Some nights, during the 1950's, walking down the stairs to Birdland, billed as “the jazz center of the world,” I had a sense of what it felt like to be in the face of a hurricane.

From below, the physical impact of the Count Basie band in full cry almost pushed me against the wall. And penetrating that swing machine was the soaring, diving, exultant voice of Joe Williams. As Cassandra Wilson says, Joe “brought the blues from the country to the city.”

The deep cry of country blues blended seamlessly with Joe Williams’city-honed wit and hard-earned wisdom. He was a pleasure to talk to because he knew so much from his own life of what it took to more than survive. As a teenager, in between musical gigs, he cleaned latrines, worked as a stage doorman, and once went down so low it took a year in a state hospital after a nervous breakdown to make him stronger than ever before.

One night, in his dressing room, we were talking about musicians we knew who were in the grave or had slipped into oblivion, some of them having been their own worst enemy. Joe Williams pointed at me and said, “You and I are survivors!” That he considered me to be at all comparable to him in that regard was an honor. Whether in the blues or in ballads, Joe sang from his own life. Like Billie Holiday, he made the lyrics into intimations of autobiography. He'd been down as far as you can go and he'd risen as high as any jazz singer ever has.

Joe Williams was a thoughtful man, given to analyzing his art. And it was a high art.Ten years ago, speaking with Terry Gross during a Fresh Air show broadcast on National Public Radio, he got to the essence of authentic jazz singing: "If you sing like a musical instrument, you don't try to cover up your support. The music will swing if you try not to get in the way. The same is true of a drummer as a singer.

“You're the soloist, so you can punctuate, make a statement, but you don't get in the way of the music itself. And it gives everybody a chance to contribute. You mustn't ever have anyone in a section back there feeling, 'My part is not important.' All the parts are important; and if it's done subtly, I have to make room for it so that it's heard, and heard the way they want it to be heard.”

Like many black jazz musicians, the first music Joe Williams heard was in church; and at 14, he was a member of the Jubilee Boys, a gospel quartet. His mother, a pianist and a singer, made sure the boy was also exposed to a wide range of music.

“She used to let me stay awake to listen to Duke Ellington in the '30s broadcasting from the Cotton Club and then kiss me and tuck me in after the band went off.” He was around eight when he first heard Louis Armstrong in a theater. Later, listening to Ethel Waters on the radio, he marveled at the clarity of her diction and the feeling the worldly-wise feeling with which she illuminated whatever she sang. And, like Coleman Hawkins, he’d learn from the larger-than-life opera singers on the radio.

Joe’s commanding presence lit up huge concert halls, but I remember him with the most delight and gratitude for how he absorbed the emotions of his audience in a small club. Their shouts when he rode the blues and their sighs when he sang of fragile love came back into his singing. Bob Edwards, host of National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, recalled the day after Joe died, going to see Joe in a small club in Maryland. It was the night of a Muhammad Ali fight on TV, “and Williams performed in front of just three couples, but he sang as if it was a packed house in Vegas."Among the current Telarc releases by Joe is Joe Williams Live with the Count Basie Orchestra; a set of ballads with Robert Farnon's orchestra, Here’s to Life; and Feel The Spirit, in which Joe returns to his gospel roots with Marlena Shaw and a chorus.

Joe Williams survives as long as there is a need for music that tells a true story. All the times I saw and heard Joe on nights when he wasn’t feeling all that good or when the band wasn’t quite together, he never coasted, he never took the weight off himself. Like that night in Maryland, he was asked afterward, “With only three couples in the room, why didn’t you come down with laryngitis? Tell them to come back another time.” “No,” said Joe, “the only real reward is when you've done the best you could. It isn’t money all
the time.”