Jack Williams has always been a bit of a musical sponge.
The national touring folk musician began on his mother’s ukulele. He played jazz trumpet, studied classical guitar, and even took up the lute in a Renaissance band. From 1958 through 1988, Williams was best known as an electric guitarist in a series of original rock bands. As a hired-gun guitarist, Williams and his bands accompanied the likes of John Lee Hooker, Big Joe Turner, Jerry Butler, Hank Ballard, the Shirelles and the Del-Vikings. Since then, Williams has largely abandoned the band format for solo acoustic gigs of his contemporary folk music.
On his latest album, Four Good Days, Williams revisits original tunes from his long out-of-print back catalog and includes songs from his live set that he never intended to record. Among the highlights are “I Wouldn’t Know Love,” which Williams describes as the shortest song he’s ever written, “Suddenly The Tide,” which harkens back to his days in R&B and doo-wop groups in the 1960s, and “Them Things,” an ode to his grandfather.
Jeremy D. Bonfiglio: Let’s start off by talking about Four Good Days, which you’ve described as a departure for you. How so?
Jack Williams: The album is different from my other CDs in that the majority of the songs on it are anywhere from 20 to 40 years old. They are songs from either my cassettes from the ’90s, which have gone out of print, or they are songs that I had never intended to record, but because of pressure from friends and my wife I decided that in my 70th year I would record them.
It was a lot of fun because all of these songs had been out of my repertoire for a long time and I missed playing them. Some of them I played pretty much straight, but most of them got new arrangements, especially on the recording. But memories are associated with them very strongly, and I enjoy keeping those memories alive, especially the older I get and the further away I get from what led me to these songs.
Can you give an example of songs on the album that you have strong ties to?
One of them, “Highway From Back Home,” tells the story of how I got the feel for what touring on the road was going to be like. I was living with my dad. He was a military man, and took me all over the world. We would come back to my home state of South Carolina to visit my grandparents, who lived right by the highway. So I always heard the sounds of the cars and trucks going by, but somehow I got a sense that I was going to be in one of those cars or trucks flying by someday. The idea of the song is that whenever I travel now, which is all the time, I find myself on a highway that connects to a place I know somewhere in the distance even if it’s a thousand miles away. It grounds me a little bit, and lets me have a connectivity to home even when I’m far, far away from those things.
There’s another story song in your live set, which appears on both 2003’s Live & In Good Company, and 2009’s Bound for Glory. It’s called “Mama Lou,” and it’s about your mother’s musical influence on you. Can you tell me about the song and the role she played in getting you into music?
Whenever I play that song, I’m able to conjure her up. The song tells the story of how she gave me music, and gave me my first instrument, the ukulele, and always encouraged me. As a musician, she was a hobbyist. She played the ukulele and dabbled with the guitar and mandolin. I heard her play the ukulele every day of her life, and figured out how to play it just by watching her. When I was 4 years old, she gave it to me and I was able to play a bit of a song. She loved that I was musical. I picked up the piano when I was 6 and the trumpet when I was 9. And when I was 15, I picked up the guitar and started playing rock ‘n’ roll, and she even encouraged me in that. I thought I was going to be a jazz player, but even though I loved jazz and pop of that time, and rock, I realized it didn’t matter what I played as long as I played something and enjoyed it. That was the rule.
In your career, you’ve played either on recordings or on stage with everyone from the Shirelles to John Lee Hooker. Did you ever consider becoming a session guitarist?
I never became a session guitarist because I didn’t like it. I didn’t like being a product brought in the studio by the label to do what they asked me to do. I wanted to do what I did best. One of those things is to accompany other performers. So I’ve got to play more recently with Peter Yarrow and Tom Paxton and the late Harry Nilsson and Mickey Newbury. In the ’60s I got a taste for accompanying others by becoming a hired-gun electric guitar player. Whenever a touring R&B or blues artist came through the University of Georgia, where I was, I could put a band together on the spot to back up these people, and I often did that, and occasionally went on the road with them where I was the one white guy in the station wagon (laughing). I learned a lot from playing with John Lee Hooker and Big Joe Turner. I think what I really learned was that the blues was a gift, and we are all influenced by it, even though I’m not a blues player.
You spent a lot of time playing with Harry Nilsson and Mickey Newbury. What lessons did you learn from them that you carry with you today in your solo folk career?
Harry Nilsson was an incredible singer, as was Mickey Newbury. I learned a lot about singing and breath and expression just from hanging out with theses guys. It was so great to watch them do things that I couldn’t do, and just learn from them.
From Harry I learned what it’s like to be in the recording studio, what it’s like to be able to be free in the recording studio. Just as he was influenced by Stevie Wonder, I was influenced by the way he went in there, took ideas and was able to be free with them. … I still keep that as my mantra in the studio.
A version of this article originally appeared in The Herald-Palladium newspaper.
