The Album
Big Joe Williams was one of the last great itinerant Delta bluesmen, a self-taught guitarist from Mississippi's Crawford community who built his signature nine-string guitar and spent decades riding the rails and playing wherever a job or a woman took him before settling into a long recording career from the 1930s onward. By the early 1970s, when this session was cut in Copenhagen, Williams was an old man still carrying the raw, hypnotic, one-man-band intensity that had made him a formative link between prewar country blues and the postwar electric tradition; younger blues and rock musicians on both sides of the Atlantic had already begun crediting him as an influence. The songs here are entirely his own compositions, following the loose, often improvised structure typical of his live performances - hard-luck laments about women leaving, wandering, and getting by, delivered with his droning, percussive guitar work and gruff, urgent vocal style. This kind of European field session was common for Williams and many of his generation, who found more consistent bookings and recording opportunities overseas than at home during the folk and blues revival years. The album stands as a late but vital document of a musician whose deceptively simple, idiosyncratic style shaped the sound of Delta and Chicago blues alike, and it has been valued by blues collectors and historians as a genuine, unvarnished performance from one of the music's foundational figures.