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Fact #30979

When:

Short story:

Willie Dixon, perhaps the best-known blues songwriter in popular music history, dies of a heart attack in Burbank, California, USA.

Full article:

Understandably, the birth of electric blues is often perceived in terms of the pioneering guitarists, T-Bone Walker, Elmore James, B.B. King and others, who brought the music to the fore. Willie Dixon was not one of those.

William James Dixon was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 1, 1915. Some of his earliest musical experiences came in a gospel group, The Union Jubilee Singers, where voice and melody were paramount, and by the time he pitched up in Chicago in 1936, Dixon had started setting his poems to music. Standing six foot four and weighing over 250 pounds, he briefly became a successful boxer (1937), founded vocal group The Five Breezes (1939), and spent ten months in jail as a conscientious objector (1942), refusing to fight for a nation which endorsed institutionalized racism.

By 1951, he was a full time employee at Chess Records, working as a producer, talent scout, session bassist and songwriter. “I began to take life apart and put it together into words,” Dixon later said. “I found out that things from my past fitted a lot of people in the present and also their hopes for the future. It didn’t always have to be a sad song … blues can be happy as well as sad."

His compositions, always as direct and simple as they are irresistible, include such classics as Back Door Man, My Babe, Wang Dang Doodle, Spoonful, Hoochie Coochie Man, I Just Want To Make Love To You and Diddy Wah Diddy, which have been recorded not just by almost every musician on Chess but by artists as diverse as Led Zeppelin, Peter Paul And Mary, Bruce Springsteen, The Doors and Elvis Costello.

Dixon’s typically concise summation of the blues remains true - "The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits."
(Brief biographical note by Johnny Black, May 2017)