music clip of the day

Art forms, like animal species, become extinct.

Robert Pete Williams (1914-1980), “Scrap Iron Blues”
Live, Louisiana (Baton Rouge), 1971

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lagniappe

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.

—Peter Guralnick, Feel Like Going Home (1971)