Blind Willie McTell (born William Samuel McTier) was an American Piedmont blues and ragtime singer, songwriter and guitarist. He played in a fluid, syncopated finger picking guitar style common among many East Coast, Piedmont blues players. Like his Atlanta contemporaries, he came to use twelve-string guitars exclusively. McTell was also adept at slide guitar, unusual among ragtime bluesmen. He sang in a smooth and often laid-back tenor which differed greatly from the harsher voices of many Delta bluesmen such as Charley Patton. He performed in various musical styles including blues, ragtime, religious music, and hokum and recorded more than 120 titles during fourteen recording sessions.
Most sources give the date of his birth as 1898 but researchers Bob Eagle and Eric LeBlanc suggest 1903 on the basis of his entry in the 1910 census. McTell was born blind in one eye and lost his remaining vision by late childhood. He attended schools for the blind in Georgia, New York and Michigan and showed proficiency in music from an early age, learning to read and write music in braille, first playing the harmonica and accordion and turning to the six-string guitar in his early teens. His family was rich in music; both of his parents and an uncle played the guitar and he and bluesman and gospel pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey were cousins.
McTell’s influence extended over a wide variety of artists. His most famous song, “Statesboro Blues” was adapted by Taj Mahal with Jesse Ed Davis on slide guitar, then covered and frequently performed by the Allman Brothers Band. It also shows up on Canned Heat’s “Goin’ Up the Country” album. A short list of some of the artists who have performed the song includes David Bromberg, Chris Smither and Ralph McTell, who changed his name because he liked the song. Ry Cooder covered McTell’s “Married Man’s a Fool” on his 1973 album, Paradise and Lunch. Jack White, of the White Stripes, considers McTell an influence; the White Stripes album De Stijl (2000) is dedicated to him and features a cover of his song “Southern Can Is Mine”. The White Stripes also covered McTell’s “Lord, Send Me an Angel”, releasing it as a single in 2000. In 2013, Jack White’s Third Man Records teamed up with Document Records to issue The Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order of Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell and the Mississippi Sheiks.
Bob Dylan paid tribute to McTell on at least four occasions. In his 1965 song “Highway 61 Revisited”, the second verse begins, “Georgia Sam, he had a bloody nose”, an allusion to one of McTell’s many recording names (Note: there is no evidence that he used this name on any recordings). Dylan’s song “Blind Willie McTell” was recorded in 1983 and released in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3. Dylan also recorded covers of McTell’s “Broke Down Engine” and “Delia” on his 1993 album, World Gone Wrong; Dylan’s song “Po’ Boy”, on the album Love and Theft (2001), contains the lyric “had to go to Florida dodging them Georgia laws”, which comes from McTell’s “Kill It Kid”.
Blind Willie McTell died of a stroke in Milledgeville, Georgia, in 1959, at the age of 61. He was buried at Jones Grove Church, near Thomson, Georgia, his birthplace. Author David Fulmer, who in 1992 was working on Blind Willie’s Blues, a documentary about McTell, arranged to have a blue marble gravestone erected on his resting place. McTell was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame in 1981 and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 1990.
