f42 Life With A 9-String
The composer of blues classic Baby Please Don’t Go, the legendary Big Joe Williams was the realest of real deals, a country blues singer on the road for over 60 years. Dave Peabody talks to Axel Kustner, the German blues researcher who met Big Joe at a young age and became a family friend.
B
ig Joe Williams was one of the most forceful, individual, and recognisable blues performers of all time, the very embodi- ment of a Mississippi blues-
man. His Baby Please Don’t Go is an iconic classic. For over sixty years his forceful vocal style and propulsive guitar playing remained steadfastly the same, despite the blues genre’s propensity to constantly reinvent itself and change direction… but Big Joe was not for turning; he remained totally true to himself.
He was a rough sort of character, not always easy to get on with. In 1930, a teenage ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards left home to go on the road with Big Joe to learn the blues and how to survive as a rambling musician, but he left Joe after six months because of Joe’s drinking, fighting, and general wild ways. So it’s quite remarkable that in the 1970s Joe struck up a special friendship with a young German blues fan by the name of Axel Kustner.
If you don’t know of Axel Kustner, think of him as a younger version of Alan Lomax, or William Ferris, or Frederic Ram- sey – folklorists who not only recorded the blues in the field, but who also took a camera along to capture the faces and places of whomever they discovered on their travels. In 1980 Axel, along with sound recordist Siegfried (Ziggy) Christ- mann, travelled 10,000 miles in two-and-a- half months through the south of the USA collecting material from some thirty-five artists that would result in twelve single LPs plus a double introductory volume, all issued on Lippmann and Rau’s (the pro- moters of the famous American Folk Blues Festivals) L+R label. Axel wrote the sleeve notes and his wonderful photographs are used extensively on the album covers. For some years now, Axel has been involved with the US-based Music Maker Founda- tion, which seeks to support ethnic Ameri- can musicians. Axel’s photographs feature in many publications and he’s been hon- oured with numerous exhibitions.
Born in 1956 and raised in the small town of Bad Gandersheim (where he still lives), Axel was bitten by the blues bug at an early age via Swing In, a monthly Ger-
man TV programme that sometimes fea- tured blues. In 1968 he saw a B.B. King stu- dio broadcast live from Cologne and later a full show broadcast of the American Folk Blues Festival, featuring an unruly vocalist/ guitarist who Axel immediately adopted as his “hero”. This man was Big Joe Williams. “I saw this old man on that pro- gramme who played a wild electric guitar. It was acoustic guitar, set up with a pick- up, so it was amplified. I couldn’t believe it, part of me said ‘this is amazing’.” In 1972, age just fifteen, Axel attended his first blues concert, an American Folk Blues Festival show in Bremen that featured Memphis Slim, Big Mama Thornton, T- Bone Walker, Robert Pete Williams… and Axel’s hero, Big Joe.
“… and I actually got to meet him at my first ever blues show in Germany. I was sitting in row number 10 holding a micro- phone and taping the whole show from the audience, and it was fabulous. I bought a poster and sneaked in the back to the dressing room to have it signed by the artistes. Robert Pete Williams saw my tape machine and said, ‘Switch it on’. He was half drunk and he grabbed the micro- phone and sang an a cappella version of an old Blind Lemon song, One Kind Favour. Then Big Joe grabbed the micro- phone and did his a cappella version with his deep, loud, resonant voice. They auto- graphed the poster and it just blew me away, to meet my hero, and that Big Joe Williams would sing just for me, a cappel- la. It was the raw energy and the power of his music that I am sure grabbed me, the spontaneous intensity. Also what fascinat- ed me after I’d met him was that although he was 53 years older than I was, I could easily communicate with him.”
“I still regret that on the first meeting
in ’72 I didn’t have a camera but the fol- lowing year Big Joe played two nights in Berlin that I attended and took some pho- tos of him performing. I had arranged for a friend of mine in Berlin to come over, pick him up at the airport, get him to the show and take care of him. I went to Berlin and taped the two shows. Afterwards, we would take him out to eat, talk with him and see that he was doing all right. There was a soul food restaurant called the Top
Hat, which was operated by Afro-Ameri- cans. Big Joe was happy to get some real Southern fried chicken. After the first- night, I asked, ‘What are you doing tomor- row afternoon, can I hang out with you?’ I think he was glad to have some company instead of sitting there all by himself.”
“When I got there he was laying in the bath and hollering the blues all to himself. I had some tapes of some live shows from some other collectors and we listened to some of the shows he had played in Ger- many years before and he was happy. He always enjoyed listening to himself. I asked him, ‘Can you play something for me?’ and I hooked up my microphone stand. He had two guitars he carried with him at that time, his famous nine-string guitar and also a twelve-string guitar. He used both guitars that afternoon and played for an hour for me in the hotel room. He was so friendly and easy-going and it was absolutely great for me to sit in the room there with Big Joe Williams and he’s playing just for me for an hour. He played that evening’s show and had a good audience. He was a legendary name, so it was a packed house, like three or four hundred people coming out to see him.”
“We had to take him to the airport as the next gig was in Vienna and he some- how didn’t have his airplane ticket with him. He had a big cowboy belt with a wal- let chained to the belt buckle, like bikers do, and kept the wallet in his back pocket with his passport, money and all the papers he needed, but the ticket was nowhere to be found. We had to call the promoter and arrange to buy a new ticket at the airport so that he could play that show. Big Joe couldn’t read or write, so he had to trust us in helping him and getting these things straightened out. He got upset and ner- vous while he was sitting at the airport but we got his ticket straightened out and he played the Vienna show. In March 1977, Big Joe came for another European tour of three weeks of one-nighters. I asked the booker, ‘Is there any way I can be Big Joe’s roadie for a while?’ and he was quite happy that somebody else wanted to take care of Joe for part of that tour. I got to know Joe much better because we stayed together for a whole week.”
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