Weepin' and singin'

Here's to you, Mister Robinson

Cellars by Starlight by Ted Drozdowski

Back in the '50s and '60s -- before the decline of Western civilization began -- every little burgh in America had its own nightclub. Even Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a small coal-dust-covered city that rose up around some mines in the south of the state's anthracite region. Which is why, one day in 1959, the blues star B.B. King and an MC from Trenton called Willie the Weeper found themselves sharing a dressing room there.

Willie had been introducing and hanging out with great R&B artists like Bobby "Blue" Bland, Little Willie John, and Titus Turner since he got his gig from his friend the promoter Willie Mitchell a year earlier. People loved Willie the Weeper's jokes -- the more lowdown and dirty they were, the more everyone laughed. But Willie really wanted to take a shot at this singing thing himself.

"You know, B., I sure wanna be a singer," Willie told the dapper King as both men fine-tuned their tuxedoes.

"Sing!", King replied.

"I ain't got no band," Willie rejoined.

"Go out and sing with my band," King offered.

"I don't know no songs but yours!"

"Well, go sing 'em."

"So," Willie recalls today, "I went out on the bandstand. When the band cranked up I didn't know nuthin' from nuthin'. I had all this music in my ear, because he had a 21-piece band. I never heard that much music before. Man, they must have played four choruses before I could sing a word. I don't even know how it went, because I was floating on Cloud Nine."

Forty years later he's still singing -- and still floating a little too. What's just launched Willie skyward again is the release of his debut album, At Last, On Time (APO/Acoustic Sounds). "The `at last' part is right," says Willie. "I'm 73 this year. I didn't know if the Lord was gonna let me hang around long enough to make a record."

The CD is a collection of good-time, mostly swinging urban blues that features duets with Willie and his friends the soul singer Mighty Sam McClain and new blues star Susan Tedeschi. There are also a couple of gritty guitar solos from Jimmy D. Lane, the son of the late blues legend Jimmy Rogers. And McClain, who co-produced the session and wrote some songs for Willie, brought his own capable band to the studio.

For Willie, who lives in Dorchester, At Last, On Time is something he's dreamed about almost as long as he'd been singing. Although he's been part of Boston's nightlife for decades, his only previous recording was his song "Can't Go Wrong" on the 1991 Tone-Cool compilation Boston Blues Blast.

Throughout his new CD, Willie's voice balances elegant restraint and emotional heft, especially in his own "Can't Go Wrong Woman," in which he shouts after a partner gone astray, and McClain's simmering slow-blues heartbreaker "Love Me If You Want To." Both combine roadhouse dirt and big-city finesse, shouted declarations and thin, wavering vibrato. You can hear the rich mud of the rural South, where he was born, and the polish applied by years of living in Trenton and Boston. There's also a song that's become his signature in the New England clubs where his band perform: "Dirty Old Man." It starts with the line "Just because I'm over 50, don't mean I'm a dirty old man" and usually ends with Willie slow-dancing the prettiest young thing in the club.

"I'm way over 50 now," laughs Willie, who changed his stage name to Weepin' Willie decades ago. "And I've seen it all and done it all." Sure enough. Over lunch in Harvard Square Willie recounts his experiences: orphan, migrant worker, dishwasher, Army private, stockade prisoner, boxer, MC, singer, coke fiend, swinger, shoe shiner, redemption-bottle collector. He's found a lot of ways to make a living and make a little trouble as he's made his way through life.

He was born Willie Robinson in 1926 in Atlanta. His father cleaned cesspools and his mother was a maid. Willie was their only child together, "but I have some half-brothers from my father who I don't know." When Willie was small, his family moved to rural Georgia and then to Winter Garden, Florida, to pick cotton. "They had me in school for one hot minute," but Willie never got enough time in the classroom to learn to read or write.

In Winter Garden his parents split. And just before Willie turned 10, his mother died. "They told me it was from bad milk and fish. One night we went to bed, and when I woke up she was on the floor." Willie's father came for him. Together they hit the road following the crops -- cotton, corn, peas, tomatoes -- from Florida to New Jersey until Willie was 14. "We was in Virginia and my father sent me ahead with a friend of his to New Jersey and said he'd be along in three weeks. That was the last I heard of him. That was in 1939. I think something happened to him and he must of passed away. Otherwise he would have come up, because he was the one who was watching out for me."

After a few more years of itinerant picking, "I said to myself -- `Self, there's got to be something better than this.' So I got a job washing dishes at the Greyhound bus station in Trenton. That was better. Then I got a better job washing dishes and parking cars."

Robinson's next stop was the Army, as World War II wound down. Although he never went overseas, he had his share of adventures. "I went AWOL for three days the first time I heard B.B. King on the radio. They restricted me to barracks for two weeks."

It was in the service that Robinson first met Titus Turner -- and eventually the jailhouse. "I hit a sergeant. I was trying to be like Ike Williams then, who was boxing champion of the world. I was training and fighting in the Army. This sergeant and I had a few words, and he moved his hand the wrong way, and `BAM,' my reaction hit him. I didn't, 'cause I ain't crazy. I wouldn't hit a first sergeant. But I was a trained fighter, so I reacted when he moved his hands. A corporal got out his gun and marched me right to the stockade. The only thing that saved me was he told the truth -- that I reacted. So they threw it out of court."

Willie got lucky again when his hitch ran out just before his unit shipped to Korea, where it was wiped out in an attack.

Robinson learned to drive trucks in the Army, and he used that skill back in Trenton until he befriended Willie Mitchell. "He would promote shows all over, and I would put up placards with him and go to all the shows."

One night Mitchell's MC didn't show for a gig with Blanche Calloway, Cab's tenor-sax-playing sister, at a little Trenton club. "Willie said, `Man, you got to MC the show.' Now, I had seen lots of MCs going to shows with him, so I said, `Put me on!' But before he did, he said, `You got to have a funny name. You're . . . uh . . . Willie the Weeper.' So I became Willie the Weeper, and when I came to Boston I changed it to Weepin' Willie."

Robinson arrived here for a gig at Louie's Lounge in 1959, and he stayed. "Back then, Boston was Boston," he recounts. "Everyone came to town. There was a couple blocks on Washington Street where there was Louie's, Big Jim's Shanty, Basin Street South -- a bunch of places. Basin Street South was the big room; it was supposed to be uppity class. The Supremes, Red Foxx . . . they played there. At Louie's I MCed for Jackie Wilson, Count Basie, Otis Redding, Joe Tex . . . Everybody came to Louie's. You could make some good money then."

Robinson took a crack at leading his own band for a while, working steady in a little joint at Four Corners in Dorchester. But that fizzled. As the popularity of earthy, blues-rooted R&B dwindled in the '70s, Willie supplemented his gigs as MC and singer with various jobs. It wasn't until the early '80s that he again determined to focus entirely on being an entertainer.

"Buddy Johnson was responsible for really putting me out there," he says. Johnson, who died last year after a lengthy illness, was a multi-instrumentalist who primarily played bass. He was a veteran of the studio and the stage who spent his whole life as a working musician, performing everything from gospel to rock and country as well as the good-time blues and R&B that the Buddy Johnson, Weepin' Willie All-Star Blues Band became known for around Boston.

"When Buddy passed away, that made me change over to being the leader. It's never been easy to get gigs or make money off this, but it's what I've got to do," observes Willie, who supplements his musical income with social-security and Army-pension checks. "Music is a drug. I gave up drugs for real 15 years ago, and I don't need nuthin' when I'm up on stage, because when I entertain people, they entertain me back. When they start reacting, I'm high."

His buzz is noticeable. The only time Willie doesn't need a cane -- the result of a stroke he suffered while undergoing neck surgery in 1985 -- is when he's on stage, where at least 10 of his years seem to slip right away.

"If the Lord lets me keep hobblin' along, I'm gonna start recording my next album in January. That CD would be for the better-distributed AudioQuest label. Meanwhile, All Right, On Time has been getting favorable reviews from the blues press and some airplay. And McClain hopes to take Weepin' Willie on tour to Europe with him next year. "I've had a lotta fun in this business," Willie says, "and I wanna have some more."

COMING UP

Tonight (Thursday), Madder Rose are at the Middle East upstairs . . . Tomorrow (Friday), Chicago's soulful barroom preacher Jimmy Johnson plays the House of Blues, and there's a local quadruple-threat bill at T.T. the Bear's with Gravel Pit, Helicopter Helicopter, Heidi, and the Nines . . . Saturday another great show at T.T.'s with Boston punk firestarters Moving Targets and Last Stand . . . On Tuesday, Michael Tarbox continues his 7 p.m. solo residency at Toad . . . Weird lives when ambient-music band Planet Mosquito play Bill's next Thursday, September 30.