Week 54: Thousand Miles From Nowhere



Robert Pete Williams

The Man

Robert Pete Williams is a relative unknown blues guitarist and singer, and has arguably the most individual style and technique in blues guitar. Almost completely self taught, Williams lead a hard life and was first recorded serving a life sentence for murder in a Louisiana jail. His prison recordings remain among the most harrowing and soul-bearingly honest music ever recorded.

Robert was born into a family of dirt poor share-croppers on March 14, 1914, in Zachary, Louisiana, a town of some 500 souls. He started working the fields picking cotton and slashing sugar cane as a child and never attended school. At age 14 he moved to Baton Rouge to work as a labourer in various lumber yards, work he would continue to do for the next 25 years. He discovered music when he was 20, making a guitar out of an old cigar box by attaching 5 copper strings to it.

He taught himself how to play a bit, and received a few lessons from local bluesmen Frank and Robert Metty, learning some Petie Wheatstraw and Blind Lemon Jefferson tunes. He had a talent for it, focusing on turning emotion into sounds rather than following the conventional blues structures and theory. He bought a cheap, mass produced guitar in the early 20s and became good enough to play at local fish fries, dances and parties.

He continued to work stacking timber during the day, and playing his brand of blues at night up to the 1950s. In 1954 he was involved in a fight at a night club, where he pulled a gun and shot dead another man. He was sentenced to life in prison, but he was allowed to take his guitar inside.

While Robert seemingly had sealed his fate, a completely different man in every way by the name of Harry Oster was making great strides in his career. Born in Massachusetts in 1923 to Polish/Russian Jewish parents, Oster was everything Robert was not. After his studies were interrupted by the Second World War (he served from 1942 to 1945), Oster returned home and graduated with an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1945. The following year he attended Harvard and earned a BA, then he moved on to Cornell University and graduated with his Masters in 1950, and then a PhD in English in 1953. He taught English at Louisiana State University from 1955, and former the Louisiana Folklore Society in 1956, dedicated to preserving traditional forms of music. One of the first recordings was of traditional Cajun music sung by himself.

In 1959 the paths of these two men would unite. Accompanied by jazz historian Richard B Allen, Oster discovered Robert Pete Williams on a trip to Louisiana State Penitentiary aka Angola Prison. They recorded over 20 tracks, with Williams solo or accompanying other prisoners. The songs were released on 3 compilations: Angola Prisoner’s Songs, Prison Worksongs and Angola Prison Spirituals. Although they recorded several prisoners, Oster and Allen recognised the tremendous and unique talent Robert possessed. Paying no attention to convention, his songs were in tunings, structures, chords and scales of his own making. It was truly unique music, and he played and sang about the reality of a dirt poor black man in prison in the racially segregated south.

In 1960 Oster returned and Williams’s first solo album was released: Robert Pete Williams: Those Prison Blues. The record was a success among blues fans, here was a complete unknown who sang straight from the soul, and it was a dark, sometimes violent, soul at that. It was completely honest music and it touched thousands of people. Oster championed Robert, appealing to the Governor to grant an early release, and managing to get Time magazine to do a piece on Robert. Lead Belly was massive at the time, and his story is very similar – discovered in prison, released early because of his talent and became a Life magazine cover story.

Due to Oster’s efforts, Robert was given a very conditional release in 1961 – his sentence was commuted to 12 years, and he was released into ‘servitude parole’ requiring him to work 80 hours a week on a farm in return for food and board, forbade him from leaving the state and prevented him from working in music. To celebrate Oster released “Free Again”, the last collection of William’s prison recordings. He still played music at a friend’s house, and in 1964 the conditions were lifted. His music had become more and more popular, and he performed at the Newport Folk Festival that same year.

He recorded his first out of prison album, ‘Louisiana Blues’ in California in 1966, recorded with Son House the same year and toured across America in ’66 and ’67. Robert settled in Maringouin, Louisiana in 1968 and worked outside of music. In the 1970s he recorded and toured again, releasing several albums, wither solo or teamed up with other blues men, of original and re-issued material. He was always a volatile and moody man, and gained a reputation for unpredictability.

Ill health slowed his output, and Robert Pete Williams died of a heart attack on New Year’s Eve, 1980, leaving a legacy of pure blues, unmatched in their originality and honest. He was inducted into the blues hall of fame in 2014.

The Song

Thousand Miles From Nowhere’ is classic Robert Pete Williams. It’s played solely by feel, the bar lengths change every bar, it has a very, very loose structure, his technique is completely individual, his solos are very non-standard and the sounds he gets are ridiculously effective.

It’s played in a low standard tuning, somewhere between D and C#, and the main not so obvious feature is that Williams doesn’t play chords. He bases his playing around E, A and B7 chord shapes, but he is always playing single notes or double stops, creating movement and tension by constantly playing little riffs – occasionally two at the same time. There is movement all over nearly every bar but he never loses his rhythm. He adds bars to verses, he adds and drops beats, he plays in free time, but there is always that groove going on. It’s pretty much the classic shuffle, but it takes a while to pick up a feel for how Williams plays it.

His picking style is completely unique and impossible to accurately tab. His fingers are nearly always hitting a muted string at the same time as the note he’s trying to hit – perhaps up strumming more than picking out a string, so I’ve only tabbed out the notes you can clearly hear. This attack means that sometimes the notes are impossible to get to sound the right way – you’ll have the right pitch, the right fret, but you don’t have Williams’s hands so it just isn’t going to sound like it does in the recording.

He mainly uses the blues scale to create the riffs and solos, but he adds whatever notes he feels are right. The solos deviate into major, chromatic, whatever, scales whenever the mood takes him, so I suggest just concentrating on the sound rather than trying to follow any particular scale pattern. Part of Williams sound is that it’s just not like other sounds other people use – it isn’t so much that he breaks rules as much as he never followed any rules from the beginning. If it sounds good, do it, and if it sounds bad play another note that makes the bad note work. Its pure creativity and feel.

Treat this tab as an interpretation of what he’s doing rather than a note for note copy. There are phrases where I simply could not work out how to get the sounds he gets, and the timing is impossible to get right in tab form. There’s more great ideas in this song than some guys have in their entire career, so it’s well worth learning and using them in your own style – because they just isn’t any way you are going to be able to play it perfectly in Robert Pete William’s style!



The Lyrics

Thousand miles, thousand miles Thousand miles from nowhere Thousand miles, thousand miles Thousand miles from nowhere Sitting down right here darling In this little old one horse town Solo Well I'm all out and down Running round here from door to door Well I'm all out and down, baby Running round here from door to door Well I'm a thousand mile from nowhere darling, Running around here in this little old one horse town Solo Well I have no place to go woman I gotta mind to lay my worries here tonight I got no place to go I gotta mind to lay my worries here tonight Well I take a stroll away from home And my poor mama laid down and died Solo Tombstone is my pillow And the bare ground is my bed Tombstone is my pillow, baby Bare ground is my bed Lord since my mother laid down and died Lord look what a shape I'm in Lord look a here baby, when the sun is gone Lord look what a shape it catch me in Look when the sun gone, baby Look what a shape it catch a poor boy in Lord I'm going to lay right here, use this tombstone for a pillow And this bare ground for my bed

First Verse and Solo



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Second Verse and Solo