Robbie Robertson: A Hawk Flies South, Chapter 4 of 4, "Meetings with Remarkable Men: Sonny Boy Williamson and Bob Dylan"

In the final chapter of Robbie's and my account of his apprenticeship years, an encounter with two of Helena's finest threatens to turn nasty, and a summons comes from on high

Ronnie Hawkins’s rules and regulations were not the only reason the Hawks abandoned their boss. Hawkins “built us up to the point where we outgrew his music and had to leave,” Robbie says in Testimony. “He shot himself in the foot, bless his heart, by sharpening us into such a crackerjack band that we had to go out into the world. We knew what his vision was for himself, but we were younger and more ambitious.”

Following their muse and tightening their sound, Levon and the Hawks were, before long, “probably the most widely imitated white band in the mid-South,” the music historian Robert Palmer wrote in his 1981 study Deep Blues. The Hawks’ excellence is palpable in Robbie’s composition “Leave Me Alone” with Levon and Richard Manuel sharing the vocals and Robbie bearing down on guitar (although, as is apparent, they hadn’t yet shed their Bo Diddley influence).

Robbie considered “Leave Me Alone” and its flip side, “Uh Uh Uh” the Hawks’ first skillfully produced songs. “In the past,” he writes in Testimony, “we’d mostly just played the songs and the producer had pressed ‘record.’” This time, they were working with someone whom Robbie considered “a real producer,” the veteran R&B entrepreneur Henry Glover, on Glover’s Ware label. While the band was on the road, Glover saw fit to release the 45 as the work of “The Canadian Squires,” a moniker more appropriate to a doo-wop group than a hard-riding rockabilly outfit. When Robbie saw the record, his response was, “Oh, dear.” He shrugged it off; just another bump in the road.

Although the Hawks gigged virtually nationwide, their favorite roost was Charlie Halbert’s Delta Supper Club in West Helena, where they rarely failed to pack the house. One afternoon the guys were sitting around in Halbert’s Rainbow Court Motel when Robbie wondered out loud if Sonny Boy Williamson, one of the greatest-ever blues harmonica players and an on-and-off West Helena resident, was in town. ¹

“Probably so,” said Levon, who idolized Sonny Boy; Levon had grown up listening to “King Biscuit Time,” broadcast every day at noon over Helena’s KFFA. The show, which featured the less than completely dependable Williamson when he saw fit to show up, was jointly sponsored by King Biscuit Flour and Sonny Boy Corn Meal.

“Let’s drive down to the holler,” Levon proposed—Helena’s Black section, known to local whites by a more derogatory name.

Whether the Hawks knew it or not, Sonny Boy Williamson had not been a Helena resident for years. His King Biscuit days long behind him, he had gone from local to global celebrity. Nonetheless, when the Hawks went looking for him, “there he was,” says Robbie, “coming up the street, in his famous suit and a bowler hat. He had a briefcase with his harps in it. He was old, but he looked….fine.” Something had brought the old man back to Helena.

The redoubtable Rice Miller, better known as Sonny Boy Williamson (b: numerous unconfirmed dates between 1897 and 1912; d: 1965). After several early- and mid-1960s European tours, during which he was lionized by such aspiring blues artists as Eric Clapton and Peter Green, Sonny Boy affected the manner, or his idea of it, of an English dandy, fitted out in a custom-tailored, two-toned suit and bowler hat, the picture of threadbare elegance.

Sonny Boy and his King Biscuit Time drummer, James “Peck” Curtis, performing Sonny Boy’s first-ever single, cut in 1951 for Trumpet Records. Williamson had a genuine verbal gift, which the wordsmith in Robbie would have appreciated. “Every time she starts to lovin’,” Williamson sings here, “She brings eyesight to the blind.”