Willie Dixon - He's the Man

Born in 1915 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Dixon sang bass parts in a gospel quartet early on but didn’t take up the instrument—at first a tin-can bass—until he moved to Chicago in the ’30s. In the ’40s Dixon recorded and performed with pop/blues groups such as the Big Three Trio, and in 1951 he began his lengthy association with Chess Records. Playing his upright behind Chicago’s blues greats, Dixon laid down riffs bassists still lean on today—though in his own lines he was constantly creative.

In 1954 Dixon backed Muddy Waters on “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” launching Dixon’s songwriting career and his hitmaking partnership with Waters. Soon at the forefront of Chess’s songwriters, Dixon also managed sessions and scouted talent for the label in addition to being something of a house bassist. “I used to see Willie all over Chicago,” recalls bluesman Charlie Musselwhite in Elwood’s Blues: Interviews with the Blues Legends & Stars [Backbeat Books]. “He’d come into the roughest little dives, and the next time you’d see him it would be at some recording studio, being the producer, running the show. He really got around.”

In the mid ’60s Dixon’s Chess sessions declined amid the rise of the electric bass, and his association with the label ended with the decade. However, he found a new niche as musical organizer and performer for the European concert tour known as the American Folk Blues Festival. At the same time, British rockers and others were covering his songs, though it would take lawsuit settlements with Chess and Led Zeppelin for Dixon to recover his full royalties.

Dixon emerged as an artist in his own right in the ’70s and ’80s, culminating in ’88 and ’89 with the Grammy-winning solo album Hidden Charms [Bug], the monumental box set Willie Dixon: The Chess Box, and his autobiography, I Am the Blues: The Willie Dixon Story [Da Capo], written in collaboration with Don Snowden. Dixon also established the Blues Heaven Foundation (www.bluesheaven.com) to help blues artists and their heirs recover money due for their songs and recordings. In poor health in his later years, Dixon died in his sleep in Burbank, California, on January 29, 1992.

Sweet Willie

Muddy Waters’s 1955 recording “Sugar Sweet” shows Dixon’s freewheeling approach to a typical jump-blues feel. In Ex. 1a he nudges the verse groove by resting for a half-beat before laying into the E’s on the “and” of four. Under the IV chord Dixon pedals tonic riffs and increases his rhythmic motion through the IV–I cadence while continuing to vary his signature 1–6–5–6–1 lick (Ex. 1b). He then energizes the V chord with a triadic line whose ghosted downbeats create a reggae-like syncopation (Ex. 1c). Dixon kicks the hard-driving instrumental section with repeated roots (Ex. 1d), and he lifts the final verse by moving into a higher register and bringing back the accented E’s (Ex. 1e).

In his decade-plus stint with the American Folk Blues Festival, Dixon played with such star performers as Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Howlin’ Wolf, T-Bone Walker, Sugar Pie DeSanto, and Victoria Spivey. Ex. 2 shows Dixon’s solo from a ’63 Spivey set. Well capable of showy licks, Dixon opts for a simpler, more expressive approach, with slides and accents that create a “talking bass” feeling. (The lengths of the slide markings in the example approximate how much string to use—short, medium, or long.) The fall-offs on beat three of bars 2 and 10 are knife-stroke quick, while bar 5’s slide-ups have a laid-back, questioning quality. The slides to C in bars 1, 7, and 8 get maximum grease. To complete your Dixon homage, keep a relaxed but solid groove, and play every note with conviction.