Robert Pete Williams - Thousand miles from nowhere

taken from the album Free Again (1961)

"It's difficult to approve the banalities of most blues singers after listening to Robert Pete Williams. The blues tradition is frequently cited to explain a singer's conventionality. We see with Robert Pete Williams,however, the possibilities of the blues. He relies upon none of the cliches, either of music or of lyric, which bluesman after bluesman will invoke. He makes each song unmistakably his own and while at times his genius may seem perverse in its oddness, when he succeeds and each odd element comes together, he will convey a tone of almost unbearable sadness"

"Robert Pete Williams is as exploratory in his way as John Coltrane or Gerard Manley Hopkins, and for the vast audience which wants to know what to expect he is certainly just as difficult. For me he is, as well, equally rewarding"

Peter Guralnick

"Although Robert Pete Williams died in 1980 at the age of 66, he arguably remains the most avant-garde blues performer ever recorded. No punk rock band has ever matched the jagged, acerbic fury of the riffs Williams played 35 years ago. No rapper has approached his ability to evoke the torment of life in prison or bend language to cast an eerie spell over a chance encounter with a seductive woman. Williams could improvise precise, topical blues numbers with remarkable spontaneity. He had never been recorded when he was discovered in Angola penitentiary in Louisiana, convicted of murder. Like the country blues titan Leadbelly, Williams even sang his way to freedom."

Milo Miles

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Music

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• robert
• pete
• williams
• blues
• primitive
• free