"You better cut it now because if you let it cool, goddamn it, it won't be what was there..."
Forty-five years after Sonny Boy Williamson hard-lived himself to death, it's difficult to imagine a time when the breadth of his recordings weren't readily available to us. We have become so pampered in this digital age and Sonny Boy's work has been packaged and repackaged with such reliable rapidity as to become dizzying. This was obviously not always the case. When Chess released
Bummer Road as part of its Vintage Series in October, 1969, it was still something of a revelation. While it has long been considered an essential inclusion to anyone's blues collection, the years have allowed it to become eclipsed by subsequent, more inclusive releases--and remembered chiefly for its quick moments of notorious hilarity.
So let's set the clocks back to a time when single-LP posthumous collections were the rule rather than the archaic exception, to a time when no one had even heard the Williamson classics
Keep Your Hands Out of My Pockets and
Unseen Eye before.
Bummer Road originally assembled 10 cuts from 5 different recording sessions between September of '57 and September, 1960. When MCA reissued the album in 1997, they included a previously-unreleased alternate track of
Your Funeral and My Trial. Even with this bonus track, the disc weighs in at an underweight 39 minutes and change; still very much the standard length of old school vinyl. When it was released, none of these cuts had yet seen the light of day. With what was almost certainly a sensationalist bit of marketing, the brothers Chess adopted a novel approach and included the 12-minute Work in Progress,
Little Village. With labels warning that this cut was "Not Suitable for Airplay," in an era when such a label would attract notice, it did precisely that.
The obscenity-laced exchange between Sonny Boy and Leonard Chess has since become part of blues legend. Many years after I first heard it, I still keep it on hand for a quick smile. That it has become the most-recognized moment of this album, however, tends to trivialize the album as a whole. And this album is decidedly not trivial.
Taken as a whole,
Little Village is an intriguing glimpse into both recording and the creative process in action. This is Sonny Boy, the band, and Leonard Chess working out a new song front start to finish. There are times when I find (especially) the middle minutes tedious and, as a whole, I feel it staggers the pace of the album. Mostly I just suck it up because it is a fascinating journey. We are also afforded a precious look at how Sonny Boy wrote. Besides being one of the blues harmonica's undisputed masters, Sonny Boy can also claim credit for being one of its true poets. And a great many of those timeless lines were completely spontaneous.
Willie Dixon, who appears on all but 3 of these tracks,would say of Sonny Boy and those studio sessions, "...Well, the first thing he'd do, when he'd get ready to record, he'd say, 'Get me something to drink'... I think he got to a place where he could perform better by having a few drinks. I think his mind worked better then, because a lot of the stuff he'd make up right on the spot. I'd ask him, say, 'what are you goin' to record?' He'd just had a title or two...I'd say, 'What is it?' He'd say, 'Well, I don't know, but after we get into it, why, I'll straighten it out..."
We see this dynamic play out through
Little Village. Finishing with what amounts to a pair of serviceable cuts Takes 2 and 11, each incarnation is markedly different from the last. When Sonny Boy snaps at Leonard Chess, it seems he's pissed that Chess had aborted a very strong start for no more reason than asking for a title. In the 2 or 3 second pause between Chess asking and Sonny Boy's first, quiet "Little Village," I swear you can hear Sonny Boy seething in the silence. Chess doesn't quite hear the title, so Sonny Boy turns up the volume on him. (That's Robert Lockwood and Otis Spann we hear chuckling when Sonny Boy blows his cool...) Shocking as the resultant exchange is the first time we hear it, just about everyone who was around Chess Studios back in the day are in agreement that this was just another day at the office. For our eternal delight, they caught that one on tape.
I'd suggest that neither of the "complete" takes on Little Village quite fulfilled the promise of that first aborted pass. Sonny Boy's playing through the first 30-40 seconds is so juicy you wanna grab a napkin. Lyrically, both complete takes remain true to each other only in theme. Take 2, the canonical one, has Sonny Boy splitting from his small-town girl because she was getting too serious on him. Just a few moments later, in Take 11, Sonny Boy's the one filled with regret that he has to move on.
Given the girth of recorded Sonny Boy material, much still vaulted and unreleased at the time, Chess took some care in assembling the tracks they did. Though I would offer a qualifying point or two on a couple inclusions, these 10 (now 11) cuts are solid to the last, a quick-dose showcase of Williamson his slow-grooving magic. His harp, always an extension of his voice, always played as if it were how he wanted his voice to be, is as clear, restrained and emotive as it had ever been.
To this day, Sonny Boy carries a well-earned reputation as a sullen and temperamental loner. We forget that a great many of his friends thoroughly enjoyed his company (suggesting he could be more sociable when he was a mind to be...) and that he had a vicious sense of humor. We see this humor, often bordering on the ridiculous, and always dryly and wryly writ, repeatedly through his recordings--though rarely as readily as we do in
Santa Claus, this album's second cut. A 'Santa Claus,' as Sonny Boy describes it, is a Christmas gift his woman has purchased for him and hidden in her dresser til Xmas morning. Curiosity gets the better of Sonny Boy, he sets to "rambling all in my baby's dresser drawers," prompting her landlady to call for the police. Say what you will, but it takes a demented sense of humor to dream that one up. The tune itself is just a delight and a Christmas staple around these parts.
It should be no surprise that these tracks are, to the last, as solid as they are. It's hard to go wrong with Chess' stable of players in those years and for these sessions, Willie Dixon consistently put some of Chicago's best in that room. Sonny Boy could never keep a band together and had to rely on Dixon to organize the players. "He would always try to get Robert Junior (Lockwood) and (Luther) Tucker to work with him, and (Fred) Below, because they were all friends..." Piano duties were covered by Otis Spann for 7 of these tunes, with Lafayette Leake on the remaining 4. Tucker and Below appear on all 11 tracks. Robert Lockwood's on board for 9 of them.
One cannot look at this album without mentioning Lockwood's performances. Of Lockwood (& several other legendary bluesmen), we hear repeatedly that he did some of his best work behind other players. Backing folks like Sonny Boy Williamson and Otis Spann, on albums like this one, is precisely how he earned that reputation. While his jazz influences are apparent in his playing here, he understates them, achieving a near-perfect balance with Sonny Boy on tunes like
I Can't Do Without You and
She Got Next To Me.
The album is not without its requisite derivative moments. The "title" track (called
Bummer Road in Chess' files but
Open Road on the album) draws heavily from Muddy Waters'
My Home Is In the Delta--and it don't detract a bit from it.
Temperature 110, however, has Sonny Boy looting his own
Nine Below Zero so heavily that I find it distracting. Were it not for the strength of the playing goin' on...
The somber, poignant
This Old Life closes out the proceedings on a near-perfect note. Part of Williamson's magic were those millisecond glimpses of vulnerability peeking out through the cracks in a genuinely tough-and-gruff soul. This song, and especially this album, is rife with them.
Sonny Boy was, of course, 4 years dead by the time these recordings debuted. Leonard Chess would die of a heart attack behind the wheel of his car on October 16, 1969, the same month
Bummer Road was initially released. He never lived to appreciate the joy we've found in Sonny Boy calling him a motherfucker.
Peace, Mudcatz
Sonny Boy Williamson
Bummer Road
MCA 19971.She Got Next To Me
2. Santa Claus
3. Little Village
4. Your Funeral and My trial (alt)
5. Lonesome Cabin
6.I Can't Do Without You
7. Temperature 110
8. Unseen Eye
9. Keep Your Hand Out of My Pocket
10. Open Road
11. This Old Life
Link
While touring through '71, Fred would be diagnosed with the cancer that would ultimately claim him in July of the following year. Finding renown at the tail end of his life, Fred became one of the blues' few success stories, leaving us some of the finest blues ever recorded. 
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