Getting to Know Jontavious Willis
What you won’t notice when talking to 24-year-old blues artist and Georgia native Jontavious Willis is the ego that you’d expect from somebody who has toured with Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’, won the 2018 International Blues Challenge award for Best Self-Produced CD, and has already been nominated for a Grammy. Instead, what you note are pairs of opposites: that he is highly accomplished, but very humble; a kid at heart, but profoundly wise; cheerful in nature, yet deeply empathetic; funny as can be, but dead serious about his craft.
Opposites, or at least paradox, might also describe blues music. It can be the lonesome sound of one person or the vociferous celebration of a whole band. Lyrics can be despairing or spiritual or earthy or resilient – sometimes all at once. And then there is that unexpected alchemy, in which the pain of a single heart expressed transforms into healing salve for the hearts of its listeners.
I’ve come to realize that there are blues and there are Blues. The first focuses on ripping guitar and screeching harmonica solos, punctuated with words sung but often not felt, and music copped without credit from those who came before. But the other, the real Blues, is something different. This Blues resonates with the lamentations, resilience, joys, and hopes of generations of African Americans and with others whose pain may not have arisen from systemic injustices but from mistakes made, respect withheld, or love unrequited. That’s the kind of Blues Jontavious Willis plays.
Two seemingly disparate experiences led Jontavious to become a Blues musician. The first was his grandfather, whose strong faith was expressed in the gospel songs he sung in and outside of church. The second was something that, on the surface, seemed quite different: videos of early Muddy Waters’ performances:
They were clapping and yelling, those people understood! It wasn’t just like high-brow art – they were clapping their hands – these folks were into it, really into it, and he was feeding off it, and it reminded me of church, it reminded me of how I grew up. He was singing to them, and they were testifying. He was very influential in the sense of connecting church to secular music for me. Blues music is congregational music…a lot of, but it's all the same. It's all in the same people, it’s all the same areas. It's all the same dialect. So, the only thing different is one of them is one of them is sacred, and one isn’t.
These experiences sparked a desire to learn more. He read everything he could find, listened to interviews with the musicians, and learned multiple instruments in an attempt to understand the music from the inside out. The blues, he came to realize, were the voice of history - of his family and of his culture, and he felt a calling to preserve them.
For many people [the blues] meant something. The blues were not just something to do.…it was part of these people’s lives. It doesn’t matter how people talk, how people walk, no matter where they work, they’re the same folks, you know? It’s pieces of people’s hearts. I feel like it’s up to folks like myself to present those songs and reclaim the history that's associated with it.
Like concentric ripples in the river of history, he realized that there were stories inside stories that he needed to tell for people.
It’s a timeline that lines up with my family, political commentary. A lot of these blues songs were not just about relationships, they were songs about welfare, songs about police, things that people are talking about now. People that can't write music will still have a story to tell.
Drawing on tradition to tell the stories he heard from his grandfather and other elderly people in his community, along with honing his skills as a musician, led to developing his own sound and an introduction to Taj Mahal.
Taj heard a video of me doing and old song called Lucy Mae, and he loved the fact that I was playing it open alternate tuning – it didn’t sound like anything he had heard before, and so we started talking right then and we realized that we had the same love for the music and we had the same love for the same musicians. We came from two generations, but we both loved the music.
Taj Majal enlisted Keb’ Mo’s’ help to produce Jontavious’ second album, Spectacular Class. While the craftsmanship of the songs may be a little more sophisticated than on his first, Blue Metamorphosis, both albums share Jontavious’ versatility, innovativeness, and ability to draw from the past to bring it into the present.
He has accomplished much in short career and has advice for aspiring musicians of all genres.
People will spend a lot of time creating ideas, thinking about ways to plan, thinking about backup plans if it fails, thinking about people that can help and people that will be against the plan, but it’s rare that you find folks that will just do. You’ve got to take the first step and do it. You can plan all year long. You can plan forever, but if you don’t do it, it’s just a wasted dream.
Jontavious continues to make things happen. He recently opened on tour with Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’ and has over thirty new songs finished or in progress. He is currently serving as artistic director of Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival and is helping to curate the Blind Willie McTell Music Festival in Thomson, Georgia.
To Jontavious, the blues is about connections – to history, to the music of the past, to an audience, and between musicians. What Taj Mahal, Keb’ Mo’, and others have done for him, he helps to continue:
I think the common core value all of it is like being kind, you know, genuinely kind. I want to help everybody that I can,because people have helped me… I just want to keep this spirit going.
The essence of the Blues is not just 12 bars, lyrics, and guitar solos. It is the shared history of the pain of a people and the troubles of a person. At its core, it’s a simple and timeless message being preached to music: Let’s remember, let’s share, let’s celebrate, and let’s love one another. To hear the music of Jontavious Willis is to understand what the Blues is all about.
