This story was originally published by ArtsATL.
Bill Sheffield has been a fixture on the Atlanta music scene for over 50 years. With ties to such blues regality as Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Big Mama Thornton — and a solid reputation as a performer and songwriter in his own right — he is regarded as one of Atlanta’s premier blues musicians.
He’s released eight albums so far, and Stomp and Stammer critic Tony Paris once wrote that Sheffield has a voice “that immediately grabs you by the heart and holds you close.”
After a long absence from the stage due to health issues, Sheffield is back. He will perform with Sandra Senn and Spencer Kirkpatrick at the Common Grounds Coffee House at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation Metro Atlanta North in Roswell at 7:30 p.m. Saturday. He also hosts the weekly Sunset Jam at Cajun Blues in Chamblee from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Thursdays.
Sheffield, 72, may be best known for his ability to play acoustic Piedmont blues, a sub-genre characterized by a complex method of using the thumb to play the bass line and the fingers to play the melody. Songs played in this style generally tell a story, and Sheffield’s music has told a very personal tale.
His father’s son
Before Sheffield played the blues, he heard the blues. As a child who was born at Georgia Baptist Hospital in Atlanta, he was deeply disturbed at the rampant racism in the midcentury, segregated city. He remembers witnessing overt acts of cruelty, inequitable working conditions and — imprinted on his mind all these years later — billboards using racial slurs to remind Black men to stay inside after dark, or else.
His father, however, refused to treat Black men the way the other white men did. He paid them fairly and treated them with dignity and respect, Sheffield said.
“That’s been the biggest influence of my life, really, to follow that,” he said. “He was a flawed man but a great man in my estimation.”
Credit: Steve Schaefer
Credit: Steve Schaefer
His song “My Father’s Son” reflects the complicated relationship he had with his father. When his father died, his Black employees called to ask permission to attend his funeral. Both the fact that they wanted to pay respects to his father and that they had to ask permission to do so greatly impacted Sheffield.
Deeply disturbed at the racial and other injustices around him and feeling helpless to remedy them, he began a lifelong battle with depression, which was coupled with alcohol and other addictions. But he also discovered blues music.
“That was what drew me to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band,” Sheffield explains, referring to the seminal blues band of the early 1960s.”He had two Black guys in his band. That was unheard of when I was a kid, you know. It just didn’t happen.”
From there, Sheffield started to dig into the influences of white musicians like Butterfield and discovered the roots of the music they were playing. The first song he remembers really making an impression on him was Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark was the Night (Cold Was the Ground).”
Johnson’s cries of impending gloom seemed to express the horrors of the racism he saw around him. Sheffield also noted that while this song reflected great sorrow, it also somehow provided a little comfort. Intrigued, he kept digging and discovered Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Blake, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and more.
Credit: Courtesy of Bill Sheffield
Credit: Courtesy of Bill Sheffield
He then began to realize that the British music that he thought was the blues wasn’t the authentic stuff.
“It was guys trying to cover blues,” he says. “Once you hear Muddy and Robert Johnson, the sound of those voices has something sad about them. Even if it’s happy, there’s something sad about it. It’s got a blue tone to it. And I’ve always had a sad nature. So it fit me nicely.”
Sheffield notes that to play the blues right, a musician has to have experienced pain.
“You got to have the pain,” he said. “You got to have it. But there’s going to be a counter to it, you know? It made me aware that blues came really out of the church. It came out of those people in church laying it down, and that opened this way for what led the blues as the way it sounds.”
Sheffield learned to play guitar by listening to records over and over and relentlessly trying to duplicate the sounds he heard.
“Once you’ve got Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy, you’ve heard the best of it, you know?” he says. “It’s unnatural for a long time until you find your space in it. And then you find a natural way to do it.”
He felt that in a small way he was making a difference. “We’re white guys playing their music and that mattered back then, because most white people didn’t like Black people very much,” he said. “Young white kids, playing their music … well, it mattered.”
Life-changing event
Sheffield began to perform regularly in Atlanta in the early ‘70s, and he eventually caught the attention of B.B. King, who asked him to open a concert for him at Lake Spivey. It was a life-changing experience.
“He was very kind. He dug me and said, ‘You’re good. You’re good at what you’re doing. Stay with it.’ He was really encouraging,” said Sheffield.
Sheffield stayed with it and rubbed shoulders with the legends. He opened for T-Bone Walker, Big Joe Turner, Eddie Vinson and John Lee Hooker at the Municipal Auditorium; Muddy Waters at Richard’s; Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Junior Walker & the All Stars at the Moonshadow Saloon; Buddy Moss, the Rev. Pearly Brown, Big Mama Thornton and George Smith at the 12th Gate; and Brownie McGee at the Great Southeast Music Hall. Stevie Ray Vaughn once opened for him at The Roxy.
Credit: Courtesy of Bill Sheffield
Credit: Courtesy of Bill Sheffield
Despite the success he found, he still spent the next several decades of his life running from the internal pain that had plagued him since he was a child. Addictions of all kinds were rampant in his life. At the same time, music provided an outlet that helped him heal.
“Whatever that angst was is what you hear in my voice,” he said. “And that’s cathartic. Always has been for me.”
He believes that pain is the essence of soul. “The worst thing you can possibly do is numb your pain,” he said. “You’ve got to live your pain. If you numb it, you lose out on the whole idea, man.”
Sheffield shies away from genre labels for his music.
“I never called myself a bluesman,” he said. “That was something that was put on me. Blues was Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf. Blues was those guys who lived it and made it and everything else is a copy. You’re not going to find someone who does better blues than Muddy Waters. Muddy was the blues, you know? I didn’t live Muddy Waters’ life, so I can’t pretend that I did.”
In fact, Sheffield’s oeuvre has strayed into folk, rock, gospel and country territory, and his original songs draw from all four.
“You just got to take it from there,” he said, regarding his blues roots. “You can’t just sit there. That’s where you want to be, where you’ve got your own genre.” He points to the bouncy, country-folk leanings of his song “Cherry Blossom Time.” Although he was inspired by Big Bill Broonzy while writing it, he said, “It’s me being naturally myself.”
Redemption song
Sheffield remains deeply concerned with social injustices and heavily invested in writing and singing about the truths he’s learned the hard way. He believes that one of his one of his best songs his latest, called “Forgive and Forget.”
“The last verse of the song is ‘Stay beware of unkind words you can never unsay.’ That’s powerful for me,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of anger in myself from different things, and I relate to confusion and turmoil and I’ve created a bunch of both in my life, you know?”
This song will be on his ninth album, currently in the works.
He has been in recovery from his addictions for several years now and is in a romantic relationship unlike any that he’s had before. “We’re very much in love,” he said of his life partner, drummer Sandra Senn. “I need her and she needs me. And that matters. She’s given me a reason to continue to live. I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”
Sheffield plans to continue playing and performing as long as he can.
“It’s important to do it,” he said, regarding his life’s work. “It’s what’s left of me. Everything else is just getting through. I’m proud that I’ve written some stuff. Stuff that matters to some people. It feels good to know that I’ve had an influence, even if a small one. To influence people here, locally, means a lot to me.”
The courage to see and to feel, to sing and to heal has been a consistent theme in Sheffield’s life and his work. As long as the world needs changing, Sheffield will be there to call out injustices, remind us that mistakes do not define us and cheer us with whatever music needs to be written, played and sung.
“So I guess I am a blues guy — at the start of it, at the guts of it,” he said. “You have to aspire to something higher. That’s what blues is about, aspiring above this life. I can be jubilant in the midst of this madness, you know?”
PERFORMANCE PREVIEW
Bill Sheffield with Sandra Senn and Spencer Kirkpatrick
7:30 p.m. Saturday. $5. Common Grounds Coffee House at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation Metro Atlanta North, 11420 Crabapple Road, Roswell. 770-992-3949, uuman.org.
Sunset Jam
7 p.m.-10 p.m. every Thursday. Cajun Blues restaurant, 2197 Savoy Drive, Chamblee. 770-674-4240, cajunblues1.com.
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Shannon Marie Tovey is a freelance music journalist and educator.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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