The blues historian Scott Barretta has a clipping from The New Yorker tacked to the wall of the office in his Greenwood home. It’s a page from the magazine’s arts calendar featuring a caricature of the bluesman Willie King. The listing — in the Sept. 16, 2002, issue — publicizes King’s appearance at Joe’s Pub, the live music venue at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in Lower Manhattan.
Barretta was in Columbus Thursday evening for a talk at the Rosenzweig Arts Center, part of the CAC’s Mississippi Writers’ Series, the first event of a weekend celebrating the life and music of the Alabama bluesman.
King died in March 2009 on his 66th birthday on a Sunday afternoon, the day after a performance at the RAC. That night, as this newspaper reported, King sang of “Friendly City angels,” who overwhelmed him with love.
He was referring to a Jan. 8 concert earlier that year at the RAC when he fell ill. At the insistence of the audience, King was immediately taken to Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle.
His concert on Saturday, the day before he died, was a “thank you” to those who expressed concern and took care of him that night.
Barretta’s day job is professor of sociology at the University of Mississippi. He hosts Mississippi Public Radio’s “Highway 61,” writes a column on blues for The Clarion Ledger and is a driving force in the state’s Blues Trail marker program. His knowledge of blues music is encyclopedic.
Growing up in the suburbs of D.C., Barretta, 52, was exposed to the nation’s rich trove of folk music early on. His parents took him to the Smithsonian Folklife Festivals on the Mall. As a teenager, he started buying blues records and going to clubs in the D.C. area to hear blues performers.
“Once I picked up a Lightning Hopkins’ record, it didn’t go away,” Barretta, said. “Like a lot of white middle-class kids, you had the potential to do archeology.”
Barretta’s “archeology” naturally took him to Mississippi.
“In the early 90s I started going to juke joints in Mississippi. Hearing Booba Barnes play on Nelson Street … it was a transformative experience.”
Friday afternoon Barretta and I had lunch at Thai by Thai. The professor was wearing a flowered shirt under a dark brown corduroy jacket with a lapel pin depicting a Highway 61 road marker. Barretta speaks in monotones; the information is there, the excitement less evident. That is until the subject is Willie King.
I asked about his first trip to Betty’s Place, the Noxubee County juke joint in the Sandyland community where King played Sunday nights to a mostly a neighborhood crowd.
“Willie wasn’t known then,” said Barretta. “It was wonderful that sort of juke joint situation was still going on.”
But, as Barretta would soon discover, the man was much more than his music.
“Willie was like a saint, a philosopher. The spiritual aspect of Willie’s music was captivating”
What do you mean, I asked.
“He was a ragtag guy,” Barretta said. “If you gave him stuff — clothes, shoes, money — he gave it to people in his community that needed it more than him.
“He wasn’t selfish in the way most of us are. He seemed to be somebody who lived according to his beliefs.”
Each year blues fans — some from overseas — traveled to Old Memphis, Alabama, to attend the King’s Freedom Creek Blues Festival. Proceeds from the event benefited The Rural Members Association, a King initiative that provided area youth classes in music, woodworking and African-American folk crafts.
Lacking in King was the trait essential to success in the music business: a willingness to tour.
“He was conflicted about going on the road,” said Barretta. “He did travel, but too many were dependent on him in Aliceville and Old Memphis.
“He worried about who was going to help this old guy take his medicine. The problems were never running out. He had little interest in career building.”
King never made it to the gig a Joe’s Pub in New York City. His record label, Rooster Records, had just been sold; the new label didn’t want to spend the money to bring King to NYC, and King was unable to get there under his own power.
Barretta sees The New Yorker clipping as emblematic of King’s career.
“It’s a weird sort of thing,” says Barretta. “This was a curated event, something that would have been triumph for most artists, a publicist’s dream.”
As for Willie King, one would think, it was just as well. There were more important things to do, here at home.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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