Joe Williams at 70: He’s Got It All

Celebrations ending in a zero tend to be momentous. When the zero is preceded by a large digit, the significance is accordingly multiplied. So it was last Monday when Joe Williams celebrated his 70th birthday.

Determined to make this a night to remember, Williams’ wife Jillean brought in the entire Count Basie Orchestra, with which he spent six crucial years of his career.

Friends flew in from Chicago and Miami, from England and Germany, from Los Angeles (composer Mel Powell and his actress wife Martha Scott), from New York (George and Ellie Shearing). After dinner, actor Greg Morris and his wife Lee collaborated on a nostalgic biographical tribute to the honoree, written and sung by her, narrated by him. George Shearing sat in with the Basie band; inevitably, the blues filled the room as Williams joined in. Long before midnight Sunday, when the actual birthday began, the banquet room in Bally’s Casino was rocking in rhythm.

In an odd twist of fate, Williams’ 70 years have been split evenly between the insecure and the secure. His first 35 years were marked by sporadic local success as a band singer in Chicago, odd jobs as stage door manager and door-to-door salesman, a bout with tuberculosis that took a year out of his teen life, three troubled marriages, a nervous breakdown, a few recordings for small labels.

The turnabout began right after his 36th birthday, around Christmas of 1954, when he flew to New York to join Basie. Only a few months later he recorded the series of bits (“Ev’ry Day I Have the Blues,” “Alright, Okay, You Win,” “Roll ‘em Pete”) that proved vital not only in terms of his own sudden fame, but also in lifting the orchestra out of its commercial doldrums.

The secure second half of his life is reflected in his relationships. He has had the same manager, John Levy, for 26 years; the same p.r. woman, Devra Hall, for close to a decade; the same home town, Las Vegas, since 1968 (he moved just once, in 1975). He has been a regular on the “Tonight” show even longer than Johnny Carson himself, with a total of well over 200 appearances, starting in the Steve Allen days.

Probably most significantly, there is the bright-eyed, bubbly Englishwoman, Jillean Milne Hughes-d’Aeth, who met him in 1957, became a steady part of his life in 1959 and married him almost 24 years ago.

“Jillean became an anchor,” he says. “Around the time we began seeing each other, I had stopped living from payday to payday; I began investing, and everything became more stable. Suddenly the word home had a new meaning.”

Joe and Jill live in Las Vegas with their three cats and three dogs (“the maximum the law will allow,” he says). Golf, the love of which played a part in bringing them together, is still a near-obsession. When John Levy explains why he keeps Williams on an easy work schedule, he says it’s because “Joe is happy having time off to play golf and relax.”

A glance at his itinerary for 1988 shows 118 working days, very few of which involve more than three or four consecutive one-night stands. With an income around into the five-figures-a-week bracket, he can afford to take it easy. This year, there have been several highlights: two consecutive honorary doctorates of music, at Berklee College in Boston and Hamilton College in Saratoga, N.Y.; a brief reunion tour with the Basie band in Europe; his annual jazz cruise, this time on the Seaward; the eighth annual trip to Washington for the Kennedy Center Honors (he is a member of the nominating committee); and appearances at the Bing Crosby and other golf tournaments. The rest is divided among college dates, concerts and very occasional night clubs.

He has an unusually close relationship with his musicians. Norman Simmons, his musical director and pianist, says: “I joined him in 1979 and he’s not only a good friend; he was even a matchmaker. He saw a young lady one day and decided she was right for me. He introduced us but didn’t say anything. Sure enough, Karen and I started dating and a year later we were married.” At the wedding, which took place on St. Thomas during a jazz cruise, Williams served as best man. An hour later in the same church he gave the bride away at the marriage of his drummer, Gerryck King.

Completing Williams’ backup quartet are Joe’s golfing buddy, Las Vegas bassist Bob Badgley, and guitarist Henry Johnson.

Never dependent on record sales, Williams has floated around happily from label to label. Recently he guested on a duet track with Lena Horne for an independent company. A session with Red Holloway’s Blues All Stars won him a Grammy in 1984. He is at work on an album that will include duo cuts with Marlena Shaw and Shirley Horn. But he feels that the Johnny Carson exposure, other TV shows (notably his occasional appearances on the Bill Cosby Show, as the star’s father-in-law) and the occasional movie are more important than records in keeping his career on track.

Ironically, he hardly ever works in Las Vegas. “I don’t want to, unless I can do the whole thing, with a full orchestra including strings, the whole schmeer.”

If ever a contest were held to determine the biggest egos in show business, Joe Williams would be a disastrous loser. A few years ago, making a local radio appearance in Washington, D.C., he devoted the entire show to Frank Sinatra, playing his records, congratulating him on his birthday--and never once mentioning that it was his own birthday, too.

“As far as manager-artist relationships go, Joe is about the tops of all the 70-plus people I’ve dealt with,” says John Levy. “I haven’t had a contract with him for 20 years; just his word and mine. He has no hangups, no jealousies. For years I had to stop him from building up all the other singers in his interviews, reminding him that he could sing rings around those people.

“Joe is the only person I know who, if he senses that the audience is right for it, may start a show with a ballad, just voice and piano. He’s become more and more relaxed over the years, singing as if he were in his own living room.”

Born Joseph Goreed in the lumber town of Cordele, Ga., to a teen-aged mother and a father he never knew, Williams (he chose the last name more or less at random when he was 14) grew up looking but not sounding like a future king of the blues. Women, both black and white, preferred their ballad singers to be “pretty” men; Billy Eckstine was the black male glamour symbol of the 1940s.

Yet Joe in his early years sang mainly pop songs and ballads; singing with the band of Lionel Hampton in 1943 he deferred to Dinah Washington for the blues interludes. Eventually, influenced by Kansas City’s big Joe Turner, he brought the blues more heavily into his repertoire.

Over the decades he has had it all: the awards, the barrier-shattering jobs such as the stint with Basie at the Waldorf Astoria’s Starlight Roof, where no black band had ever played; the movie appearances and sound tracks; the State Department-sponsored tour of Africa with trumpeter Clark Terry; the Command Performance for Queen Elizabeth, with Basie, at the Palladium.

If he had to relive his life, would he do anything differently?

“Oh, yes, I would study more, be better versed in music; I’d learn how to arrange, compose, conduct, you know. I’d do so much more than I have done, which is just perform.”