Blues artist 'Weepin' Willie dies at 81

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Source: Yahoo News

BOSTON - "Weepin'" Willie Robinson, a blues singer who performed with Steven Tyler and Bonnie Raitt but also spent time homeless, has died at age 81.

Robinson had been a sharecropper, an Army veteran and a friend of performers, including B.B. King.

"He was truly the elder statesman of the (Boston) blues. He was our godfather. He was the most dear man," Holly Harris, host of "Blues on Sunday" on WBOS radio, told The Boston Globe for Monday's editions.

When he sang, "you knew he meant it because he had passion," Harris said


Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071231/ap_on_en_mu/obit_robinson

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1. The man lived the blues and preformerd earlier this month

with Steven Tyler.

RIP Willie.

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2. Here's some biographical details I jsut fount on him... "Weepin’ Willie Robinson spent

spent part of his childhood in Winter Garden, Florida. In 1939, when he was 13, he was living with his father in a shack beside a graveyard. The shack was also the storage area for bodies scheduled for burial the next day, which must have made for some pretty bad dreams. Later that same year, his father put him on a truck bound for a farm in New Jersey where they needed some extra hands, and that was the last he saw of him. His mother had died three years earlier. While living down south, Willie got to know water moccasins, cottonmouths, and all sorts of other nasty snakes (as did I, as a kid growing up in nearby Winter Park). Willie noted that "The rattler is the only snake that will warn you to get away," a quality I’ll bet he wishes was shared by some of the human snakes-in-the-grass he ran across later during his many years working Boston nightclubs. He described a rough-and-tumble life of being stabbed, shot twice, and dealing with various ne’er-do-wells in the tougher neighborhoods of Boston. But he also made a lot of friends, and sooner or later people started leaving him alone. He got his start in music while working with B.B. King as an emcee, knowing he could sing but initially too scared to do so. Today, at age 74, he is a sensation as a blues singer in Boston."

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