Big Jim: Musician Willie Walker

Mr. Walker was born in 1902 in Marshall, Texas, and loved music from childhood. He vividly remembered the fine string bands and early morning serenades of his East Texas youth. “About daybreak, they’d wake you up with music — real nice music, you know — and it’d stay on your mind all day.”

He learned “Casey Jones” on an accordion his parents bought him, but soon graduated to his first love, the mandolin. He played with several local bands until around 1920, when his father’s railroad job took the family to Chicago. There he heard and learned from the great jazz bands of that time and place, and switched from mandolin to tenor banjo.

Willie Walker played dance music all his life. When I met him, he didn’t have a band, but could play and sing a wide selection of the popular dance songs of the 1920s and ‘30s. His repertoire included such songs as “The Sheik of Araby,” “I Get the Blues when it Rains,” “The St. Louis Blues,” and “Out on the Western Plains.” His solo style was highly syncopated, reminiscent of the tenor banjo part in a small dance band. He strummed his banjo using a home-made invention — a straight pick attached to a roll of electrician’s tape and slipped over his finger. He was frequently joined by his wife, Eleanor Walker.

I met Willie around 1975, and he performed annually in Tucson Meet Yourself for the few years of life that remained to him. I remember him as a wonderful transplant from an earlier era, a charming gentleman, and a dynamic musician and singer representing one of the many fascinating strains of African-American music.