“Weeping Willow” - Blind Boy Fuller (1937)
Blind Boy Fuller was an amazingly skillful and influential blues artist. He was one of the most popular of the Piedmont blues artists that also included Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Willie McTell, and Blind Blake. The Piedmont blues (also known as Piedmont fingerstyle) is a type of blues music characterized by a unique fingerpicking method on the guitar in which a regular, alternating-thumb bass pattern supports a melody using treble strings. The result is comparable in sound to a ragtime piano. The Piedmont style is differentiated from other styles (particularly the Mississippi Delta style) by its older, ragtime rhythms, which also prevented it from being particularly influential on later electric band blues and rock ‘n’ roll, but influential on rockabilly, and folk.
Blind Boy Fuller was born Fulton Allen on July 10, 1907 in Wadesboro, North Carolina. As a boy he learned to play the guitar and also learned from older singers the field hollers, country rags, and traditional songs and blues popular in poor, rural areas. Fuller began to lose his eyesight in his mid-teens. According to researcher Bruce Bastin, “While he was living in Rockingham he began to have trouble with his eyes. He went to see a doctor in Charlotte who allegedly told him that he had ulcers behind his eyes, the original damage having been caused by some form of snow-blindness”. However, there is an alternative story that he was blinded by an ex-girlfriend who threw chemicals in his face.
By 1928 he was completely blind, and turned to whatever employment he could find as a singer and entertainer. By studying the records of country blues players like Blind Blake, Fuller became a formidable guitarist, and played on street corners and at house parties in Winston-Salem, Danville, and then Durham, North Carolina.
Blind Boy Fuller began his professional recording career in 1935 for the American Record Company label. He would go on to record over 130 songs over the next 5 years until his death on February 13, 1941 from pyemia due to an infected bladder and GI tract.
In addition to blues and ragtime material Fuller’s repertoire also included “hokum” songs. a “hokum” song is a humorous song which uses extended analogies or euphemistic terms to make sexual innuendos. Some of Fuller hokum songs included such titles as “Meat Shakin’ Woman”, “I Want Some Of Your Pie”, “Get Your Yas Yas Out” (the origin of a later Rolling Stones album title), and “Sweet Honey Hole”.
It would be really hard for me to pick a favorite Blind Boy Fuller song but if I had to choose just one it would be “Weeping Willow”. Although the song is a basic blues both it’s vocal melody and it’s guitar accompaniment rank among the most beautiful to ever grace a “blues” record. To me it almost sounds like an old English folk song rather than an American blues.
“Weeping Willow” was recorded in 1935 probably for the American Record Company although there is a chance that the recording was leased to second record label for it’s actual release.
