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Black Patti sides only ever sold in hundreds, so Gennett pretty soon
pulled the plug on the whole operation, and Ink moved on to Brunswick
for a while until the Wall Street crash brought the
record business screeching to a halt.

When Ink resurfaced he was head of Race

Records for Decca and still peddling the Chicago
Music Publishing Company’s raw deals, but Mayo
was going out of style and Decca Studios in
Chicago spent more time as a warehouse than a
studio. There were more small independent labels and more shady contracts

but as he struggled along with microscopic budgets, Ink realised his time was
done and decided to quit and enjoy his ill-gotten gains.

There was no question Ink Williams played a big part in bringing a whole
chunk of blues music to the attention of the public and without him many

performers just wouldn’t have made it. But he had no respect for any of
them, “they were just drunken low-down guys…not people I wanted to hang
around with for more than it took to do my business”.

There is no question he was a trailblazer, a sharp guy with a head for
business and they were rough, tough times he was operating in when it was every man for himself,

but us Nitecrawlers figure that if he’d played a straighter hand, Ink Mayo Williams might well have
gone down as one of the more influential and important characters on the whole blues scene.

Extracted—with permission—from