Weepin' Willie: Boston’s Entertainer Extraordinaire
A man moves with an unsteady gait toward the stage. Supporting his stature is a black linear cane, a reminder of a neck/spinal cord operation eight years ago that now causes his left leg to be a half-step behind its partner's lead. He looks frail, almost vulnerable.
He is impeccably dressed, resplendent in a black tuxedo. A matching, perfectly knotted bowtie perches above a starched white-ribbed shirt. The shirt starkly contrasts with the neatly pressed, cuffed black trousers and eye-aching shine cast from patent-leather shoes. He personifies aged sophistication, elegance and style -- nouveau chic at 70-plus.
On stage he moves quickly to his spot, a place he knows well after more than 50 years behind a microphone and in front of an audience. A glance back to his bandmates and he is ready. The music starts. With a flick of his wrist as if shooing away an insect, he discards the cane and manhandles the microphone by its invisible throat. Everyone stops his or her private conversations in mid-sentence and their collective heads turn toward the stage as one. It's time to see and hear Weepin' Willie sing his blues.
William Lorenzo Robinson, better known as Weepin’ Willie, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, July 6, 1926. His early years were mostly spent outdoors in the fields of Winter Garden and Belglade, Florida, under a humid and unyielding sun picking tomatoes, potatoes, beans and assorted crops.
After his mother died when he was 10, Willie and his father migrated with the harvest seasons in a canvas-covered truck, driving from Florida through the Carolinas to Virginia. Throughout this time while he traveled on the muddied back roads and labored in the fields, Willie knew there had to be another way to make a living. "I didn’t like this. It was too hard," he said.
On one trip to Cheapside, Va., Willie’s father had arranged to have him and a family friend head further north to Trenton, N.J. "My father said he’d join up with me in a few weeks. But I haven’t seen him since," he said. "I was just a kid, 15."
He went to work on a Trenton farm milking cows, driving tractor and truck, doing the usual chores of the day.
"I got sick of picking potatoes and the rest, so they let me drive the truck. It was better than picking," he said.
After a year or so, he moved into the city and became a dishwasher. When he was 17 he enlisted in the Army.
"I told them I was 18, but I was really 17 ... In the Army they told me to listen up and pay attention, because if you don’t pay attention you’ll have to take basic training all over again and not get a chance to go overseas. So, I didn’t pay attention and I didn’t go overseas. I wasn’t mad at nobody."
After three years in the service, Willie met a friend who booked bands in Trenton, and he started working as a master of ceremonies in a nightclub. The club booked such luminaries as B.B. King, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Jackie Wilson, and Little Richard. While King, Bland, Wilson, and Richard carried their own MC, Willie was the house MC who’d tell jokes, dance, sing, and generally warm up the people before the main performers came out. "I got to know a lot of people personally this way, B.B., Bobby Bland, Big Joe Turner, they all came through."
When Willie first started emceeing in Trenton, the owner said he needed to change his name. They first tried Willie the Weeper, but that didn't really fit. So Willie shortened it to Weepin’ Willie, and has been ever since.
B.B. King was most responsible for the development of Willie as an entertainer. King told him that if he wanted to sing, "Then just sing. The rest will take care of itself."
"But I don't know any songs except your songs," Willie told King one night.
"Then sing ’em," King said.
"So I got up there with his 21-piece band behind me ... Now I've never been around anything more than four pieces in my life, and I didn’t know nothing from a hole in the ground. But I was lucky. B.B. said, ‘That’s all right. Keep on singing. Learn one song. Then learn two, and so on. Learn enough songs to where five people will like you. Maybe after a while 30 people will like you. Just keep on going. That’s how I started out.’"
King also advised him to always sing so that women will like you. "Because if you sing to the women, the men will always follow," he said. "Do what you can do, the best you can do. After that you ain’t got no control over it."
"Well, I must have done all right because no one ever asked for their money back whenever I sang. I never had any formal lessons or anything like that. I just sing what I feel," Willie said.
"I never say that I worked for B.B. King or Jackie Wilson or anyone else. I tell people that I worked on stage with them. And I worked with a lot of people -- Jimmy Reed, Chuck Jackson, Otis Redding, Joe Tex, and Solomon Burke," he said.
In 1959, a young woman from Louie’s Lounge in Roxbury came to Trenton and asked Willie, "I like your band, do you want to go to Boston?"
"Yeah, we’ll go to Boston," he told her. "And we've been here ever since."