Willie Dixon Wrote the Blues With a Hope for the Future

The blues were always more for Willie Dixon than just tales of hard living and party-down good times. For the influential songwriter, producer and bassist who died Wednesday of heart failure at 76, the blues were also a fountain of wisdom that people could draw upon.

His own personal favorite wasn’t “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Wang Dang Doodle,” “My Babe” or the other classics that earned Dixon his reputation as the Chicago blues songwriter. It was “(It Don’t Make Sense) You Can’t Make Peace,” an eloquent, early ‘80s critique contrasting society’s technological advances with its inability to use them for peaceful ends.

Sample lyrics:

You have made great planes to scan the skies

You gave sight to the blind with other men’s eyes

You even made submarines stay submerged for weeks

But it don’t make sense you can’t make peace.

It was 10 years ago that I first met Dixon, who will be remembered at a memorial service at 1:30 p.m. today at Forest Lawn Memorial Parks in Glendale. He had just moved to Los Angeles from Chicago, and I was nervous interviewing someone who had written so many of my favorite songs.

But Dixon--a massive man with a down-to-earth manner--was first and foremost a diplomat, a person who could put anyone at ease. It was a character trait that Chess Records engineer Malcolm Chisholm, in describing Willie’s studio approach, referred to as “his wonderful Buddha act.”

Dixon certainly enjoyed the increased acclaim and recognition that came his way in the last few years, but he was secure in his contributions to the blues. During the four years I spent collaborating with him on his 1988 autobiography “I Am the Blues,” he showed no desire to embellish his personal achievements.

Dixon’s easygoing demeanor, however, masked a man of strong convictions. He refused induction into the Army during World War II on the grounds that African-Americans had been denied freedom here.

As he related in “I Am the Blues”: “I explained to them in several court cases, ‘Why should I go to fight to save somebody that’s killing me and my people?’ ” Dixon spent close to a year, off-and-on, in prison and was released in 1944 but prohibited from working in the lucrative war industries.

Yet no single passion ruled Dixon more than promoting the blues, the music he called “the roots of all American music.” His efforts ran the gamut from opening up the European tour circuit through a series of American Folk Blues Festival shows in the early ‘60s to setting up the Blues Heaven Foundation in the early ‘80s to help older blues musicians and their heirs reap the financial rewards of their music.

It would figure that Dixon grew up playing the blues that ultimately brought him fame . . . but it didn’t happen that way.

Dixon was still in his teens when he began his career by singing in a gospel quartet in Vicksburg, Miss. He didn’t play bass until his early 20s and his recordings in the late-1940s with the Big Three Trio, which featured smooth vocal harmonies and split the difference between Tin Pan Alley pop standards and blues material in the sophisticated, Charles Brown vein.

It wasn’t until 1954, when Muddy Waters recorded “Hoochie Coochie Man” that Dixon started on the long road toward becoming a figure as popularly identified with Chicago blues as Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter. Those performers and others first recorded the songs that form the cornerstones of Dixon’s reputation.

His songs projected a larger-than-life swagger. It’s hard to imagine the stance of, say, the Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash” or Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile” if Dixon’s “Back Door Man” or “The Seventh Son” hadn’t preceded them.

But his legacy extends beyond the songwriting sphere. That’s Dixon playing bass on most of Chuck Berry’s ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll hits and his role as the musical backbone of the Chess Records studio team left an indelible mark on the sound of blues, rock and even gospel music.

There was another element in Willie Dixon’s success--his work ethic. Dixon grew up in an era when he had to hustle to get his material recorded--it often took years, even decades, for some of his most famous songs to be recorded. He continued working into his 70s. His 1988 solo album “Hidden Charms” on Bug/Capitol earned Dixon his first Grammy, he scored his first movie soundtrack for “Ginger Ale Afternoon” and co-wrote a song on Los Lobos’ “The Neighborhood” album.

Beyond the music, there are memories of the man . . . including a two-day visit during the writing of “I Am the Blues” to his hometown of Vicksburg, where Dixon rolled back the pages of his personal history. He tracked down childhood friends and displayed a remarkable memory for places.

But mostly one remembers Dixon’s boundless enthusiasm for life, one that even enabled him to view the diabetes that caused the amputation of his right leg 15 years ago in a positive light--something that added extra years to his life.

This zest extended to his music because the blues was never an archaic form to Dixon. It was a living, breathing music as current as the day’s headlines.

“I can’t go back to talking about slavery days, picking cotton and pulling corn,” he once said. “All that’s yesterday’s news.

“I made blues yesterday about the things of yesterday and what would be the hopeful future of tomorrow. Today I make blues about today and what the hopeful future of tomorrow is.”