Joe Williams

Nothing but the blues

The image-making industry might now be a respiratory system supporting every celebrity, but it never meant much to Joe Williams, one of the best-loved, least-hyped, and least affected of all jazz singers. Williams, who has died at the age of 80, after walking out of the Las Vegas hospital where he was being treated for a respiratory ailment, was one of the Count Basie Orchestra's most celebrated vocalists. A singer of immense sophistication and range, he consistently proved throughout a long career that the direct and unvarnished art of the blues continued to have immense potential for every generation.

As a singer, Williams could display the majestic forthrightness of the early blues shouters yet have a thoughtful, elegant and subtle jazz tone on standard songs and ballads. It made him an ideal front man for the bluesy jazz of the Basie band and ideally equipped for the solo career that followed his tenure with it. Like Billy Eckstine, the first black pop star in the 1940s, Williams coupled the earthiness and vigour of the blues with an instrument-like facility on more complex materials.

He had an acting life too, playing Bill Cosby's father-in-law, Grandpa Al, on The Cosby Show in the 1980s. Williams and Cosby (a lifelong jazz fan) were close, and the reminiscences Williams told as Grandpa Al were often true accounts of his former life after his move to Chicago.

But the blues were Williams's roots. Like the finest exponents of the idiom, he constantly sounded as if he were laying bare the most intimate joys and frustrations of his own life to each listener individually, opening to each night's new audience a window on his soul.

The singer was born Joseph Goreed in Cordele, Georgia and raised by his mother and grandmother. As a child he amused himself listening to jazz and opera on the radio, learning the piano and singing the spirituals he heard at the Methodist church where his mother was organist. Early in his life, his mother took him to Chicago in at attempt to start a new life away from the privations of black life in the Southlands. While she worked as a servant, the teenage Joe sold newspapers, carried ice and performed just about any task that would bring in a nickel.

Though Chicago was beginning to lose its sheen as the dominant jazz city by the beginning of the 1930s, it was still a town boiling with music, and the teenage Williams was able to persuade some of the South Side bandleaders to try him out. In the 1930s, at 14, he led the singing group The Jubilee Boys in church performances.

He made his professional debut in 1937 with the clarinettist Jimmy Noone and also joined tenor-sax giant Coleman Hawkins for a while. But his big break came in 1943, when he was working as a security guard at the Regal Theater, meeting the leading jazz luminaries. The Regal's manager spotted Williams's talent and sent him to the Tick Tock in Boston to audition for Lionel Hampton's band, which also had its own powerhouse blues singer, Dinah Washington.

It was while he was singing with Hampton that Count Basie's musicians heard him, and advised the boss to hire him. 'I can't give you what you're worth,' Basie told him. 'But, things get better for me, they get better for you.' Basie had been impressed by Williams' big, reverberating sound and a range that extended beyond the traditional limits of the blues, long before he finally hired him.

Yet it was with blues, and particularly the 1955 hit of Memphis Slim's Every Day I Have The Blues, that the Williams/Basie chemistry made its biggest impact on the public. They played together 1954-1961, and Williams often performed with Basie until the bandleader's death in 1984 - the year Williams won a Grammy for best jazz vocalist with his Nothin' But The Blues album. The singer always dedicated his You Are So Beautiful to Basie's memory.

From 1961, Williams went on the road as a soloist, which he continued to do into his seventies. Though in his later years the spine-tingling edge went from his high range and the lustrous smoothness of his delivery began to show a ripple, he retained his old revealing power and gravity, and added a contemplative stillness on slower pieces that was almost as affecting as his more tumultuous earlier work. Williams appeared with every kind of band from jazz small groups to full orchestras (he memorably recorded under the classical conductor Robert Farnon in 1993) and applied his musicality, swing and indomitable spirit to every situation.

Into the 1990s, he sang on cruise ships, at festivals and in hotels and clubs, and when he wasn't keeping up his 40-week-a-year schedule, he was on the golf course. He believed his responsibility to an audience was to help it contact 'the harmony of life', and said in a 1986 interview: 'I remember Edward (Duke Ellington) saying, 'I'm just a messenger boy for God'. Much of what we do comes through us. I thank God for what comes through me.'

Joe Williams is survived by his fourth wife Jillean, his son, Joe; and daughter, Anne.

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