The Gospel According to Blind Willie Johnson 
SXSW 2010 
Music
He Writes the Songs
When stars like Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt need a creative spark, they call on Jerry Lynn Williams, the best Texas tunesmith you’ve never heard of.
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In 1964 Williams and his band, the Epics, got local airplay with their first single, a Beatles-influenced original called “Tell Me What You See,” on Fort Worth’s Brownfield label. Soon after, the fifteen-year-old stumbled into a lifetime’s worth of musical education when his band got to open for R&B stylist Ray Sharpe—famous for his song “Linda Lu”—at one of the great Texas roadhouses of all time, the Skyliner Ballroom on the Jacksboro Highway. Weeks after landing that gig, he got another break when the owner, Jimmy Levens, asked him to help book bands at the club, and he started tracking down artists like Jimmy Reed, Ike and Tina Turner, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. He also got to hang out with the entertainers he brought in; Reed, for instance, taught him rhythm-guitar chords. And a few months later, Williams got his biggest break yet: He booked R&B great Little Richard, who, after hearing Williams sing and play, hired him as the rhythm guitarist in his touring band. On the road Williams learned to play lead guitar from Little Richard’s other axman, a young musician who went by the name Jimmy James and later achieved fame as Jimi Hendrix.
His tenure with Little Richard lasted nine months, and shortly after, he returned to Fort Worth, where he made it through a semester at Arlington Heights High School before snagging regular gigs at the Bayou Club and the Silver Helmet Club in Dallas, which was owned by several Dallas Cowboys players. “I was doing Otis Redding stuff three nights a week,” he remembered, “and within two weeks I had so many people in there that the fire marshal started showing up.” Then, in the late sixties, Williams discovered orange sunshine, tie-dye shirts, and the hippie lifestyle, so he formed a three-piece psychedelic blues outfit called High Mountain and went to L.A. to score a record deal with the ATCO label. It became another learning experience. The resulting album, High Mountain Hoedown, went nowhere, and the musicians got to split a paltry $10,000.
But Williams didn’t worry, because he was on a creative spree. “In those days,” he said, “I was like the space shuttle that didn’t want to land.” In 1971 Down Home Boy hit the airwaves with a cast of studio heavyweights including Nicky Hopkins, bassists Chuck Rainey and Gordon Edwards, Bobbye Hall on percussion, Bernard Purdie on drums, and Cornell Dupree on guitar. Its sales were abysmal, but Williams kept writing obsessively. At times he lived in various studios, sleeping on packing blankets. “When I’d get an idea, I’d roll over from under the piano and be with my baby,” he said. He hung out for a while at singer-pianist Leon Russell’s studio and home near Tulsa, where he learned more recording techniques. Then, in 1972, he made his first house call as the Song Doctor: He hooked up with guitarist Dave Mason, who was one of rock’s newly knighted gentry but was having trouble writing tunes for his next album. Williams, a font of songs, was a perfect match, so he moved into Mason’s house in Southern California and started cranking out two or three a day. He toured as part of Mason’s band, but after several months, he simply walked away from it all. “I was losing my spirit. I didn’t want to lose the concept of who I am,” he said.
Though he liked writing for others, Williams was more determined than ever to perform on his own, and in 1978 he got a cushy deal with Warner Bros. to cut a record called Gone—but Gone would never see the light of day. Its beginnings were certainly promising enough; using the $500,000 advance from the contract, Williams bought a ranch in Santa Barbara and started recording in L.A. “We lived in the studio,” he said. “Everything was brought in. I had the engineer put in a dead bolt and lock us in. We’d get our clothes dirty and I’d just throw them away.” He wrote 27 songs in fourteen days. The album, completed in 1979, was produced by Chris Kimsey—who engineered and produced records for the Rolling Stones—and featured such session aces as Duck Dunn and Steve Cropper, the toasts of Memphis; James Jamerson, whose bass put the bottom in Motown’s greatest hits; and drummers Jeff Porcaro of Toto and Ric Jagger, Mick’s brother. The lineup of songs included the original version of “Givin’ It Up for Your Love” and what might be the finest cover of Redding’s “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” ever recorded. But Gone was never officially released. Williams and Warner president Lenny Waronker battled so acrimoniously over money, among other things, that the copies that had been pressed were instantly remaindered. (Even today, Waronker won’t talk on the record about Williams.)
Disappointed, Williams came back to Texas and settled briefly on a farm in Springtown. Over the next few years a pattern developed: He would head out to California, work until he ran out of money or had a fight with a record company, come back to Texas, live quietly for a while, and then go west again. One day in 1984, while recording demos in L.A., Williams noticed someone with a vaguely familiar face standing by the studio console. It was Eric Clapton. He was in a songwriting slump and had been referred to Williams by, of all people, Lenny Waronker—even the suits who won’t touch Williams recognize his talent. He ended up penning more than half the songs for the next year’s Behind the Sun, which is now regarded as the big comeback album for the greatest guitarist in rock and roll.
Since then Williams has helped revive Bonnie Raitt’s career—he wrote “Real Man” for her 1989 album, Nick of Time, which won three Grammys—and turned down an offer from his friend Mick Fleetwood to join Fleetwood Mac (because he wanted to sing lead rather than back up current vocalist Bekka Bramlett). These days he’s also looking at a thirteenth-century chateau in the Loire River Valley of France, priced at just under $2 million. Despite all the spoils, though, Williams is still writing great material and still making great music. “Forever Man” and “Running on Faith” may suit Clapton well, and “Givin’ It Up for Your Love” may be McClinton’s best-known tune, but those songs really hit the mark when Williams does them himself on The Peacemaker. Stevie Ray Vaughan adds plenty of fire and Clapton puts his “Slowhand” stamp on it, but it’s Williams who makes the whole thing come together.
As good as it is, of course, few people are likely to hear it, given the album’s limited distribution and Williams’ refusal to compromise his principles. But these days he seems to be at peace with himself and not particularly worried about the future. “Wherever God wants me to go, I’ll go,” he told me. “What He sends me, that’s what I want.” Coming from just about anyone else, that sentiment would have elicited a derisive snort. But I really believed Jerry. That’s the way he deals with the ugly truths of the business that has made him rich. It’s also the way he resolves the conflict between his religious upbringing and his reputation as a wild Texan gone Hollywood crazy.
Still serious for a minute, he fidgeted a little. “Music is the voice of spirits and angels throughout the universe, and it has the power the whole world to transform,” he said. “If you let it do that, that’s what you’ll get from it.” Then he grinned. “God is my pocketknife, and I shall not want. And the world is my cheese.”
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