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| Born | Jerry Williams Jr. (1942-07-12)12 July 1942 (age 82) Portsmouth, Virginia, U.S. |
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| Years active | 1954–present |
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| Labels | Sunglasses,Oh Boy Records |
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| Website | theswampdogg |
Jerry Williams Jr. (born July 12, 1942), generally credited under the pseudonymSwamp Dogg after 1970, is an Americancountry soul andR&B singer, musician, songwriter and record producer. Williams has been described as "one of the great cult figures of 20th century American music."[2]
After recording asLittle Jerry andLittle Jerry Williams in the 1950s and 1960s, he reinvented himself as Swamp Dogg, releasing a series of satirical, offbeat, and eccentric recordings, as well as continuing to write and produce for other musicians. He debuted his new sound on theTotal Destruction to Your Mind album in 1970. In the 1980s, he helped to develop Alonzo Williams'World Class Wreckin' CRU, which producedDr. Dre among others.[3] He continues to make music, releasingLove, Loss, and Auto-Tune onJoyful Noise Recordings in 2018,[4][5]Sorry You Couldn't Make It in 2020,[6] andI Need a Job...So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune in 2022 onDon Giovanni Records. In 2024, he releasedBlackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St on Oh Boy, a label founded by the lateJohn Prine.
Williams was born inPortsmouth, Virginia. He made his first recording, "HTD Blues (Hardsick Troublesome Downout Blues)", for the Mechanicrecord label in 1954, when he was aged 12, with his parents and uncle and backing musicians, and was regularly hired to play private parties.[6] From 1960, he released occasional singles for a variety of labels, including the self-written "I'm The Lover Man" in 1964, which was first issued on the Southern Sound label and was then picked up by the largerLoma label, almost breaking into the nationalBillboard Hot 100.[7][8] He also wrote successfully for other musicians, including "Big Party" forBarbara and the Browns.[8]
As Little Jerry Williams, he had his first national chart success in 1966, when "Baby You're My Everything", which he co-wrote and produced, was released on theCalla label and rose to #32 on the R&B chart, again just missing the Hot 100.[9][10] He released several more singles on Calla through to 1967, by now credited simply as Jerry Williams, but with little commercial success, although some of his records such as "If You Ask Me (Because I Love You)" later became staples of theNorthern Soul movement in the UK.[7]
By late 1967 he started working inA&R and other duties for theMusicor label in New York.[11] In 1968 he co-wrote, withCharlie Foxx,Gene Pitney's up-tempo hit, "She's a Heartbreaker", which Williams also claimed to have produced, saying: "I produced the motherfuck out of it... [and] Charlie Foxx put me down on the label as "vocal arranger." What the fuck is that? When they took out full-page ads inBillboard andCashbox, there was a picture of Charlie on one side and a picture of Gene Pitney on the other and no mention of me."[12]
Later in 1968 Williams began working as a producer atAtlantic Records withJerry Wexler andPhil Walden,[2][13] on artists includingPatti LaBelle & the Blue Belles, though he found the administration frustrating.[6] He established a songwriting partnership with Gary Anderson, who performed asGary U.S. Bonds, and the pair wrote theR&B chart hits "To the Other Woman (I'm the Other Woman)" byDoris Duke, and "She Didn't Know (She Kept on Talking)" byDee Dee Warwick.[8] He also recorded a single, "I Got What It Takes", in a duo withBrooks O'Dell, and released two singles under his own name on theCotillion label, a subsidiary of Atlantic.[7]
Williams later wrote:[14]
I became Swamp Dogg in 1970 in order to have an alter-ego and someone to occupy the body while the search party was out looking for Jerry Williams, who was mentally missing in action due to certain pressures, mal-treatments and failure to get paid royalties on over fifty single records.... Most all of the tracks included were recorded inMuscle Shoals, Alabama, and Macon, Georgia, which brings me to how the name Swamp Dogg came about.Jerry Wexler,Atlantic Records v.p. and producer/innovator second to none, was recording in the newly discovered mecca of funkMuscle Shoals, Alabama. He coined the term "Swamp Music" for this awesome funk predominately played by all white musicians accompanying the R'n'B institutions e.g.,Wilson Pickett,Aretha Franklin,King Curtis... I was also using the same "swamp" players. I was tired of being a jukebox, singing all of the hits byChuck Jackson,Ben E. King, etc., and being an R'n'B second banana. I couldn't dance as good asJoe Tex, wasn't pretty likeTommy Hunt, couldn't compare vocally toJackie Wilson and I didn't have the sex appeal ofDaffy Duck. I wanted to sing about everything and anything and not be pigeonholed by the industry. So I came up with the name Dogg because a dog can do anything, and anything a dog does never comes as a real surprise; if he sleeps on the sofa, shits on the rug, pisses on the drapes, chews up your slippers, humps your mother-in-law's leg, jumps on your new clothes and licks your face, he's never gotten out of character. You understand what he did, you curse while making allowances for him but your love for him never diminishes. Commencing in 1970, I sung aboutsex,niggers,love,rednecks,war,peace,dead flies,home wreckers,Sly Stone, mydaughters,politics,revolution andblood transfusions (just to name a few), and never got out of character. Recording in Alabama and sincerely singing/writing about items that interested me, gave birth to the name Swamp Dogg.
Having adopted his moniker beforeSnoop Dogg was born, he has claimed to be "the original D-O double G".[15]
In 1970, he emerged in his new Swamp Dogg persona, with two singles onWally Roker's Canyon label, "Mama's Baby, Daddy's Maybe", again co-written with Bonds, and "Synthetic World". He also produced the first Swamp Dogg album,Total Destruction to Your Mind. The album sleeve showed Williams sitting in his underwear on a pile of garbage. Williams' new direction apparently followed anLSD trip, and was inspired by the radical politics of the time and byFrank Zappa's use of satire, while showing his own expertise in, and commitment to,deep soul and R&B music. According to Allmusic: "In sheer musical terms, Swamp Dogg is pure Southern soul, anchored on tight grooves and accentuated by horns, but the Dogg is as much about message as music..." Although not a commercial success at the time, Swamp Dogg started to develop a cult following and eventually the album sold enough to achievegold record status.[2][16] Record criticRobert Christgau wrote that "Soul-seekers like myself are moderately mad for the obscure" album and has called it "legendary".[17] It was reissued in 2013 byAlive Naturalsound Records.[18]
Around the same time, one of the songs Williams had co-written with Gary Bonds, "She's All I Got", became a top-ten R&B hit forFreddie North, and was recorded with even greater success bycountry starJohnny Paycheck, whose version reached #2 on thecountry music chart in late 1971.[8] In a later interview onNPR'sStudio 360, Williams stated he was raised on country music: "Black music didn't start 'til 10 at night until 4 in the morning and I was in bed by then... If you strip my tracks, take away all the horns and guitar licks, what you have is a country song."[19] However, he also continued to write and produce deep soul songs for other musicians, includingZ. Z. Hill andIrma Thomas.[2][8] In 1971 in collaboration with co-producer and writer the legendary George Semper he released "Monster Walk Pt. 1 and 2" by the Rhythm 'N' Blues Classical Funk Band on Mankind Records label. Produced for Jerry Williams Productions, Inc.and in spite of modest sales the record once again demonstrated his entrepreneurial skill as an artist.[20]
As Swamp Dogg, he was signed byElektra Records for his second album,Rat On! in 1971. The sleeve showed him on the back of a giant white rat, and has frequently been ranked as one of the worst album covers of all time.[21][22][23][24] Sales were relatively poor, and he joinedJane Fonda's anti-Vietnam WarFree the Army tour.[6] His next albumsCuffed, Collared and Tagged (1972) andGag a Maggott (recorded at theTK Studio in 1973) were released on smaller labels, though his 1974 album,Have You Heard This Story??, was issued byIsland Records.[2] In 1977 he had another minor R&B hit with "My Heart Just Can't Stop Dancing", credited toSwamp Dogg & the Riders of the New Funk.[9] He continued to release albums through the 1970s and into the mid-1980s as Swamp Dogg, on various small independent labels and in a variety of styles includingdisco and country and maintained a healthy cult following. He also set up his own publishing and recording company, Swamp Dogg Entertainment Group (SDEG).[2]
In 1999, "Slow Slow Disco" wassampled byKid Rock on the track "I Got One for Ya", sparking a revival of interest in Swamp Dogg, who began performing live gigs for the first time. Several other of his recordings were sampled, and in 2009 he released two new albums,Give Em as Little as You Can...As Often as You Have To...Or...A Tribute to Rock N Roll, andAn Awful Christmas and a Lousy New Year. He also released some further singles, and a compilation album of the best of his work as both Little Jerry Williams and Swamp Dogg,It's All Good, was released in 2009. Most of his early Swamp Dogg albums have also been reissued on CD.[2]
Swamp Dogg released a full-length album of new songs in 2014,The White Man Made Me Do It, which Williams described as being a sort of sequel toTotal Destruction To Your Mind.[25][26] Shortly thereafter, Swamp Dogg teamed up with Ryan Olson fromPoliça to produce the tracks for his 2018 albumLove, Loss & Autotune,Justin Vernon (akaBon Iver) fine-tuning the vocal tracks.[27][28] The song also features instrumentation byGuitar Shorty.[29] The music video for "I'll Pretend" premiered at NPR[27] and was later featured atRolling Stone,[30]Pitchfork,[31]Spin[32] and elsewhere. Swamp Dogg described the song as a character study about "a guy sitting in a restaurant by himself losing his fucking mind because he's hoping his woman is gonna walk by, but she's at a Ramada Inn somewhere fucking somebody else to death."[28]
In 2020, he released the albumSorry You Couldn't Make It, acountry-styled record recorded inNashville with producerRyan Olson and musicians includingJustin Vernon,John Prine, andJenny Lewis.[6]
In 2022 he releasedI Need a Job...So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune onDon Giovanni Records.
In 2024 he was profiled in the documentary filmSwamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted.[33]
musicor jerry williams.
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