I b'lieve she done lose her mind

Thursday music corner: Sonny Boy Williamson (1912-65) was a Mississippi-born blues harmonica player who began recording in 1951 and attained popular success in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly with his blues standard Help Me (1963), which is in turn based on Booker T & the MGs’ famous 1962 instrumental, Green Onions. Much about Williamson's background is murky, including his name and date of birth. Born Alex or Aleck Ford, he later appropriated the Sonny Boy Williamson name of another popular Chicago blues harp player (1914-48). At various times he claimed his year of birth ranged anywhere from 1897 to 1912, perhaps to stake an earlier claim to the older Williamson’s name. 

Touring Europe in the early 1960s Williamson fell in with the British blues explosion and recorded with both the Yardbirds and the Animals. He was also something of a gourmand; according to Led Zeppelin biographer Stephen Davis, ‘while in England Williamson set his hotel room on fire while trying to cook a rabbit in a coffee percolator’. Williamson died of a heart attack in Arkansas in 1965, aged 52. She’s Crazy appeared on a 1991 Williamson compilation album, Goin’ in Your Direction, and features marvellously circular reasoning in its final line, ‘She musta been crazy; if she hadn’t’a, she wouldn’t’a lose her mind’.

Sonny Boy Williamson – She’s Crazy