The Wisdom of the Blues--Defining Blues as the True Facts of Life: An Interview with Willie Dixon

Abstract

In this narrative from an interview, poet-philosopher Willie Dixon (1915-1992) gives autobiographical insight on African American secular and sacred music traditions. His observations on issues of segregation, industrialization of community musical forms, and impact of corporate manipulation of Black people's culture are clear and profound. Willie Dixon, musician, composer, and founder of Blues Heaven Foundation, Inc., is often referred to as the poet laureate of For more than fifty years Dixon shaped course of blues genre and campaigned for recognition of blues as cornerstone of American popular music. My name is Willie Dixon and I was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, July 1, 1915. My whole family was from that area. I went to school there for a while. I lived around there under starving conditions, until I had to get hell out, so somebody else could eat. Ain't but one part of Vicksburg, and that's Vicksburg. I lived on outskirts of town. I was about one, two blocks from bus. At that time, we had a street car. You got on trolley car and you went straight to back. That's where you'd sit until you got off. And if a white person came over and needed your seat, you had to get up and let him in there - that's all. They had just about same conditions all over, you know. But thing was, that some were well enough brainwashed so that they thought this was best. And there were others that knew it wasn't best and were afraid to say different, afraid to act different. Anytime you're born and raised in Mississippi . . . in those days, it was experience that happened to anything that moved. My father used to say, If you don't learn nothing, you have nothing, you know nothing, and you do nothing. But Little Brother Montgomery used to say that everybody was born naked. When I first met him as a youngster, I used to ask him, Why do you say that everybody was born naked all time? When I was older, and he and I were getting around together, he said that meant we all started same way - you can gain if you want to, or lose, if you please, but ain't nobody came in here with nothing, and ain't nobody going to take nothing away. So get what you can while you're here, and be best you can, and try to make arrangements for somebody else while you're here. I knew Little Brother Montgomery since I was quite young. I used to play hooky from school just to hear those guys playing on street corner. He was little, and I thought then - because he was a little short guy - that he was a boy. But he was grown. At that particular time, he played all different styles, all styles other people never heard of. He did a song called Vicksburg Blues, which was real popular in Vicksburg, and then Roosevelt Sykes changed it into Forty-Four Blues. It was same music. Little Brother had to sit down at different times and show me how they first started to play it, and then how they added a little bit here and there, and how different people who had died long before they got a chance to record, how they played. He knew all of them. They all start from original stuff because blues - rearrangement of blue - created all these other styles, and it's very easy to see. It's like Dudlow out of Dudlow, Mississippi. He was one of guys that inspired that left hand to original 12-bar blues. When I was a kid they used to call it Dudlow - all real old-timers, they called it that name. But after people decided they were going to commercialize it, record it, they started to call it woogie. Then everybody could get into act, and everybody did get in act. Everybody come up with a boogie of his own. But it was all 12-bar blues. You learn a lot of things when you are young, and a lot you can tell people about - and then some things you can't tell people. Especially in South, where people didn't know too much at that time and weren't allowed to learn very much. …