b. c. 1901, Haywood County, Tennessee; d. 1947 or 1965 (disputed) - Delta blues guitarist, singer and mandolin player
William “Hambone Willie” Newbern was an itinerant Tennessee musician who worked around Brownsville and Memphis with Yank Rachell and Sleepy John Estes — Estes is one of the few people who ever supplied biographical detail about him. On 14 March 1929 he made six sides for OKeh in Atlanta, the only recordings of his career, and one of them was “Roll and Tumble Blues,” a solo performance with slide guitar in open-G tuning framed as a dance tune. The nickname is thought to come from the smoothed piece of hambone he used on his fretting finger to slide the strings. Then the trail goes cold: he had a reputation for a hot temper, and sources disagree over whether he died in a prison incident in 1947 or at home in Memphis in 1965.