# As a blues and ballad singer, Joe Williams was widely admired for his heartfelt tone and impeccable timing: Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2018/12/11/as-a-blues-and-ballad-singer-joe-williams-was-widely-admired-for-his-heartfelt-tone-and-impeccable-timing-video/
- Published: 2018-12-11T21:12:15+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**12.12. – Happy Birthday !!! Joe Williams, whose urbane bass-baritone and suavely
heartbroken songs made him one of the most important singers in jazz.**

Mr. Williams collapsed on a city street a few blocks from his home after walking
out of Sunrise Hospital, where he had been admitted last week for a respiratory 
ailment. The hospital had reported him missing several hours before his body was
found. ”He’s an adult and chose to leave,” Ann Lynch, vice president for human services
at the hospital, said. ”We don’t confine people here. Upon finding him missing, 
the facility was checked, and then the police were notified to continue the search.”

Ron Flud, the Clark County Coroner, said Mr. Williams had apparently died of natural
causes.

As a blues and ballad singer, Mr. Williams was widely admired for his heartfelt 
tone and impeccable timing. ”He sang real soul blues on which his perfect enunciation
of the words gave the blues a new dimension,” Duke Ellington wrote in his autobiography,”
Music Is My Mistress.” ”All the accents were in the right places and on the right
words.”

Mr. Williams traded supple syncopations with big bands and small groups and gave
ballads a tender authority; his voice could also reach raw blue notes and breaking,
ululating inflections that harked back to the music’s African roots. As the singer
with the Count Basie Orchestra in the 1950’s, he carried the group to its commercial
peak, beginning with what became his signature song, Memphis Slim’s ”Every Day (
I Have the Blues).”

”He brought the blues from the country to the city,” the jazz singer Cassandra Wilson
said yesterday. ”His voice is rich and it’s bittersweet, but it’s a very composed
sound. Everything is well-formed in his mind before he opens his mouth, and it’s
flawlessly executed. He reminds me of autumn. His voice is bronze and burnt sienna
and golden, warm and enveloping, just an incredible instrument. It’s a life’s work
to create that kind of a sound.”

Mr. Williams reached his broadest audience in the 1980’s with occasional television
appearances on ”The Cosby Show” as Grandpa Al, whose reminiscences about Chicago
were often drawn from his own life. But his recording career continued into the 
1990’s. His album ”Nothin’ but the Blues” (Delos) won him a Grammy Award in 1984
as best jazz vocalist.

He was named Joseph Goreed when he was born to a teen-aged mother on Dec. 12, 1918,
in the small town of Cordele, Ga. When he was 3, his grandmother took him to Chicago,
where his mother had gone to work as a cook; he lived with his mother and aunt, 
who both played the piano. He sang in church, learned some piano and listened to
jazz and opera on the radio, particularly to Ethel Waters, whose precise diction
and deep emotion left a lasting impression on his style.

He started singing with a teen-aged gospel quartet, the Jubilee Boys, when he was
14. A year later, he was found to have tuberculosis and had to have a lung collapsed
for treatment, but his voice was undamaged. At 16, he got his first job as a pop
singer, performing for an all-white audience in a club called Kitty Davis’s, where
he cleaned latrines and sang for tips. He dropped out of high school to work and
changed his last name to Williams. He sang in clubs around Chicago with bands led
by Joe Long and Erskine Tate.

In 1937, Mr. Williams joined the band led by the clarinetist Jimmie Noone, which
was broadcast nationally on the CBS network. He toured the Midwest with the Les 
Hite band between stints with Noone, and in 1941 he joined the Coleman Hawkins big
band, which dissolved in 1942. For steady work, Mr. Williams became the stage doorman
at the Regal Theater in Chicago, where he met the leading musicians on the jazz 
and rhythm-and-blues circuit. He joined the Lionel Hampton band during its engagement
there, working alongside Dinah Washington, and went on to tour with the band. He
sat in for six weeks, replacing Big Joe Turner, in a blues show with Pete Johnson
and Albert Ammons, and went on to join Andy Kirk’s big band.

He was married twice in the 1940’s: to Wilma Cole from 1943 to 1946 and to Ann Kirksey
from 1946 to 1950. Mr. Williams suffered a nervous breakdown in 1947, and spent 
a year in a state hospital. He then sold Fuller Cosmetics door to door before returning
to performing. He worked around Chicago, building a strong local reputation at the
Club DeLisa, and sang with George Shearing’s quintet. He married Lemma Reid in 1951,
but that marriage foundered after the birth of their daughter, JoAnn, in 1953; after
years of separation, they were divorced in 1964.

Mr. Williams sat in regularly with a septet led by Count Basie when it came to Chicago
in 1950. Four years later, Basie had put together a new big band, and after it came
through Chicago, Basie invited Mr. Williams to join. He became a member of the band
on Christmas Day in 1954. ”He told me he couldn’t pay me what I was worth,” Mr. 
Williams said in an interview with The New Yorker, ”but as things got better for
him they would get better for me.”

Things got better quickly. Mr. Williams chose not to sing material associated with
the Basie band’s former vocalist, Jimmy Rushing, and introduced his own blues repertory.
He had been singing ”Every Day (I Have the Blues)” in his club dates, bringing sets
to a peak with its mournful incantations. He had recorded it in 1951, backed by 
a Chicago band, and it became a local hit. In 1955, he recorded a new version, arranged
by Ernie Wilkins, that became the Count Basie Orchestra’s first major hit in 15 
years; it appeared on the album, ”Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings” (Verve).
He made his first network television appearance on CBS’s ”Music 55.” With the Basie
band, he toured the United States and Europe, sometimes singing alongside Sarah 
Vaughan or Ella Fitzgerald; he also made albums on his own.

In 1957, the Basie band became the first black performers to appear at the Starlight
Roof of the Waldorf-Astoria. There, Mr. Williams met an Englishwoman, Jillean Hughes-
D’Aeth, whom he went on to marry in 1965.

His vocal style was changing. When he began singing, he often performed without 
amplification, belting above the band. But during his years with the Basie band,
he listened to tape recordings of his nightly performances, and he honed his style,
paring away nonessentials, improving his intonation and adding new subtleties. His
role with the Basie band was as a blues singer, but he was increasingly drawn to
ballads.

By 1960, Mr. Williams was losing interest in the routine of the Basie band. Basie
agreed to let him go and offered strategic career advice. After playing a final 
engagement with the Count Basie Band in January 1961, Mr. Williams embraced Basie
on the stage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem — they had never even shaken hands 
before — and started his solo career.

Mr. Williams formed a small group featuring the trumpeter Harry (Sweets) Edison,
who had been a Basie band member. While many jazz musicians struggled in the 1960’
s as rock took over popular music, Mr. Williams worked steadily. He appeared frequently
on television shows, notably the ”Tonight” show with Johnny Carson. He settled in
Las Vegas with his wife, though he was on the road about 40 weeks a year, usually
working with small groups. Through the years, his accompanists included the pianists
Junior Mance, Ellis Larkins and Norman Simmons. Mr. Williams also worked during 
the 1960’s with the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band.

In the 1970’s, he collaborated with the saxophonist Julian (Cannonball) Adderley
on the album ”Joe Williams Live” and he sang the role of John Henry in ”Big Man,”
Mr. Adderley’s ”folk musical.” He reunited with the Count Basie Orchestra in 1974
for a Newport Jazz Festival concert in New York City that drew rave reviews and 
appeared frequently with the group until Basie’s death in 1984. In 1978 and 1979,
Mr. Williams and the trumpeter Clark Terry toured Africa, sponsored by the United
States State Department.

During the 1980’s, Mr. Williams toured with Mr. Edison and other Basie alumni, as
well as with his own trio. His star was placed next to Basie’s on the Hollywood 
Walk of Fame in 1983, and in 1984, he sang Duke Ellington’s ”Come Sunday” to a hushed
crowd at Basie’s funeral. In 1989, he had his own tribute concert as part of the
JVC Jazz Festival, backed by Frank Foster conducting the Count Basie Orchestra. 
In 1992, ”Every Day (I Have the Blues)” was added to the Grammy Awards Hall of Fame
for recordings.

Mr. Williams recorded in the 1980’s for Verve and in the 1990’s for Telarc Records;
his last album, a set of spirituals called ”Feel the Spirit” (Telarc), was released
in 1995. More recently, he recorded duets with a young singer, Nicole Yarling, for
the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild label; they have not been released.

Well into the 1990’s, Mr. Williams was one of the most dependably moving performers
in jazz. Standing nearly still, perhaps with his hands folded in front of him, he
would make ballads sound like resonant, intimate conversation, then open up a blues
with a voice that was both knowing and heartsick. ”There is nothing wrong,” he told
an interviewer, ”with singing a song the way it is written, with making a song say,‘
Please like me.’ ”

He is survived by his wife and daughter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYVEdPy8gQY

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