The wisdom of the blues - defining blues as the true facts of life: an interview with Willie Dixon

African American Review, Summer, 1995 by Worth Long

My name is Willie Dixon and I was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, July 1, 1915. My whole family was from that area. I went to school there for a while. I lived around there under starving conditions, until I had to get the hell out, so somebody else could eat.

Ain't but one part of Vicksburg, and that's Vicksburg. I lived on the outskirts of town. I was about one, two blocks from the bus. At that time, we had a street car. You got on the trolley car and you went straight to the back. That's where you'd sit until you got off. And if a white person came over and needed your seat, you had to get up and let him in there - that's all.

They had just about the same conditions all over, you know. But the thing was, that some were well enough brainwashed so that they thought this was the best. And there were others that knew it wasn't the best and were afraid to say different, afraid to act different. Anytime you're born and raised in Mississippi . . . in those days, it was the experience that happened to anything that moved.

My father used to say, "If you don't learn nothing, you have nothing, you know nothing, and you do nothing." But Little Brother Montgomery used to say that everybody was born naked. When I first met him as a youngster, I used to ask him, "Why do you say that everybody was born naked all the time?" When I was older, and he and I were getting around together, he said that meant we all started the same way - you can gain if you want to, or lose, if you please, but ain't nobody came in here with nothing, and ain't nobody going to take nothing away. So get what you can while you're here, and be the best you can, and try to make arrangements for somebody else while you're here.

I knew Little Brother Montgomery since I was quite young. I used to play hooky from school just to hear those guys playing on the street corner. He was little, and I thought then - because he was a little short guy - that he was a boy. But he was grown. At that particular time, he played all the different styles, all the styles other people never heard of. He did a song called the "Vicksburg Blues," which was real popular in Vicksburg, and then Roosevelt Sykes changed it into the "Forty-Four Blues." It was the same music. Little Brother had to sit down at different times and show me how they first started to play it, and then how they added a little bit here and there, and how different people who had died long before they got a chance to record, how they played. He knew all of them.

They all start from the original stuff because the blues - the rearrangement of the blue - created all these other styles, and it's very easy to see. It's like "Dudlow" out of Dudlow, Mississippi. He was one of the guys that inspired that left hand to the original 12-bar blues. When I was a kid they used to call it "Dudlow" - all the real old-timers, they called it that name. But after the people decided they were going to commercialize it, record it, they started to call it "boogie woogie." Then everybody could get into the act, and everybody did get in the act. Everybody come up with a boogie of his own. But it was all 12-bar blues.

You learn a lot of things when you are young, and a lot you can tell people about - and then some things you can't tell people. Especially in the South, where people didn't know too much at that time and weren't allowed to learn very much. They thought every time you brought up a conversation about something, it was something to argue about. But afterwards you learned they were playing the same identical music, the same identical tunes.

One they called a spiritual, and the other was called the blues. And the only difference was that one of them was dedicated to the earth and the facts of life, which was the blues, and the spiritual things were dedicated to heaven and after death, you know. So that was the difference between the spirituals and the blues. And the experience you receive on earth was the only thing you had to go on because nobody had the experience of heaven. And I don't think they have had it yet.

You see, I had a chance for two sides of things because my mother was definitely a Christian all of the way around, and my father was sometimes a Christian and sometimes anything he wanted to be. But he thought of the difference. Christianity and his thing were two different things. He thought the Christian thing was just psychologizing people so they could be under control. And after I got older, I could make my own decision either way I'd feel.

My father always said, "You got to live before you die. And don't get ready to die before you get ready to live." So that was kind of my philosophy, that I had to live before I died. I figured getting ready to live was better than getting ready to die. When I'd get old enough, then I'd start getting ready to die. Then, if you happen to miss, you have a little taste of it anyway.

The reason I have the Blues Heaven Foundation is so the blues will be properly advertised, publicized, emphasized, talked about, and understood. Once you understand the blues, it will give everybody a better life because you'll have a better life with each other. That's what Blues Heaven is all about.