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BLIND WILLIE McTELL

“I was born to ramble”

There were no easy rides down on those old Georgia cotton farms. Life out there in those sun-drenched
fields was tough and unforgiving, so a young blind boy really was hogtied unless he could figure out
some kinda angle. One road out was to learn a little bit of harp or banjo or guitar and that way maybe
he could earn himself a couple of bucks entertainin’ down at them local weekend fish fries and chicken
shacks. And for Blind Willie McTell that was pretty much the way it all started.

Blind Willie was born in Happy Valley, a tiny neck of the woods just south of the small town of Thomson,
Georgia. His father Ed McTear, a gambler and a drifter, disappeared soon after the boy was born so it
was left to his young mother Minnie to raise her blind son. First off she moved to Stapleton, a stop on
the Augusta Southern railway, then headed even further south to the cotton township of Statesboro
where the two of them lived in a little shack by the railroad and the Savannah.

By all accounts Minnie was a pretty good guitarist out of a family full of musicians, so it was pretty
natural for her to teach her boy how to pick out a tune on harp and accordion till he was old enough to
handle a guitar.

A local woman gave Willie his first guitar and he learned real fast, so fast that by the time he was teenage
he was already hookin’ onto small time carnivals and medicine shows, “I run away, went everywhere
I could go without money” laughed Willie.