When Andre Williams died of cancer on Sunday, March 17, at age 82, he was well-known in Chicago as an R&B veteran who’d stayed busy and beloved in his later years. From his childhood onward, he’d spent much of his life here, but for a long stretch of the 1970s and ’80s he was somewhere between “whatever happened to” and “missing in action.” Drug addiction had all but ended his career, and for a while in the early 90s he survived by panhandling on the downtown Randolph Street bridge.
As the 60s rolled by, Williams traveled all over the R&B landscape, writing songs for Stevie Wonder and Mary Wells at Motown, producing Bobby Bland for the Duke label in Houston, Texas, and finally settling in Chicago, where he recorded the seminal “Cadillac Jack” in 1968 for Chess Records, with the Dells singing backup. For Chess subsidiary Checker, he produced “The Prayer” b/w “Lilly White Mama, Jet Black Dad” for comedian Ray Scott in 1970.
When Greasy/Fat Back came out in 1996, I had the honor of joining John Battles and the late Shawn Maloney to interview Williams at the Beat Kitchen for Roctober magazine. The three of them had arrived before me, but Williams swiftly acknowledged my presence: “Y’all brought a black brother in! They told me you were all white!” He was in the middle of explaining how, in his new “Jail Bait” remake, he begs the judge not to send him to the big house because “they get the booty” up in there. He autographed my copy of his “Jail Bait” reissue album just that way: “They get da budy —Andre Williams.”
