from jazzmen like Django Reinhardt. He absorbed the melodic and harmonic elegance of Moore and T-Bone Walker, but added the piercing tone and aggressive attack that characterized the burgeoning Chicago sound. The result was a blend of sophistication and grit, seasoned with his own considerable improvisational imagination.
Artists weren’t innocent either. In 1958, about a year after Williams had recorded “Lucky Lou,” Otis Rush waxed one of his best-regarded sides, “All Your Love (I Miss Loving),” which starts off in a nearly identical minor-key rumba cadence, progresses through virtually the same sequence of rhythmic variations (although Rush modulates into a major key in the 4/4 passages), and features a very similar series of string zips. Williams’s solo on “You May,” the flip side of “Lucky Lou,” was also appropriated in ’58 (probably also by Rush) for the guitar break on Buddy Guy’s debut for Artistic, “Sit and Cry (The Blues).”
“Love Is Strange,” issued on the RCA subsidiary Groove, hit the Billboard pop chart in January 1957 and remained there for 14 weeks, peaking at number 11; on the R & B chart it reached number one. It was a big moneymaker from the start: according to Baker, as quoted in George White’s biography Bo Diddley: Living Legend, “RCA sent me a check for $50,000 one day, and $27,000 the next. They told me they had to stop pressing Elvis Presley records to keep up with the orders on mine.”
True to his word, in recent live performances Williams has largely eschewed any sort of flamboyant stagecraft, but his guitar sound remains one of the most ebullient in blues. He can still make old tropes sound new by inserting them in novel places, coming at them repeatedly but with different tonal attacks, or tweaking them into unexpected shapes. He’s especially adept with the riffs and techniques he’s borrowed from T-Bone Walker: he nudges the rhythm by coming in with solos slightly ahead of or behind the beat, unfurls extended arcs and then cuts them into short, crisply articulated phrases, dialogues with himself in a call-and-response pattern, bending upward to a note then hitting the same note on a different string. At Rosa’s, on “T-Bone Shuffle” he playfully altered that trick by omitting the response, letting the upward bend dissolve into thin air, recapturing the melody in a higher or lower register, then slowly bringing it back to where he’d left off. By slowly rotating his right hand as he picked, he evoked the swirling tonal alterations of a phase shifter; the effect sounded uncannily like a jazz chorus singing bebop vocalese behind his leads.
