Andre Williams

Singer, songwriter, producer

Call him by one of his various nicknames: the Black Godfather, the Father of Rap, Mr. Rhythm. Or there is another common description available—as Williams admitted to Larry Katz of the Boston Herald, "They call me the dirtiest man that ever lived." Andre Williams is a rhythm-and-blues wild man, a survivor of the raunchy urban African-American music of the 1950s and 1960s who enjoyed an unlikely career revival at the 20th century's end, when he was more than 60 years old.

Williams was active as a writer and producer in Detroit during the first part of his career, and he was a hidden presence in the early days of the city's famed Motown label. What drew new young fans in his direction later on, however, was the raw sexuality of much of his own music. "I Wanna Be Your Favorite Pair of Pajamas," from his 1998 album Silky, was one of his milder efforts. "I'm trying to tell a story. Dig the theme," Williams explained to Gilbert Garcia of the Dallas Observer. "We can't all go on the expressway. Sometimes some of us got to take the low road."

Heard Southern Country, Chicago Blues

Andre Williams was the stage name of Zeffrey Williams, who was born in Bessemer, Alabama, on November 1, 1936. During his childhood he bounced back and forth between Chicago, where his father worked in a steel mill, and his grandparents' home in rural Alabama. "My grandfather was a primitive, sanctified man," Williams told Joss Hutton of the Perfect Sound website. "Him and my grandmother. That means seven days a week in church. No rock 'n' roll on the radio, no smoking or drinking." The music Williams heard plowing fields in Alabama was country, coming over the radio from WLAC in Memphis: Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Patsy Cline. In Chicago, however, where he worked after school (and through much of the night) at Cadillac Bob's Steakhouse on the South Side, he heard the hyper-charged blues of Wynonie Harris and other singers and instrumentalists on the cutting edge of African-American music around 1950.

Threatened with a stint in an Illinois reform school due to repeated truancy, and impressed by the naval adventure film The Frogmen, Williams, at age 14, borrowed an older brother's birth certificate and joined the United States Navy. After serving for some months, and singing with doo-wop groups the Cavaliers and the Thrills while in Chicago on leave, he was found out, court-martialed, and imprisoned for a year on charges of fraudulent enlistment. Williams then headed for Detroit with a Navy friend. Wearing the red corduroy jacket he had been given as part of his Navy discharge, he entered an amateur-night contest at the Warfield Theater in the city's Hastings Street black entertainment district. He took home the $25 first prize with a daring dance routine in which he misjudged a jump over the orchestra pit but kept going without breaking stride, and local music executives began to get wind of the brash youngster's talent as he was invited back for subsequent performances. Comedian Redd Foxx dubbed Williams "Mr. Rhythm," and the nickname stuck.

Williams knew that he did not have the voice to compete with Clyde McPhatter and other singing stars of the time, so he tried to go back to musical roots. "I wanted to tell stories!" he explained to Hutton. "I'll tell you somethin' … the first line of communications was the drums. That was in Africa, the Congos, the Mongos, and all them 'gos. When they was doin' communications, it was with the drums. So if I could get a drum rhythm which captivates people and put a hell of a story on top of it, I can't lose. And that's where I went." Signed to Detroit's Fortune label, he released "Bacon Fat" in 1956, drawling over a drumbeat and a doo-wop chorus about a new dance, the Bacon Fat, that was taking hold among cotton pickers in the South. He composed the song while driving to a gig in Tennessee and holding a bacon-and-egg sandwich in his hand. Fortune's engineers thought he was joking when he began talking rather than singing, but a Detroit DJ, Frantic Eddie Durham, was observing the session and realized the record's potential.

Influenced Funk and Rap Performers

The song reached the national rhythm-and-blues top ten and was picked up for distribution by the major Epic label, but Williams realized few profits from the deal. He released a series of follow-up singles; "The Greasy Chicken" and "Pass the Biscuits Please" reprised the food theme, while "Jail Bait" suggested the sexual content of his later music. These recordings, collected on the 1960 Fortune LP Jail Bait, were not big hits but were known to other performers and became collectors' items. "Bacon Fat" helped spawn a tradition of spoken songs that influenced performers up to 1970s funk master Bootsy Collins and beyond. "I wouldn't say I was the first in the world, but that's how the talking thing started," Williams observed to Katz. "Now some people call me the Godfather of Rap."

In 1961 Williams moved to the new Motown label after his barber introduced him to auto-plant worker and music entrepreneur Berry Gordy. He began writing songs prolifically; of his 230 compositions registered with the BMI licensing agency, many date from this period. Among his compositions was Stevie Wonder's very first recording, "Thank You for Loving Me." Williams' biggest hits as a songwriter and producer, however, came with other labels—his relationship with Gordy was tense, and he was fired and then rehired several times after notching a hit with another artist. The rhythm-and-blues standard "Shake a Tail Feather," sung by Ray Charles in the film The Blues Brothers, was originally written and produced by Williams, with a group called the Five Du-Tones performing. He also wrote the Alvin Cash and the Registers hit "Twine Time."

In 1965 Williams left Motown after an incident in which he is said to have taken a shot at a stranger who had entered the dressing room of Motown star Smokey Robinson. Working briefly as road manager for singer Edwin Starr, he signed with the Chess label in Chicago and released several moderately successful singles—small classics of early funk such as "Cadillac Jack" and "The Stroke." In the early 1970s Williams was working for the Houston independent label Duke (artists in his producer stable there included bluesmen Bobby "Blue" Bland and O.V. Wright), but this stretch of his career came to an end when his life was threatened by a gangster whose daughter he had become involved with. Given the gift of a plane ticket by a friend, blues star B.B. King, Williams headed for California and signed on with R&B duo Ike and Tina Turner, then in the last stages of their marriage and professional partnership.

For the Record …

Born Zeffrey Williams on November 1, 1936, in Bessemer, AL; two sons. Education: Attended schools in Bessemer, AL, and Chicago.

Won amateur contest at Warfield Theater, Detroit, MI, early 1950s; recorded (mostly as Andre Williams and the Don Juans) for Fortune label, had hit R&B single "Bacon Fat," 1956; affiliated intermittently as producer and songwriter with Motown label, Detroit, producing recordings by the Contours and Mary Wells, 1961–65; composed several classic R&B hits, including "Shake a Tail Feather" and "Twine Time," late 1960s; recorded for Checker label, ca. 1967–68; worked as producer for Ike Turner, early 1970s; dropped out of music business due to substance abuse problems, late 1970s–early 1990s; released Greasy album 1996; signed to In the Red label, released Silky album, 1998; recorded for In the Red, Bloodshot, and Norton labels, late 1990s–early 2000s; released Aphrodisiac on Pravda label, 2006.

Addresses: Record company—In the Red Records, P.O. Box 50777, Los Angeles, CA 90050.

Struggled with Cocaine Addiction

Williams worked with Ike Turner for 18 months, which was long enough to develop a full-blown addiction to cocaine. "You know how your mother would have little porcelain elephants or whatever, on the kitchen shelves, like salt and pepper shakers. Well, every single one of these in Ike's house was full of coke!" Williams recalled to Hutton. "You could either pick the neck down or move a leg and shake a gram out of it. Full of coke! When I went to work with Ike I was weighing 185 pounds. At the end I was 85 pounds!" Williams managed to return to Detroit and recover temporarily, but the rise of the high-tech disco style displaced his lowdown brand of blues and funk from urban music charts.

Things went from bad to worse, and Williams ended up in a Chicago homeless shelter, prey to a long drug addiction. He made a living by panhandling, and recalled one day on which he was forced to sit on a bridge begging for quarters in a 40-below-zero wind chill, wearing five pairs of pants and nine shirts. "I found this little spot in Chicago where all the white boys come off the train with their purple platinum Visa," he recalled to David Kunian of the Best of New Orleans website. "I'd make me $150 by 9 a.m. Then I'd take the bus to the projects and by the time I left the projects at 11, I'd have one dollar and 38 cents. I gave that up one New Year's Eve when I got so paranoid that I threw $290 in the Chicago River, and I almost threw in my coat. Those kind of things are what turned me around."

Made Surprising Comeback

Williams had no thought of resuming his music career until he was tracked down by rock 'n' roll enthusiasts at the St. George and Norton labels. "I just woke up one morning, went to the bathroom, and all of a sudden the phone rang," he recalled to Katz. "It was, 'Andre, do you want to make a record?' And I said, 'Are you trying to wake me from this terrible dream that I'm nobody? OK, I'll try it.' All of a sudden I'm playing in Europe, at festivals, everywhere. And suddenly I realized I am somebody." Williams released his Greasy album in 1996 and then moved to California's In the Red label for 1998's Silky.

Returning to his country roots with the 1999 album Red Dirt, recorded with the alternative country band the Sadies, Williams mixed classics of deranged country music such as Johnny Paycheck's "Pardon Me (I've Got Someone to Kill)" with originals like "She's a Bag of Potato Chips." Part of the reason for Williams' continuing success in the early 2000s was that he had no trouble writing new material, even as he approached 70 years of age. He told Hutton, "You come up with stuff about what the f**k happened yesterday! Always in life … if you wake up tomorrow, something's gonna happen in that day that the world can relate to. You just got to find that one thing that happened. And then put your own self in it." The experiences Williams sang about in such songs as "Your Stuff Ain't the Same" (from 2001's Bait and Switch), were often sexual ones. It was not quite true that, as Garcia wrote, "His music has one message: He's horny and he wants to do something about it," but the characterization was appropriate for many songs. Jeff Gordinier of Fortune noted that Williams' "salacious soul workouts are clotted with good, old-school sonic crud; sometimes the mike literally sounds as if it's daubed with griddle fat and carburetor grime."

At the instigation of a Jamaican-born girlfriend, Williams converted to Judaism later in life. Despite the raunchy content of his lyrics, he often professed religious faith in interviews and credited his career resurgence to divine intervention. Entering his eighth decade of life, Williams was making music at a pace that exceeded even his busiest days in Detroit at the Fortune label. He released the Aphrodisiac album on the Pravda label in 2006.

Selected discography

Jail Bait, Fortune, 1960.
Greasy, Norton, 1996; reissued, 2003.
Mr. Rhythm, 1996.
Silky, In the Red, 1998.
Red Dirt, Bloodshot, 1999.
The Black Godfather, In the Red, 2000.
Fat Back & Corn Liquor, St. George, 2000.
Bait and Switch, Norton, 2001.
Holland Shuffle!, Norton, 2003.
Red Beans and Biscuits, Soul-Tay-Shus, 2005.
Aphrodisiac, Pravda, 2006.
Movin On: Greasy and Explicit Soul Movers: 1956–1970, Vampi Soul, 2006.

Sources

Periodicals

Boston Herald, October 4, 2001, p. 65.

Fortune, January 21, 2002, p. 136.

Wisconsin State Journal, October 26, 2006, p. 19.

Online

"Andre Williams," All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com (November 7, 2006).

"Andre Williams," In the Red Records, http://www.intheredrecords.com/pages/andre.html (November 7, 2006).

"Andre Williams May Be 63 Years Old, But He's Still Agile, Mobile, and Hostile," Dallas Observer, http://dallasobserver.com/Issues/1999-11-11/music/music3.html (November 7, 2006).

"Here Comes Trouble: Rhythm and Blues Bad Boy Andre Williams Rings in the New Year in New Orleans," Best of New Orleans, http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2001-12-25/ae_feat.html (November 7, 2006).

"The Black Godfather: Andre Williams," Perfect Sound, http://www.furious.com/PERFECT/andrewilliams.html (November 7, 2006).