Willie Baker
Piedmont Blues Guitarist, Singer & Songwriter
Inducted into the Indianapolis Jazz Hall of Fame in 2005
Willie Baker
(BORN? – DIED?)
Also known as:
Steamboat Bill and His Guitar
Willie Jones and His Guitar
Willie Baker was an American Piedmont blues guitarist, singer and songwriter. He recorded eight tracks, playing a twelve-string guitar to back his own strong vocals. All of his recordings took place in January and March 1929 in Richmond, Indiana, for Gennett Records. Details of his life outside of his recording career are sketchy.
Baker's lyrics often used common blues parlance of the time. His song "Crooked Woman Blues" contained the lines "It's comin' a time, these women won't need no men / They'll find a wash job, an' money come rollin' in". The term 'wash job' related to the employment of washerwoman. In "Weak-Minded Woman", Baker used the lines "A weak-minded woman will let a rounder tear her down / An' when she get in trouble that rounder can't be found". Weak-minded was a derivative of the standard English sense of lacking in strength of purpose, being used as suspectable to loose sexual morals. As 'weak mind', the idiom survived in the speech of black youths up to the 1970s. In the same song, Baker's use of the term 'take' was meant to denote 'to be seized by, or have an attack of something' as described in the lyrics "Woman take the blues, she gonna buy her paper an' read / Man take them blues he gonna catch a train an' leave". Whereas in "No No Blues", Baker sang "I'm long and tall, like a cannon ball / Take a long-tall man, make a kid gal, make a kid gal squall". 'Long and tall' was often used in blues songs but is now redundant in everyday speech. In the same song, Baker also used the lines "Take a mighty crooked woman, treat a good man wrong / Take a mighty mean man, take another man, take another man's whore". 'Mean' as used here indicated a man of disreputable or amoral intent. Some of the Gennett recordings were later reissued on subsidiary labels, such as Champion and Supertone. These often employed a pseudonym for the original artist, with the express desire of avoiding paying the musician's royalties.
