J. Mayo Williams, who was nicknamed “Ink” due to his dark skin, had two often simultaneous careers. He is best remembered today as a pioneering African-American record producer and talent scout who worked for the Paramount and Decca labels, but he was also one of the few black professional football players who was active during the earliest years of the National Football League.
Very little has been written about Williams through the years, making Clifford Murphy’s biography particularly valuable. The producer was interviewed five times in the 1970s by others and his first-person memories add to this book’s value, but the biography is particularly successful due to Murphy’s comprehensive decades-long research and his very readable text. Rather than separate Williams’ music and sports lives, he combines them in a chronological fashion, showing how they overlapped and how Williams’ personality, intelligence, and methods helped him excel in both areas.
J. Mayo Williams accomplished a great deal despite the odds being very much against him during his prime years. He attended both black and white colleges, was an Army officer during World War I, became a star in track and field, and played both offense (as an end) and defense during the first few years of the National Football League before a “gentlemen’s agreement” resulted in professional football barring African-Americans altogether during 1933-45. He did all of this despite the horrors of racism which was far from subtle in the early 1920s.
After gaining experience as a sales manager for the Black Swan label, Williams talked his way into an important job with Paramount, becoming in charge of their “race records” division. He founded the short-lived Black Patti label, later worked for Vocalion and Brunswick, and during the second half of the 1930s did similar work for Decca that revived the careers of many veteran blues artists. He discovered and signed up such notables as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Big Bill Broonzy, Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell, Cow Cow Davenport, Georgia Tom Dorsey, Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Willie McTell, Memphis Minnie, Pinetop Smith, Trixie Smith, Tampa Red, and Peetie Wheatstraw, and worked closely with Ma Rainey. He supervised their recording sessions and displayed a talent at bringing out the best in most of his artists, favoring blues-oriented music that was somewhat danceable.
J. Mayo Williams would be the first to admit that he was not a perfect human being. In the 1920s when he was discovering blues artists, he would often sign them to contracts that resulted in the musicians being paid what seemed to be a generous amount for the recording session. However at the same time they were also signing away their publishing and future royalties. While many of the musicians would not sell enough records to have earned royalties (and one could rationalize that Williams was taking a chance with them), if any of their songs became a hit in the future or were recorded by popular rock artists decades later, Williams and the record label received all of the money.
The worst instance of Williams cheating an artist was when word got around about Count Basie’s exciting Kansas City-based orchestra. Producer John Hammond heard Basie on the radio in 1936, talked about the music a bit too much, and Williams along with Decca executive Dave Kapp beat Hammond to Kansas City. They acted as if they were friends of Hammond and signed Basie to Decca with a three-year contract that just paid him a flat fee, tying him up until 1939.
J. Mayo Williams’ importance to the music industry faded in the 1940s. He worked with Louis Jordan but missed the boat with Muddy Waters, Nat King Cole, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe and gradually became out of touch with modern trends. His Ebony label in the 1950s and ’60s failed to make an impression or generate any hits. Despite his efforts to correct “experts” about music and sports history (few seemed to know that the NFL had been integrated in the 1920s), he was largely forgotten by the time of his death in 1980 at the age of 86.
There are a few unnecessary errors in Ink. It is obvious that Clifford Murphy is more familiar with blues than jazz history for all of the half-dozen or so mistakes involve jazz. For example, John Hammond’s Spirituals To Swing concert of 1938 was not the first integrated concert at Carnegie Hall; Benny Goodman’s famous event preceded it by 11 months. Also, Freddy Cole was not part of the Solid Swingsters along with his brothers Nat and Eddie Cole in 1936; Freddy was only four at the time. In general, Williams’ involvement with jazz artists is understated in the biography.
But on the brighter side, such artists as Paul Robeson, Georgia Tom Dorsey, Little Brother Montgomery, and Sammy Price are among those who make memorable appearances in the book and there are many fresh and formerly untold stories that give readers all of the unearthed information that could be found about J. Mayo Williams. Ink (available from www.press.uillinois.edu and www.amazon.com) is well worth acquiring.
Ink: The Indelible J. Mayo Williams
by Clifford R. Murphy
University of Illinois Press
www.press.uillinois.edu
336 pages; 6.125 x 9.25 in; 16 photos
Cloth, ISBN 9780252045882; $125
Paper, ISBN 9780252087981; $24.95
eBook, ISBN 9780252056765; $14.95
Since 1975 Scott Yanow has been a regular reviewer of albums in many jazz styles. He has written for many jazz and arts magazines, including JazzTimes, Jazziz, Down Beat, Cadence, CODA, and the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, and was the jazz editor for Record Review. He has written an in-depth biography on Dizzy Gillespie for AllMusic.com. He has authored 11 books on jazz, over 900 liner notes for CDs and over 20,000 reviews of jazz recordings.
Yanow was a contributor to and co-editor of the third edition of the All Music Guide to Jazz. He continues to write for Downbeat, Jazziz, the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, the Jazz Rag, the New York City Jazz Record and other publications.
