Andre Williams died in Chicago on Sunday aged 82 after being diagnosed with colon cancer two weeks earlier. To most people, his name will be unfamiliar, but to me he was one of the great heroes of American music.

Born in Bessemer, Alabama, Zephire “Andre” Williams escaped rural poverty for the bright lights of Detroit around 1950. Motor City was booming and Williams, aware he lacked a voice but determined to succeed as a vocalist, created a sing-speak style mixing humour and innuendo with the ruling R&B and doo-wop musical styles of the time. Some have pointed to this vocal delivery being one of the starting points for rap music.

In 1955, his unique style won him a local talent quest and a contract with Fortune Records, a tiny independent run by Jack and Devora Brown. Williams wrote and sang-spoke a series of lusty, comic records and earned the nickname Mr Rhythm. His biggest hit came in 1956 with Bacon Fat, a wonderfully greasy dance record that reached No 9 on Billboard’s R&B chart. His funniest (and most disputable) record, Jail Bait – with wonderfully wry advice to any man pondering a relationship with a teenage girl – was never going to get radio play.

In the 1980s, a series of bootlegs called Songs the Cramps Taught Us, gathering originals of songs the Cramps covered, was my introduction to Williams, but info about him was scarce. What I did work out was that Fortune were marginal, so when Williams bumped into an aspiring mogul Berry Gordy in the barber’s, he accepted a job offer. Gordy hired Williams not as an artist but to produce and develop Motown’s new signings. He did so but disliked Gordy’s autocratic manner, and left for Chicago, where he did a similar job at One-derful. In 1963, he co-wrote Shake a Tail Feather for the Five Du-Tones, a minor hit when released but almost immediately an R&B standard (it was most famously performed by Ray Charles in the film The Blues Brothers).

The next year, he wrote the R&B and pop hit Twine Time, for Alvin Cash, and throughout the decade issued his own records while writing and producing for everyone from Mary Wells to Parliament-Funkadelic to Bobby “Blue” Bland. A call from Ike Turner inviting Williams to work with him in Los Angeles – Shake a Tail Feather was a staple of Ike & Tina’s live set – proved fateful: Williams picked up Turner’s cocaine habit and ended up homeless and addicted.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andre Williams in 2010. Photograph: Linda Vartoogian/Getty Images

Williams cleaned up at some point in the 1980s and began working Chicago’s blues clubs. He was surprised to find he had a cult following. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion brought Williams to the UK in the mid-90s as support act, and I finally got to cast eyes on the legend. He commanded the stage like the veteran ringmaster he was and, backed by Spencer’s band, cranked out ancient songs – garage R&B, punk rap, his music could wear many handles – that sounded indisputably contemporary.

He paired with garage rockers the Dirtbombs for his 1998 album, Silky, and it is a raucous, lusty celebration. Black Godfather, released two years later, is noisy but thin on ideas. That year Williams played the Garage in London, and I went backstage. A dapper man dressed in blood red shoes and pink suit, Williams looked as if he’d stepped out of Detroit club circa 1964. He was very droll, very street, dismissing Ike Turner as “a D-O-G – DOG!”, happy to accept accolades for being “the original rapper” and gracious towards those who had ensured he had an audience after his long disappearance. Backing band the Countdowns were a US thrash outfit. Never before or since have I seen an artist and band so badly paired. The London audience, consisting not of mosh pit regulars but those into vintage R&B, stood in shock as the band blasted every song into submission.

In 2007, Spain’s Vampisoul Records issued Movin’ on With Andre Williams, a superb double album that provided an overview of his career from 1956 to 1970. This got Andre back in London in 2008, and at the pre-gig interview I found a broken man: Andre drank Bacardi the way most of us drink tea. He remained droll but that evening’s performance, with a band only marginally less awful than the previous time, found him slurring and staggering. I tried to make contact with Williams later that year when I was in Chicago researching my book More Miles Than Money but no one knew where he could be found.

Over those years, Chicago’s Bloodshot Records issued several albums by Williams, most pretty hasty efforts, but 2012’s Hoods and Shades, produced by noted Detroit guitarist Dennis Coffey, was a solid affair. I requested a phone interview and got one. Williams was sober and happy to reflect on his life. He’d finally got control of his royalties for Shake a Tail Feather, calling that song his greatest creation. He was, dare I say it, mellow.

I never saw or spoke to him again, but just last week I dropped into London’s wonderful No Hit Records and found a new EP of Williams’s Fortune recordings. Of course I bought it and, on studying the sleeve, saw I’d been quoted. I stand behind my description of him as “an innovator with a smile on his face and a hard-on in his pants”. Rest easy, Andre.