REV. KM WILLIAMS "JUKIN'IN THE HOLY LAND" "LIVE IN ISRAEL"
How many active bluesmen today can claim to stock a homemade, single
string cigar box guitar in their arsenal and play it while wearing a
priest’s collar, all while being backed by a percussionist and washboard
player who prefers to use his hands over drumsticks and spoons? There’s
only one, and his name is Reverend K. M. Williams.Born in 1956 in Clarksville, Williams grew up in Red River County in
Northeast Texas, where he soaked in the sounds of blues and R&B
music broadcast from WLAC radio out of Nashville. Artists like John Lee
Hooker, Blind Willie Johnson, and R. L. Burnside all made strong
impressions on Williams as he was coming up, and one of his first
introductions to guitar came in the early sixties at the hands of an
itinerant blues player believed to be Elmore James. It would be almost
two decades before Williams’ career started to take off, but that long
journey has led him to open shows for legends like the Holmes Brothers,
Little Milton, and Robert Jr. Lockwood, and he shared a bill with Mavis
Staples in Europe, where he has returned three times and performed in
front of thousands.The Reverend is a bona fide ordained minister in the Holiness Church and
has been performing his unique brand of earthy gospel blues regularly
in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area since the nineties. He calls himself the
Texas Country Blues Preacher, and for good reason. I tell people all the
time that gospel music and blues are basically the same. I always said
that with the blues, you’re asking questions about life, or you’re just
expressing how you feel about what you’re going through. And gospel is
the answer to those questions. But it’s still the same feeling. I play
gospel music the same way I play blues—honest and funky, just real. REV.KM WILLIAMS
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