Artist's albums
Highway Man
2000 · album
Going Back to Crawford
1999 · album
Back to the Roots
2023 · album
Big Joe Williams King Of The Delta Blues
2023 · album
Worried Man Blues
2021 · album
My Baby's Gone (Live)
2021 · single
Big Joe Williams Played The Blues
2018 · album
Big Joe Williams - By Baby
2017 · album
Blues From The South Side
2017 · album
Baby Please Don't Go
2017 · album
Big Joe Williams - Baby Please Do
2016 · album
Shake Your Boogie
2015 · album
Big Joe Williams (Doxy Collection)
2014 · album
Baby Please Don't Go
2014 · album
Blues Masters: Big Joe Williams
2014 · album
Baby Please Don't Go
2012 · album
The Very Best of Big Joe Williams
2011 · compilation
Live In Chicago
2011 · album
Baby Please Don't Go
2010 · album
The Very Best Of
2009 · compilation
Baby Please Don't Go (The Best of)
2009 · compilation
The Best Of
2008 · EP
Big Joe Williams Revisited
2006 · album
The Sonet Blues Story
2005 · album
I Got Wild
2003 · album
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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 exceptionally 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. As protégé David "Honeyboy" Edwards described him, Williams in his early Delta days was a walking musician who played work camps, jukes, store porches, streets, and alleys from New Orleans to Chicago. He recorded through five decades for Vocalion, OKeh, Paramount, Bluebird, Prestige, Delmark, and many others. According to Charlie Musselwhite, he and Big Joe kicked off the blues revival in Chicago in the '60s. When appearing at Mike Bloomfield's "blues night" at The Fickle Pickle, Williams played 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 one would likely ever hear. 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. ~ Barry Lee Pearson, Rovi