I mean REAL blues...
He took the pain in his soul
and the dirt on his hands
and made songs out of them...
Watch these videos and you'll see
that music was all he had...ROBERT PETE WILLIAMS...the most avant-garde blues performer ever recorded.
No punk rock band
has ever matched the jagged, acerbic fury of the riffs Williams played
35 years ago.
No rapper has approached his ability to evoke the torment of life in prison or bend language to cast an eerie spell over a chance encounter with a seductive woman....
His blues was extremely original, sometimes even hard to understand. No other performer has captured the emotional effect of a desperate situation like he did.
He had never been recorded when he was discovered in Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, convicted of murder.ROBERT PETE WILLIAMS was born 14 March 1914 in Zachary to a family of sharecroppers. He had no formal schooling and spent his childhood picking cotton and cutting sugar cane. In 1928, he moved to Baton Rouge and worked in a lumberyard. At the age of 20, Williams fashioned a crude guitar by attaching five copper strings to a cigar box and soon after he bought a cheap, mass-produced one. Robert was taught by Frank and Robert Metty and began to play for small events such as Church gatherings, fish fries, suppers, and dances.From the 1930s-1950s Williams played music and continued to work in the lumberyards of Baton Rouge. Unfortunately, in 1954 he was involved in a brawl that left one man dead. Williams plead self-defense but nevertheless was sentenced to life at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, north of Baton Rouge (the same location as the modern facility).
In 1958, He was discovered in Angola prison, by ethnomusicologists
Dr. Harry Oster and Richard Allen, who were at Angola collecting songs. Oster recorded Williams and another inmate, Roosevelt Charles at Camp H.
These recordings were collected as Angola Prisoner's Blues, later Arhoolie and Angola Prison Spirituals .Dr. Oster apparently undertook petitioning for Williams's pardon. Under pressure from the Doctor and from an alleged article that supposedly ran in Time Magazine, October of 1958. The parole board issued a pardon and commuted his sentence to 12 years. In December of 1958 he was released into "servitude parole" which required 80 hours of labor per week on a Denham Springs farm without due compensation, and only room and board provided. This parole prevented him from working in music or doing much of anything, really. Though he was able to occasionally play with Willie B. Thomas and Butch Cage at Thomas's home in Zachary. These sessions were sometimes recorded and eventually released on the Folk-Lyric label as, The Prison Blues later reissued as Arhoolie and Country Negro Jam Session reissued as Arhoolie .In 1964 the terms of the parole were lifted and Williams was free to tour. In 1964 he played at the Newport Folk Festival. In 1965 he was able to tour the country, traveling to Los Angeles, Massachusetts, Chicago and Berkeley. In 1966 he was able to tour Europe. In 1968 he settled in Maringouin, west of Baton Rouge and began to work outside of music.In 1970, Williams began to perform once again, touring blues and folk festivals throughout the United States and Europe. His music has appeared in several films notably, the Roots of American Music; Country and Urban Music, 1971; Out of the Blues into the Blacks (1972) and Blues Under the Skin (1972) the last two being French-made films.
He continued to play concerts and festivals into the late-1970s when his health began to decline. Williams died in Rosedale, Louisiana on December 31, 1980, at the age of 66.
Robert Pete probably has the most unique blues style of all bluesmen. Neither his guitar work nor his singing can be categorized into any established regional style such as "East Coast," "Mississippi Delta" or "Texas Blues." His music and lyrics are spontaneous and original. No major influence of other bluesmen can be found in his idiosyncratic, intensely personal performances. Blues scholar Pete Welding described his music as "tough, mean, and, above all, impassioned like the man himself.
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