By Jim Morrison
Swamp Dogg’s return to the charts he first cracked as Little Jerry Williams from Portsmouth is a zig-zagging journey through musical genres, accidental connections and his attraction as an underground legend.
“I’m finding out all kinds of artists have Swamp Dogg as a hero,” he says on a call to his Northridge Los Angeles home, “but they never expected that they would see him.”
Swamp Dogg has been making music — soul, R&B, country, bluegrass, alternative — since he started at 12 in 1954. He’s also been a record label executive, manager (for Dr. Dre before N.W.A), producer for Irma Thomas and others, and a hit songwriter for performers as diverse as Doris Duke, Johnny Paycheck, and Gene Pitney. Kid Rock, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, and others have sampled his songs. He has a forthcoming book, “If You Can Kill It, I Can Cook It,” which he describes as a cookbook, a humor trip, and a biography. Just like his album catalog, it doesn’t fit on one shelf.
But then Swamp Dogg’s chaotic, wondering mind has always prodded him to explore the unexpected far and wide. His latest album, for instance, is a bluegrass delight that he labels Blackgrass and features some of the genre’s best pickers.
That album followed his return to the charts with 2018’s “Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune.” Another odd connection — he owns the rights to an album by the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, an early Dre group – led to that album. A distributor wanted to re-release the Dre album. He hooked up Swamp with Ryan Olson of the synth-pop band Poliça who produced Lizzo’s 2013 debut.
Swamp can talk (this interview lasted an hour and 44 minutes) and the two soon were on the phone regularly. Olson wondered if he had any songs. Oh, he had songs. Swamp figures he has more than 1,000 in the bank. So, he sent Olson what he’d been working on lately. It took a while, actually a couple of years, for Olson to return his edits, but the result became an unlikely success, reaching number 7 on the Heatseekers chart and 28 on the Independent Albums chart.
The disc features Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, one of those artists like Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley, Vernon Reid of Living Colour, and the legendary John Prine, who hold an affection for him. Decades earlier, as an executive at Atlantic Records, Swamp, then Jerry Williams, was given a list of artists to ax. Those he kept included Prine, Pattie LaBelle, and The Commodores. But his career as the label’s only Black A&R man ended after a short stint when he was fired for going over budget recording an album with his friend, another local talent, Gary U.S. Bonds.
For “Love, Loss and Auto-Tune,” Olson brought Vernon, his childhood friend, to help. He contributed to one cut on an album that opens with a version of “Answer Me, My Love,” made famous by Nat (King) Cole, and ends with “Star Dust,” the Hoagie Carmichael standard. Neither are recognizable from the familiar versions. “Swamp Dogg sets off into a bizarre, unsettled realm of computer-manipulated vocals and surreal, anything-can-happen electronic backdrops,” wrote Jon Pareles of The New York Times. “And yet, somewhere within all the digital commotion, there’s still a human being in search of love.”
Swamp gives Olson credit. “I tried to stay out of the way, because I didn’t want it to sound like another Swamp Dogg album. So, there’s some things that I learned to live with that’s happening on the album, but I’m glad I did,” he says. “You know, sometimes when you know it all, you find you don’t know it all.”
Swamp confessed the first time he heard the album, he thought it had no groove and no beat. It fits a life of taking chances with the direction of others. “Every time I let somebody in, I have some sort of success,” he says.
There was a reason to change his sound. The previous Swamp Dogg album sold 4,000 copies. But at least that sold better than “Beatle Barkers,” an album of barnyard animal noises playing the Fab Four that he hawked (but did not record) in the 1980s.
For “Love, Loss and Auto-Tune,” he cut a deal with a foreign record company owner he met at a picnic who bought the album unheard. Crazy, Swamp says. “Matter of fact, everybody I’m working with is a little crazy. Ryan Olson is out of his mind, but he’s a genius,” he adds.
Of course, Swamp made a U-turn with his next album, aided by Vernon, Lewis, and Prine, who he met at a tribute festival produced by Olson and Vernon in 2017. He’d recorded Prine’s “Sam Stone.” It was a hit for him, but they’d never met.
That release, “Sorry You Couldn’t Make It,” is a soul country album paying homage to the country radio stations he loved growing up. It features two duets recorded in Nashville with Prine and the album opener, “Sleeping Without You Is a Dragg,” with Lewis and Vernon.
Now, he had momentum. Naturally, there’s another twist. The album he’s touring behind for his show on May 29 at The Perry Pavilion with the Virginia Arts Festival’s North Shore Point Downtown series is — wait for it — bluegrass. Titled “Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125 St,” it features some of the finest young pickers including Sierra Hull (who appeared downtown two years ago) and Noam Pikelny of Punch Brothers as well as Jerry Douglas, Margo Price, Chris Scruggs, and Lewis. Vernon Reid shows up on “Rise Up,” a Swamp song recorded decades ago by The Commodores.
The album features the usual Swamp mix of humor, wisecracking sleaze, and social commentary with “Mess Under That Dress,” “Ugly Man’s Wife (“if you want to live the high life, become an ugly man’s wife”), and “To the Other Woman.” There’s a stunning duet with Lewis on “Count the Days.”
Swamp’s partnership with Olson led to the film project, “Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted,” a sort of documentary about what his daughter, Jeri, a neurologist calls “a bachelor pad for aging musicians.” He’s joined by former Cameo member Larry “Moogstar” Clemons and the late blues legend Guitar Shorty, who died during filming.
Shorty, Swamp says, called him one day to say he’d broken up with his girlfriend in Texas and he needed a place to stay for a couple of weeks. He stayed for 18 years. Swamp never charged him rent.
Moogstar came through Wally Roker, a singer, A&R man, and dealmaker Swamp met along the way. Roker claimed Moogstar would produce a hit record for him. When they met, Swamp asked him how much he’d charge. $50,000 was the answer. “I cursed him out,” he says. Later, Swamp, who acquired several album catalogs over the years — and regrets he turned down Quinn Ivy’s offer to sell him “When a Man Loves a Woman” for $10,000 before the Michael Bolton hit — was looking for someone to upload them for a download company. Roker said he had a guy. It was Moogstar. He completed the job and stuck around.
“I found out that he could play about 10 fucking instruments, I mean, not just half ass,” Swamp says. “Then he had all these ideas how to make me sound like I had 40 pieces on stage when I didn’t have one. And I thought, yeah, this motherfucker here is worth it.”
The documentary, which will be shown at The Naro on May 28 with a Q&A featuring Swamp, started with Olson shooting a video for “Love, Lost and Auto-Tune.”
The man who now says to call him Swamp grew up Jerry Williams on Duke Street in Portsmouth, the child of a mother who sang and a stepfather who played guitar. Because there were only two small Black hotels in the area, they often hosted touring musicians. His first record went on the air in 1954 over WRAP in Norfolk. Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis were his heroes.
On his bicycle, he delivered for a pharmacy, earning $25 a week, but he soon also had a slot on a Friday night show where he had to bring his own sponsor. That paid another $25. ” I was making $50 a week,” he says. “And you know, with a lot of grown men wasn’t making that at that time.”
In the 1960s, he scored with a few singles including “I’m The Lover Man,” written for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, who never recorded it, and “Baby You’re My Everything,” later featured on the soundtrack to “Ted and Venus.”
He wrote with Bonds, who lived down the street in Portsmouth after his early 1960s-star turn, and Charlie Whitehead, another local who released albums under his own name and Raw Spitt.
But ultimately, Jerry Williams wasn’t working for him. He didn’t want to be compared to Jackie Wilson or Ben E. King. Collaborating with another writer, his songs explored a new path. “I was basically doing Frank Zappa with an R&B beat and groove and powerful horns,” he says. Swamp Dogg rose out of Jerry Williams. The other Dogg, Martha Stewart’s friend, had not been born.
He became a storyteller. He became political. He became outrageous. He became a critical darling. He didn’t sell records.
His 1970 Swamp Dogg debut, “Total Destruction to Your Mind,” and the follow-up, “Rat On,” which features Swamp riding a gigantic rat and is often cited as one of the worst album covers ever, became cult classics over time. The New Yorker wrote that “Total Destruction” was a “crazed, brilliant blast of protest soul that compared favorably with the best work of Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, and Funkadelic.”
A co-write with Bonds, “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe,” became a minor hit. He leaned into social commentary with the title cut. “God Bless America for What” created a stir. He joined Jane Fonda’s anti-Vietnam Free the Army tour. Politics, he says, hurt him. “It actually held me back,” he says. “The Black disc jockeys were afraid of Swamp Dogg.”
Now, nothing holds him back. No boundaries. He’s not done.
“I’ve asked the Lord for 104,” he says. “If you could just let me hang until I’m 104 and I got my mental faculties and shit, and don’t walk too slow, I can get it done. Lord, you know me, you know it’s been cool.”
WANT TO GO?
Swamp Dogg
Presented by Virginia Arts Festival
Documentary Film and Q&A, May 28, The Naro Expanded Cinema
Concert, May 29, Perry Pavilion
