ONE STRING OF FURY
The Legend of Willie Joe & his Unitar
an appreciation by Shane Speal. (Originally published in "Uncle Enos Magazine," Spring 2007)
(c)
2007 Shane Speal, Sr.
***CLICK HERE TO BUILD YOUR OWN UNITAR***
Ask any mainstream rock historian “what’s the meanest sounding guitar of the 1950’s?”
and they’ll most likely answer with names like Link Wray, Chuck Berry or Johnny “Guitar” Watson.
Unfortunately, very few
of them ever heard the name Willie Joe and his Unitar, much less the handful of obscure singles he appeared on during the
Eisenhower Era. Willie Joe laid down the meanest guitar of the Fifties. It’s time
for the world to know…
Joe Willie Duncan was a blues musician from the Detroit ghettos
who played a massive, amplified one string instrument he called a Unitar. The Unitar was a killer musical
device of atomic proportions. Made from a 7 foot plank of wood, it was strung with a solitary piece of
wire (with a playable scale length of over 4½ feet!) and wired with a DeArmond acoustic guitar pickup.
The instrument was a version of the traditional African-American ‘diddley bow’ and was played with a bottle
as a slide. Duncan used a hunk of leather as a pick and flogged the string as he played it, delivering
a tone that’s best described as ‘bitch-slapping!’
In the late Forties, Duncan partnered up with legendary bluesman,
Jimmy Reed, performing on back porches, in front of stores and on Maxwell Street. Reed knew Duncan by the
nickname “Jody” and the pair would drive around the city in Reed’s battered pickup truck and choose a storefront
or corner to play on. If there was a place to plug in, they’d stop.
When you stand on the
sidewalk with a 7 foot musical plank, you’re guaranteed to draw a crowd; and people would swarm around the duo in amazement
as Jimmy Reed played guitar and sang and Duncan pummeled his Unitar. Duncan sang a few tunes, too and would
pull out an old pair of spoons to beat on his knees as a finale. Although they wouldn’t charge the
store owner for the performance, Duncan always passed the hat at the end. According to Reed, they made
more money busking than they did at their jobs in the factory.
Unfortunately for Reed, Duncan saw a brighter future in California and
packed his bags to leave. But before he could leave the Detroit ghettos, Reed presented him with a portable
Unitar for the trip, complete with a hinge in the middle making the instrument foldable! (See the pic of
Duncan. There’s a hinge.) Duncan settled in at Palo Alto, California and continued his outrageous
ways. He was even known to ride his pony up and down the streets while dressed like a cowboy.
He continued to play the Unitar around town and was eventually asked to sit in on several sessions for Specialty Records
in Burbank in 1956. (I think he was discovered by guitarist and Specialty’s house band leader, Rene
Hall, but I’m not sure.)
Specialty Records was a hit making machine at the time with artists like Little Richard and Guitar Slim in the lineup.
Joe Willie Duncan was invited to play solos behind a gravel voiced singer by the name of Bob Landers for the absolutely
catchy single, Cherokee Dance. Legend has it that Landers got his frog sounding voice because he was suffering
from throat cancer and died soon after the song was released. The song was credited to Bob “Froggy” Landers with
Willie Joe and his Unitar. (Apparently, the folks at Specialty wanted to give Joe Willie Duncan a more
stage-worthy name and flipped his first and middle name to mimic the name of singer “Little Willie John” who had
a hit at the time with ‘Fever.’)
Now here’s the main point I’ve wanted to tell the world about... The
B side of the record just happened to be the greatest instrumental guitar song of the entire 1950s: UNITAR ROCK.
Unitar Rock is a simple blues jam provided by Rene Hall and his Orchestra with Willie Joe front and center, slapping
and beating the Unitar until it screamed for mercy. It’s distorted, gnarled sound is one of the meanest
guitar parts recorded, AND IT’S ALL ON ONE STRING!
It amazes me that this song never achieved the cult
status of Link Wray’s ‘Rumble.’ It’s pure rock and roll. It’s
slide guitar to the extreme. It’s the most brutal thing put to wax up until that time.
Unitar Rock ROCKS and deserves a place alongside guitar hero songs like Smoke on the Water and Day Tripper!
After the modest jukebox
success of Cherokee Dance, Duncan was invited back to Specialty in 1957 as a studio musician, playing solos on one more instrumental,
‘Twitchy’ by Rene Hall and his Orchestra. The songwriting credits went to W.J. Duncan.
In 1958, Rene Hall left
Specialty for Rendezvous Records in Los Angeles. He soon called on Willie Joe for one more dose of Unitar
and Willie Joe played the solos the single ‘Teen Flip’ by Ernie Fields. Although
it’s not as prominent as Unitar Rock, Duncan’s Unitar rocks out again on the track.
From 1958 onward, I have only
found scraps of information on Duncan. For a short while Willie Joe showed up a lot on local R&B TV
shows (Johnny Otis, Hunter Hancock) on a fairly regular basis. One musician told me that Willie would jam
at open mics in local bars and eventually added a second Unitar that had an orange crate as the guitar body.
Duncan was also re-discovered
by LA disc jockey, Little Willie G and was asked to perform at O.T Price’s Music Hall in Santa Cruz around 1985.
John Huffman, a musician currently in Guam was one of the people recruited for Willie Joe’s backup band for that
show. “We played 45 minutes of music, all of it sounding like Unitar Rock,” Huffman told me.
Little Willie G claims to have bootleg video footage of this show and plans to put it on YouTube for the world to witness
for free. Let’s hope that comes true.
Little Willie G also said that Duncan passed soon after in 1988 or 1989,
but to this day, I have yet to find a definite date.
As I stated, there are many holes left in Duncan’s bio from 1958 onward.
My hope is that some people will read this article and email me some new information. Joe Willie
Duncan and his bombastic Unitar is one legendary sound that the world needs to hear.
By the way, one of those
that DID hear Willie Joe and was greatly moved was the late Mark Sandman of the iconoclast grunge jazz band, Morphine.
Sandman performed on a 2-string slide bass that was built to sound like Duncan’s Unitar.
Notes on the Specialty Records releases
from the Specialty Story cd box set booklet:
BOB “FROGGY” LANDERS WITH WILLIE JOE AND HIS UNITAR: CHEROKEE DANCE 2:32
(Robert Landers)(Sp 576) Recorded January 20, 1956 – Master Recorders, Hollywood
BOB LANDERS - vocal; WILLIE JOE DUNCAN - unitar; TED BRINSON - bass; ROY PORTER – drums A&R:
BUMPS BLACKWELL
RENE
HALL’S ORCHESTRA FEATURING WILLIE JOE: TWITCHY 2:22 (W.J. Duncan)(SP 618)
Probably recorded October 30, 1957 - Master Recorders, Hollywood RENE HALL - guitar; WILLIE JOE
DUNCAN – unitar (Additional personnel unknown) A&R: probably Art Rupe
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