1903-1982 · Delta blues singer and guitarist · recorded the song first, Chicago, 1935
Joseph Lee Williams was born in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, in 1903 and played a self-modified nine-string guitar that earned him the epitaph “King of the 9 String Guitar.” Producer Lester Melrose signed him to Bluebird in 1935, and he stayed with the label for roughly a decade. He kept returning to this song — Bluebird again in 1941, Columbia in 1947 — and lived long enough to be rediscovered by the folk-blues revival, touring America, Europe and Japan into the 1970s. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1992.