It has been often noted that the blues is a healer. For those that have accepted this music in their heart and soul, we know that this notion is a stone-cold fact…plain and simple. If ever an entire nation could use some healing it is now.

We could also use justice and some leadership, but that’s another story.

Music is the best I can do for you at the moment. John Lee Hooker famously sang the title track of an album called The Healer in 1989. However, it was an album that was released in 2002 that holds songs which may have the soothing balm for a weary nation. It is by Wille King and the Liberators entitled Living in a New World.  

Willie King was born on March 18, 1943, in the rural countryside of Noxubee County, Mississippi, very near the Alabama border. He began singing and playing what ethno-musicologists call a “monochord zither”, as a child; it is commonly known as a single string diddly bow. This early musical experience took place on a plantation. It was here, as a young man, he was a sharecropper. He augmented that income by manufacturing and selling moonshine.

He held a variety of jobs through his formative years before becoming active in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s.

The civil rights movement in those days meant different things to different people. To King, an African-American, living where he did, when he did, his participation in this movement to rid the south of segregation and the Jim Crow laws that still plagued that part of our country was a life-threatening proposition. This experience informed his songwriting in a music career that was decades away from being noticed anywhere outside of his immediate surroundings. 

He later received some notice by performing at Bettie’s Place in the rural eastern Mississippi area. He rarely played anywhere else. Between 1999 and 2006 he recorded six albums for local independent labels. Most notably in recognition of the Rooster Records 20^th anniversary the label put out an album on Willie King and his band, the Liberators, called Freedom Creek.

In 2002, Rooster Records put out another CD on Willie King and the Liberators entitled Living in a New World. These songs could be interpreted as a reaction to the recent terrorist attacks and our country’s dangerous response, Homeland Security, which is now coming back to haunt us. 

That, in and of itself, should be enough to make people take notice. Yet, King went deeper in their meaning to include the terrorism that had and continued to rain down on those in the African-American community.

On Tuesday morning June 2^nd, I listened to Willie King and the Liberators album Living in a New World through the perspective of the recent events which have plagued our country. The music sounded like it was written overnight. It was a moving experience.

Maybe Charlie Lange put it best when he described this music as “Combining beauty and intellect without sacrificing joy.” It has all of that with relentless grooves and even notes of the redemption and salvation we need if we are to face another day.

Willie King died of a massive heart attack on March 8, 2009, just ten days short of his 66^th birthday and shortly after President Obama was reelected for a second term. This must have been something in which a 60’s era civil rights worker and lifelong community activist could take pride.

We may be living in a new horrible world here in the spring of 2020, but thanks to Willie King, I feel like an entire nation could squeeze into Bettie’s Place on a Saturday night.

It will take more than great blues music to heal our nation, but the soul massage I got from Willie King’s music this morning will get me through another day. For that I am grateful.

- David Mac



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