[Dixielandjazz] Fiddler Williams

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I remember in December 1996 I was in a department store in Nuernberg (Nuremberg as it is for many people who speak English) and astonished to see a poster of this lively looking man with dreadlocks caught by the camera flapping over his tuxedo and fiddle and bow in flying condition.
I'd not heard of Fiddler in a while, but there he was, and he would be performing in a travelling ensemble with among others Red Richards and Norris Turney.  
And sometime I'll find a copy of the recording they made. But the dreadlocks!  I suppose he was pushing eighty at that date.  
He wasn't a unique case, just a more extreme one than Jay McShann, who was internationally about as obscure until near enough 1970, because he had to play what he could make money playing, and like the pianist of McKinney's Cotton Pickers, Todd Rhodes, and like Lloyd Glenn, a very interesting arranger for Don Albert's band (Alvin Alcorn on trumpet, and on one title both an amazing arranged passage for reed section and the most teeth-curdling vocal) and indeed Sonny Thompson they played the bluesy side of the midwestern repertoire in its narrowed version as so-called Rhythm & Blues.
The French Black & Blue label had something to do with some of them recording jazz again. 

And the sudden-seeming re-emergence of Stephane Grappell(y or i) had a lot to do with an interest in playing jazz on violin, which comes more easily nowadays to classically trained musicians than it did in the 1930s.  There was an interview with Stuff Smith in which he described all the problems of producing enough volume on the instrument (I liked the one about filling the cavity with rattlesnake tails!) when Eddie Lang was having a guitar built to his own specifications and Eddie Durham experimenting with the sort of instrument one or two people have been lucky enough to salvage from scrap metal merchants.  Nowadays there are probably quite a number of amateur or potential jazz violinists. 
And there is at least a TV recording of George Wein and Keter Betts with a front line of Warren Vache, Evan Christopher and Regina Carter, demonstrating profound awareness of the pioneering of Stuff Smith (though unlike Stuff, she does not look like somebody who would halt the first number of a set and with a look of dismay accuse colleagues with the despairing cry, "it's not right -- one of you cats is sober!"). I think Alvin Queen was on drums, and Rodney Jones the impressive guitarist. In the Wein band.
Jonah Jones was the one Stuff dismissed for sobriety, which he had taken up on medical advice (no booze and no reefers) and he did much later record an excellent Louis Armstrong sort of set for Black and Blue and live into his nineties. Of course Jonah was noted for the most magnificent open tone, but where others were R&B-ing he was earning his money mostly by playing with harmon mute.