Willie Dixon: I Am the Blues

by Sam Seliger

During his life, Wilie Dixon released 13 albums (plus a box set) and 12 singles, none of which charted.

He also wrote over 500 recorded songs. In 1960 alone, Dixon gave Howlin’ Wolf a trio of classic hits: “Back Door Man,” “Spoonful,” and “Wang Dang Doodle,” and the next year gave him two more with “I Ain’t Superstitious” and “Little Red Rooster.” While that short span of compositions for a single artist alone would have made Dixon an indispensable contributor to the legacy of blues music, it is rivaled by numerous other accomplishments of similar importance.

In the 1950s and 60s, Willie Dixon was the bassist and de facto leader of the house band at Chess Records, that palace of postwar Chicago blues that codified and transformed the genre. He produced numerous recording sessions and worked as an administrator for Chess and its subsidiaries, as well as scouting for talent on their behalf (and that of some other small labels). With his playing, songwriting, and work behind the boards, he was the single largest contributor—save for the artist themselves— to the classic sound of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Little Walter, Otis Rush, and early Chuck Berry.

Dixon was part of a pivotal generation of African-American musicians. Born in Mississippi in 1915, he was five years younger than Howlin’ Wolf, four younger than Robert Johnson, and two younger than Muddy Waters. Like all of those men, he was exposed to a robust musical world in the deep south and eventually moved towards larger cities (and northward) as a part of the Great Migration.

Dixon’s musical background exemplifies the changing musical world in which he came of age. As a young man, he sang in gospel groups, as well as working in small ensembles that specialized in the emerging styles of more urbane Black pop music. Though he was part of Chicago’s tremendous Blues scene, he was recording proto-rhythm-and-blues with the Big Three Trio late into the 1940s. The Blues was a form of popular music, and while it may not have sold quite as well as the Ink Spots, it was within the musical vernacular of the day and held a niche in the landscape of Black popular music in the middle of the 20th century.

Dixon joined Chess Records in 1951, and his work there solidified that niche in its post-WWII manifestation. In his book Romancing the Folk, historian Benjamin Filene highlighted Blues’s popularity with Southern-born adults: it was a modern style of music built on the familiar pre-war tradition that Dixon’s generation had grown up with. With his songwriting, playing, bandleading and production, Dixon was as crucial to this formation of the blues as anybody: he took the themes, lyrical tropes, and songwriting structures of the early blues and formed them into a coherent and fully developed world. In it, the seedy drama of everyday life was played up, where compelling characters—heartbroken, libidinous, powerful, desperate, charismatic—were the center of the world for three to five minutes at a time. His songwriting was marked by its masterful concision, using the repetition of the blues form to maximum extent and giving his many talented vocalists plenty of space to make it their own.

The blues that he played with the Chess band was sturdy and swinging, continuing the rhythmic evolution of the music from the first decades of the 20th century onward. The blues shuffle was never merely a product of the rhythm section (Dixon’s steady bass lines and the jazz-influenced swinging of the drums), but of a whole ensemble product; the defining blues rhythmic tendencies came just as much from the rhythm guitar and the left hand of the piano. While the British blues/rockers of subsequent generations would morph the blues into a guitar-slinger’s field, Dixon’s Chicago blues was still an ensemble-based music, and the bands that Dixon led for Chess Records were among the best.

It is a tragedy of these circumstances that Dixon’s catalog as a leader gave him so few opportunities to achieve stardom from the sound he developed. He recorded relatively little as a leader for Chess, and while the material he did make, such as the live duo album with Memphis Slim, are quite interesting and enjoyable, they weren’t exactly vehicles to superstardom. In 1970, he put out the aptlytitled I Am the Blues for Columbia, a personal favorite for its lived-in, ensemble-oriented sound, and while he eventually garnered success on the touring circuit, it was far less than the late-career renaissance of Muddy Waters or the eternal reverence of Chuck Berry. However, those attentive to the tremendous importance of his work have always known that there is none who can equal him.

WKCR will be inaugurating the month with a special broadcast to honor the life and work of Willie Dixon. The broadcast will run 2-6pm on Saturday, July 1st, pre-empting Something Inside of Me and Hobo's Lullaby.

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