What's In a Name?

I’ve never met Steve Futterman, but I did speak to him on the phone once. My namesake called me some twenty years ago, obviously tickled that there were two journalists, albeit on opposite sides of the country, with the same name. We had a pleasant conversation with some laughs and have never been in contact again. No one who has ever known me has ever gotten the two of us confused. West Coast Steve was a prominent freelance journalist and sports correspondent; for my part, I had attended exactly two baseball games in my life at that point (the record still holds), and my interest in anything even vaguely sports-like remains practically nil. My not-quite-doppelgänger (he is the recipient of Edward R. Murrow Awards; my kids went to Edward R. Murrow High School) is also a fixture on NPR; anyone who has basked in my thick Brooklyn accent knows that any on-the-air presence for East Coast Steve is the stuff of parallel universes. What West Coast Steve and I have most in common is that we share an atypical, but obviously not all that rare, name. Obviously, neither he nor I were poaching the other’s identity. All of which puts me in mind of Sonny Boy Williamson I and Sonny Boy Williamson II.

By the time he first began recording in the late 1930s, John Lee Curtis (born in 1914) had taken on the moniker Sonny Boy Williamson, quickly establishing himself as an exemplary blues harmonica player and singer. Before his death in 1947, the result of a sidewalk robbery, Williamson cut a swath of formative tracks under his own name and as a sideman for others. His 1937 version of “Good Morning, School Girl” transformed the riff-based ditty (with now- questionable lyrics) into a blues, and later blues-rock, standard usually titled “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.” Williamson’s mushed-mouth vocal and country blues harmonica styling (with assistance from famed guitarists Big Joe Williams and Robert Nighthawk) highlights an intoxicating example of pre-electric blues that also presages the evolutionary plugged-in sides of the Chicago artists of the next two decades. (Rolling Stones fans will also recognize Williamson’s fingerprints all over the band’s 1972 version of “Stop Breaking Down,” which the blues harpist recorded in 1945.) Williamson was a bona-fide blues pioneer deserving of a singular legendary stature. Which, thanks to a certain “Rice” Miller, he was denied.

Williamson, it seems, was still alive and kicking in Chicago when Miller, an up-and-coming Mississippi blues singer and harmonica player, started using Williamson’s name as a means to attract more attention when performing on an Arkansas radio show in the early 1940s. Huh? In what world does a regional musician steal a famed living artist’s name and get away with it? I suppose it was a time and a place when litigation was for the wealthy, and artistic appropriation was just a bunch of fancy words.

The most baffling element of this altogether puzzling matter is that Miller was himself a superb bluesman, one who could have taken on any original name he wanted including, for veracity’s sake, Rice Miller, and still distinguish himself. But the S.B.W. tag stuck like glue and remained Miller’s adopted byline until his death, in 1965. Sonny Boy Williamson II, as he’s known to blues aficionados who grant due respect to S.B.W. I, was also a similarly mush-mouthed vocalist and inventive harmonica player who influenced a generation of Chicago blues artists and in turn a developing generation of rockers on both sides of the Atlantic. Cut in 1957, after Williamson had established himself as a Chicago blues mainstay, “Fattening Frogs for Snakes” (what an image!) is a fine example of his near- conversational vocal approach, his snappy offhand interjections, and his personal harmonica style, which, with its subtle rural overtones, is distinctly different from say, Little Walter’s amplified wailing.

PS: Not leaving well enough alone, Williamson II, later in his career, asserted that he had been using the Sonny Boy Williamson name before John Lee Curtis took it on. Oh, what a tangled web we weave.…

(With thanks to S.H.)