He built his first guitar with one string and whatever the swamp offered. He never really stopped.Born in 1903 on the edge of Mississippi's Noxubee Swamp, Joseph Lee Williams left home as a teenager and spent the next six decades proving that a blues musician's real instrument was motion itself — riding rails, working levee camps, touring with travelling minstrel shows, and turning up wherever a crowd needed convincing. Along the way he modified an ordinary guitar into something no one else played: a battered, buzzing nine-string monster that became as much his signature as his voice.He wrote "e;Baby, Please Don't Go"e; in 1935 and then watched it travel without him — through Muddy Waters' Chicago, into the British Invasion, and on to generations of musicians who never knew where it came from. He outlasted the era that made him, re-emerged as an elder statesman of the folk-blues revival, and kept roaming almost to the day he died in 1982.This is the story of a musician who never let an instrument, a genre, or a settled life tell him what it was for — and who turned that restlessness into some of the most durable music the blues ever produced.

He built his first guitar with one string and whatever the swamp offered. He never really stopped.Born in 1903 on the edge of Mississippi's Noxubee Swamp, Joseph Lee Williams left home as a teenager and spent the next six decades proving that a blues musician's real instrument was motion itself — riding rails, working levee camps, touring with travelling minstrel shows, and turning up wherever a crowd needed convincing. Along the way he modified an ordinary guitar into something no one else played: a battered, buzzing nine-string monster that became as much his signature as his voice.He wrote "e;Baby, Please Don't Go"e; in 1935 and then watched it travel without him — through Muddy Waters' Chicago, into the British Invasion, and on to generations of musicians who never knew where it came from. He outlasted the era that made him, re-emerged as an elder statesman of the folk-blues revival, and kept roaming almost to the day he died in 1982.This is the story of a musician who never let an instrument, a genre, or a settled life tell him what it was for — and who turned that restlessness into some of the most durable music the blues ever produced.

He built his first guitar with one string and whatever the swamp offered. He never really stopped.Born in 1903 on the edge of Mississippi's Noxubee Swamp, Joseph Lee Williams left home as a teenager and spent the next six decades proving that a blues musician's real instrument was motion itself — riding rails, working levee camps, touring with travelling minstrel shows, and turning up wherever a crowd needed convincing. Along the way he modified an ordinary guitar into something no one else played: a battered, buzzing nine-string monster that became as much his signature as his voice.He wrote "e;Baby, Please Don't Go"e; in 1935 and then watched it travel without him — through Muddy Waters' Chicago, into the British Invasion, and on to generations of musicians who never knew where it came from. He outlasted the era that made him, re-emerged as an elder statesman of the folk-blues revival, and kept roaming almost to the day he died in 1982.This is the story of a musician who never let an instrument, a genre, or a settled life tell him what it was for — and who turned that restlessness into some of the most durable music the blues ever produced.