The tragic life and death of Larry Williams: counterculture’s favourite forgotten 1950s star
If your music was covered by the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Little Richard, you’d think that would put you well on your way to being a star in your own right, and a household name to boot.
Having written and performed songs such as ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’, ‘Bony Moronie’, and ‘Short Fat Fannie’, there were plenty of electrifying tracks in his repertoire that many other rock and roll pioneers would have dreamt of producing, and the fact that he was capable of doing it all himself put him a cut above many of his peers, who were leaning on the talents of others in order to come up with their hits. The trouble is, there were plenty more things going on in the life of Larry Williams that meant he was destined never to hit the big time, despite being adored by many of his peers as an icon.
For all of his talents, Williams had his demons and was unfortunately sucked into a world of drug abuse and violent behaviour, all of which contributed to his gradual downfall and spiralling out of control. His early successes in the 1950s were largely forgotten about 20 years later as a result of him not having protected himself from these darker corners of society, and becoming engulfed in this lifestyle of substance abuse would eventually take over his life.
He’d been close friends with Little Richard up until this point, but in 1977, when Williams held his fellow star at gunpoint over an unpaid drug debt, their relationship collapsed, with Richard taking this as a cue to leave behind his own life of drug abuse and become a reformed Christian. Similarly, his relationship with his wife, Ina Marie, was a strenuous one, with the couple eventually becoming estranged from one another as a result of his misdeeds.
Williams could have been a sensation if it wasn’t for these poor judgments, but it’s fair to say that the signs had always been there. His descent into addiction had already begun in the late 1950s after his run of four chart hits, when he was arrested and jailed for three years in 1959 for the illegal possession of drugs and firearms, which led to him ultimately being dropped by Speciality Records and struggling to find any stability upon his return to the music industry following his release.
During this period, having a three-year exodus from releasing was only ever going to do long-term damage to somebody’s career, due to the fast-paced nature and high demand placed on popular recording artists to continually release music and play shows. Returning to music in the mid-1960s, after having served his sentence, he chose to change his approach to something more closely aligned with funk music, but it was always going to be a case of playing catch-up with all of his contemporaries who had shot ahead of him during the interim, plus trying to win back audiences after a conviction was always going to be working against him.
It wasn’t as though his releases from his return were below his previous standards either, and those in the know would be able to tell you that his 1960s output showed just how much of a true trailblazer he was in everything he attempted. With some cult success in the northern soul scene during the latter part of this decade, and his work as a producer and musical director alongside Little Richard helping give him some of his greatest successes of the ‘60s, there were some positives to Williams’ post-prison career, but it frankly wasn’t enough to salvage a complete renaissance.
In January 1980, Williams was found dead at his home in Los Angeles, with a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head being the cause of death. Having allowed his life to be consumed by a world of drugs, violent crime, and, according to some sources, prostitution, he’d reached the point of no return, and although some speculate that his passing could have been a murder case that was cleverly made to look as though he’d pulled the trigger himself, the levels of despair that Williams had been dragged down to were at a point where his career was beyond rescue.
Despite having allowed his career to reach this low, his artistry was clearly still respected, albeit in some rather unconventional ways. Following his death, drummer Martin Albritton of the Bobby ‘Blue’ Band decided to proclaim that he was, in fact, Larry Williams, had written all of his biggest hits, and was touring the country under this thin disguise. It wasn’t until he was confronted by Etta James, who knew the real Williams, and was on the receiving end of demands from the deceased singer’s family, that he stopped billing himself by this name and gave up the ruse.
Williams’ songs were arguably just as important to the history and shaping of rock and roll as many of his contemporaries, with Little Richard being a prime example of someone he may have had the potential to be a suitable rival to. However, such is the tragedy of his life, the lack of recognition that he gets in modern times is indicative of just how far his potential failed to reach the dizzying heights that were predicted of him.
