Willie J. Foster

Willie James Foster (19 September 1921 – 20 May 2001; Leland, Mississippi, United States) was an American Delta blues harmonica player, singer and bandleader, affectionately remembered in his native Mississippi Delta as "the Godfather of the Blues" and "the Harmonica King of Holly Ridge" for a career that stretched from the juke joints of the 1930s to international stages in the final years of his life.

Early Life

Foster was born the son of sharecroppers in a cotton field outside Leland, Mississippi, his mother having gone into labour while picking cotton for the plantation owner. He helped his family farm from around the age of seven, often wearing sacks tied to his feet in place of shoes, and left formal schooling after the fourth grade, attending only sporadically thereafter.

As a young boy he fashioned his own instruments, including a diddley bow, before buying his first harmonica for twenty-five cents, on layaway, at a drugstore in Leland; he taught himself to play by imitating the sounds of mockingbirds and passing trains. In 1937 he saw Muddy Waters perform on a local plantation, and also recalled an early encounter with harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson, formative experiences that set him on the path to a lifetime in the blues.

Career

At seventeen, Foster left Mississippi for Detroit to work in the automobile industry, before serving with the US Army in England during the Second World War. After his discharge he settled in St Louis, where he formed a trio known as the 3W's with fellow musicians Willie Williams and Willie Howard, playing his first paid engagement around 1951.

He relocated to Chicago in 1953, where he crossed paths with harmonica players Walter Horton and Snooky Pryor and guitarist Leroy Foster, and began working with Muddy Waters, touring with Waters's band, including an appearance at Carnegie Hall in New York. That same year he made his recording debut with the single "Falling Rain Blues" backed with "Four Day Jump" for the Parrot label, followed in 1957 by "Crying the Blues" backed with "Little Girl" for Cobra Records.

In 1963 Foster returned to Mississippi to care for his father, who had been badly injured in a car accident, and settled in the Delta region around Holly Ridge, Indianola and Greenville, where he became a fixture of the local juke joint circuit. In the 1980s he formed his own band, the Rhythm and Blues Upsetters, and it was not until the early 1990s that he recorded his first full-length album as a leader, At Home with the Blues (RMD Music, 1993), produced by Carl J. Griffin. He followed this with I Found Joy, recorded with guitarist and producer Bobby Mack, and My Life (Palindrome, 1997), before releasing Live at Airport Grocery with the Rhythm and Blues Upsetters on the Mempho Records label. Through the 1990s Foster toured extensively across the United States and abroad, carrying the sound of the Mississippi Delta to audiences internationally into the final years of his life.
 

Personal Life

Foster remained an active performer to the end of his life, continuing to tour internationally even as he faced health difficulties in his later years. He died in his sleep of an apparent heart attack on 20 May 2001, at the age of seventy-nine, in a hotel room in Jackson, Tennessee, where he had performed at a private party the previous night; he was found by his son-in-law, drummer Anthony Evans, who often performed alongside him. At the time of his death, he had been due to travel to Norway for a further engagement within a fortnight.

Foster is buried at Holly Ridge Cemetery in Sunflower County, Mississippi, where a memorial stone was later funded by a 2003 benefit concert at the Walnut Street Blues Bar in Greenville, supported by the Leland Blues Project. Widely regarded as one of the last of the great Delta blues harmonica players of his generation, Foster is remembered by fellow musicians and historians as a figure whose deep, direct connection to the region's blues tradition went for many years without the wider recognition it deserved, a gap that later tributes and preservation efforts have sought to address.