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Sonny Boy Williamson II
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Aleck "Rice" Miller (date unconfirmed - May 25 1965), a.k.a. Aleck Ford, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Willie Williamson, Willie Miller, "Little Boy Blue", "The Goat" and "Footsie," was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter.
k Ford was born on the Sara Jones Plantation near Glendora, Mississippi in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. The date and year of his birth are a matter of some uncertainty.
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Aleck "Rice" Miller (date unconfirmed - May 25 1965), a.k.a. Aleck Ford, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Willie Williamson, Willie Miller, "Little Boy Blue", "The Goat" and "Footsie," was an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter.
Biography
Aleck Ford was born on the Sara Jones Plantation near Glendora, Mississippi in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. The date and year of his birth are a matter of some uncertainty. He claimed to have been born on December 5, 1899, but one researcher, David Evans, claims to have found census record evidence that he was born around 1912. Miller's gravestone has his birthdate as March 11, 1908.
He lived and worked with his sharecropper stepfather, Jim Miller, whose last name he soon adopted, and mother, Millie Ford, until the early 1930s. Beginning in the 1930s, he traveled around Mississippi and Arkansas and encountered Big Joe Williams, Elmore James and Robert Lockwood, Jr., also known as Robert Junior Lockwood, who would play guitar on his later Checker Records sides. He was also associated with Robert Johnson during this period.
Miller developed his style and raffish stage persona during these years. Willie Dixon recalled seeing Lockwood and Miller playing for tips in Greenville, Mississippi in the 1930s. He entertained audiences with novelties such inserting one end of the harmonica into his mouth and playing with no hands.
Miller is also recognized as one of the first musicians to "electrify" the blues (a major influence on what would would become Rock n Roll), when he and Lockwood would use electric guitar and a microphone for the harp as early as 1940, which was unheard of. Later, Miller would pass this "electric blues style" on to student "Little Walter" who would become the greatest artist of this style backing Muddy Waters and creating his part of the "Chicago Electric Blues" sound.
In 1941 Miller was hired to play the King Biscuit Time show, advertising the King Biscuit brand of baking flour on radio station KFFA in Helena, Arkansas with Lockwood.
It was at this point that the radio program's sponsor, Max Moore, began billing Miller as Sonny Boy Williamson, apparently in an attempt to capitalize on the fame of the well known Chicago-based harmonica player and singer John Lee Williamson (see Sonny Boy Williamson I). Although John Lee Williamson was a major blues star who had already released dozens of successful and widely influential records under the name "Sonny Boy Williamson" from 1937 onward, Aleck Miller would later claim to have been the first to use the name, and some blues scholars believe that Miller's assertion he was born in 1899 was a ruse to convince audiences he was old enough to have used the name before John Lee Williamson, who was born in 1914. Whatever the methodology, Miller became commonly known as "Sonny Boy Williamson," (universally distinguished by blues fans and musicians as "Sonny Boy Williamson number two" or "Sonny Boy Williamson the second") and Lockwood and the rest of his band were billed as the King Biscuit Boys.
In 1947 Sonny Boy relocated to Twist, AR just outside of West Memphis, Arkansas, and lived with his sister and her husband, Howlin' Wolf. Sonny Boy would teach Howlin' Wolf how to play blues harp. (Later, for Checker Records, he did a parody of Howlin' Wolf entitled "Like Wolf.") Sonny Boy then moved to West Memphis, Arkansas where he performed on a KWEM radio show (now KWAM Radio) from 1947 to 1951 selling the elixir Hadacol. At KWEM/KWAM, Sonny Boy would introduce Riley B. King, later to be known as B.B. King, to the world by giving him his first radio appearance, and also giving B.B. King a gig that Sonny Boy had double booked at Miss Annie's Diner on 16th Street in West Memphis, Arkansas. B.B. would make $12.50 a night plus room & board (4 times the money that could be made picking cotton) playing at Miss Annie's for the next 2 years until he would record "3 O'Clock Blues" with Ike Turner's Band (also living and working in West Memphis) at the Memphis YMCA for the Bihari Brother's Modern Records, and become famous and begin touring all across America!
Sonny Boy also brought his King Biscuit musician friends to West Memphis, Robert "Junior" Lockwood, Elmore James, Houston Stackhouse, Arthur "Big Boy" Cradup, Robert Nighthawk and others to perform on KWEM/KWAM Radio. These radio programs at KWEM/KWAM would be a major influence on a young Albert King, who lived just outside of West Memphis, Arkansas.
Thanks to Sonny Boy, Howlin' Wolf would also have his own show on KWEM/KWAM Radio in West Memphis, Arkansas from 4:30 to 5:00 daily, being sponsored by a Tractor Implement Company. Howlin' Wolf's show would last from 1948 til 1951, when he would be discovered by Sam Phillip's who was listening to KWEM/KWAM. Sam would record "Moanin' at Midnight", and have a huge hit for Chess Records (Sam Phillips leased the tracks to Chess). In 1952 Howlin' Wolf would leave West Memphis, Arkansas for Chicago and his "West Memphis Blues" would become the "Chicago Blues".
In the 1940s Williamson married Mattie Gordon, who remained his wife until his death.
Williamson's first recording session took place in 1951 for Lillian McMurry of Jackson, Mississippi's Trumpet Records (three years after the death of John Lee Williamson, which for the first time allowed some legitimacy to Miller's carefully worded claim to being "the one and only Sonny Boy Williamson".) McMurry later erected Williamson's headstone, near Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1977.
When Trumpet went bankrupt in 1955, Sonny Boy's recording contract was yielded to its creditors, who sold it to Chess Records in Chicago, Illinois. Sonny Boy had begun developing a following in Chicago beginning in 1953, when he appeared there as a member of Elmore James's band. It was during his Chess years that he enjoyed his greatest success and acclaim, recording about 70 songs for Chess subsidiary Checker Records from 1955 to 1964. In the early 1960s he toured Europe several times during the height of the British blues craze, recording with The Yardbirds and The Animals, and appearing on several TV broadcasts throughout Europe. According to the Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods, while in England Sonny Boy set his hotel room on fire while trying to cook a rabbit in a coffee percolator. During this tour he allegedly stabbed a man during a street fight and left the country abruptly.(Robert Palmer's Deep Blues)
Sonny Boy took a liking to the European fans, and while there had a custom-made, two-tone suit tailored personally for him, along with a bowler hat, matching umbrella, and an attaché case for his harmonicas. One of his final recordings from England, in 1964, featured him singing "I'm Trying To Make London My Home" with Hubert Sumlin providing the guitar. Due to his many years of relating convoluted, highly fictionalized accounts of his life to friends and family, upon his return to the Delta, some expressed disbelief upon hearing of Sonny Boy's touring across the Atlantic, visiting Europe, seeing the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and other landmarks, and recording there.
Upon his return to the U.S., he resumed playing the King Biscuit Time show on KFFA, and performanced around Helena, Arkansas. As fellow musicians Houston Stackhouse and Peck Curtis waited at the KFFA studios for Williamson on May 25, 1965, the 12:15 broadcast time was closing in and Sonny Boy was nowhere in sight. Peck left the radio station and headed out to locate Williamson, and discovered his body in bed at the rooming house where he'd been staying, dead of an apparent heart attack suffered in his sleep the night before.
Williamson is buried on New Africa Rd. just outside Tutwiler, Mississippi at the site of the former Whitman Chapel cemetery. His headstone was provided by Ms. Lillian Mc Murray, owner of Trumpet Records.
Some of his better known songs include "Don't Start Me To Talkin'" (his only major hit, it reached the #3 position on the national Billboard R&B charts in 1955),"Fattenin' Frogs for Snakes", "Keep It To Yourself", "Your Funeral and My Trial", "Bye Bye Bird", "Nine Below Zero", "Help Me", and the infamous "Little Village", with dialogue 'unsuitable for airplay' with Leonard Chess. His song "Eyesight to the Blind" was performed by The Who as a key song in their rock opera Tommy (the only song in that opus not written by a band member) and it was later covered on the Aerosmith album Honkin' on Bobo. His "One Way Out", reworked from Elmore James and recorded twice in the early 1960s, became popularized by The Allman Brothers Band in the early 1970s.
In interviews in The Last Waltz, roots-rockers The Band recount jamming with Miller prior to their initial fame as Bob Dylan's electric backing band, and making never-realized plans to become his backing band.
Pet Turtle
Sonny Boy kept a large turtle in the back of his car.
Influence
While tall tales, unlikely fables and outright lies make up much of what Sonny Boy Williamson II had to say about his own life, his most important contributions have been documented well through countless recordings on myriad labels. His output of recordings, both issued and unissued, for Lillian McMurray's Trumpet label, can be found on Arhoolie, Alligator, Purple Pyramid, Collectables, plus a handful of other domestic and import imprints, while his years as a resident of the Chess/Checker house appear on various compilations on MCA/Chess. His European recordings reside on Alligator, Analogue Productions, Storyville, and others.
Sonny Boy Williamson II has had an enormous influence on modern day blues and blues rock artists and other legendary artists, as is shown by the number of his songs that are still covered. Among many others:
not to mention the great hit ( getting out of town )
External links
- Sonny Boy Williamson (by Gayle Dean Wardlow)
- Sonny Boy Williamson II - Aleck Ford "Rice" Miller (1899–1965)
- Sonny Boy Williamson II - Tribute page
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