“fever and fate:
the strange story of little willie john”

Publshed by The Village Voice

Buried in the middle of the October 19, 1964 edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, under a headline reading “Reality of Hell Confirmed,” a wire service story noted that the Vatican had approved a document reiterating the actual existence of hell as a place for the eternal punishment of the damned. A few pages later was the following terse article:

Dies of Stab Wound in Chest

A Seattle man died yesterday after he was stabbed in the chest and collapsed in a house at 918 23rd Ave. Police were questioning several persons who saw the man collapse.

Detectives at the scene said papers on the man identified him as Kendall Roundtree. Several persons were in the house when Roundtree collapsed, officers indicated.

Late last night, detectives said they had booked and were holding William Edward John, 26, of Los Angeles. Police said that John was reported to be a singer who goes under the name of “Little Willie John.” John had not made a statement, police said.

*   *   *

Little Willie John was born in Camden, Arkansas in 1937. There were six other children. Willie’s father, Mertis, eventually moved the family north to Detroit and the automobile assembly lines.

The Johns had a musical household. Willie’s mother, Lillian, played solid gospel piano. His sister, Mabel, was a fine singer who went on to become a member of Ray Charles’ Raelets for many years and who recorded several sides for the Stax label in the mid-‘60s. Even as a small boy, Willie was an eerily precocious singer who could focus his gift like a cool, seasoned performer. His voice was a bred-in-the-bone treasure that was startlingly powerful, elastic, and full of emotion.

It was marketable, too. By the time he was 11, Wilie had graduated from slipping out of his bedroom window to sing on streetcorners to a regular gig at Detroit’s Book-Cadillac Hotel. Three years later, he was occasionally fronting the Count Basie Orchestra and appearing regularly in Detroit with Paul Williams’ big band. On the advice of Dizzy Gillespie, Mertis quit his spot on the night shift at the Dodge plant to manage his son’s career.

In 1951, bandleader Johnny Otis attended an amateur show at Detroit’s Paradise Theater in the guise of a talent scout for King Records, a Cincinnati-based label hungry for rhythm and blues talent. Otis sent King owner Syd Nathan glowing accounts of the performance of three young contestants who appeared that night—Hank Ballard, Jackie Wilson, and Willie John. Nathan passed over John and Wilson and signed Hank Ballard. Four years later, after watching Ballard chart with “Work With Me Annie,” “Sexy Ways,” and “Annie Had a Baby,” Willie John appeared unannounced at the King offices to rectify the affront. He auditioned on the spot and left with a recording contract. Before 1955 was out John and Nathan had themselves two huge hits with a catchy shuffle entitled “All Around the World” and its even more successful follow-up, “Need Your Love So Bad.” Now dubbed “Little” Willie John and a bona fide star, John was all of 17.

For months the next year, a voice heaped high with hurt and riding a sparse musical bed of finger snaps and ominous tom-tom rolls was all over the R&B charts. Willie John’s recording of “Fever” was more than just a hit record. “Fever” will beat what any dictionary tells you about soul,” James Brown once confided. Peggy Lee’s cloned version of the tune was one of the biggest hits of the decade.

For the next five years, the hits piled up for Willie John—14 Top-10 singles. Several of these, including “All Around the World” and “Heartbreak (It’s Hurting Me)” were irresistibly sassy blues shuffles, but Willie Johnm seemed to save something extra for his ballad performances. On unhurried masterpieces like “Talk to Me” and “A Cottage for Sale,” John’s voice, with its seemingly unlimited range, offered the listener a guided tour of the outer limits of soulfulness. As a singer, he had it all: an awesome range, relentlessly hip phrasing, the ability to grab hold of an unadorned melody and take it to a stunning territory all his own, and—the trademark of all great rhythm and blues vocalists—an overriding tone of bluesy regret. From 1955 o 1960, Little Willie John was in the emerging soul front line along with Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson, B.B. King, Clyde McPhatter, Sam Cooke, and Bobby Bland.

In the flesh, Little Willie John went for a decidedly cool presence. Spurning the sharkskin suits and the churchy gyrations that were standard for stars of the chitlin circuit, John came across as a kind of black Bing Crosby, even down to the pipe. In his homburgs and tailored, wide-shouldered suits, he looked like a boy who had just stepped out of his father’s clothes closet. But with that voice, Willie John could have performed in burlap. When the lights went down, he would walk calmly to center stage, lay one hand on the mike, and look the audience squarely in its collective eye. Then his head would roll back dreamily and a huge, aching sound would fill the hall.

In the 1950s, Harlem’s Apollo Theater was the Holy Grail for performers. Willie John was hardly intimidated by his first booking at the fabled showcase. Godon “Doc” Anderson, the Apollo’s house photographer for nearly 30 years, remembers Willie John causing a near riot during his debut rehearsal there. “Willie spotted Frank Schiffman, the owner—he had never met him before—and he asked him, ‘How you doin’, Jew boy.’ Oh, Mr. Schiffman, he got angry. His face got red and he chased Willie all through the theater. He grabbed him—he was going to kill that guy. When he collared him, Little Willie said, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean any offense, because I’m a Jew myself.’ He said he had converted to Judaism. I don’t know if he was lyin’ or what. But Mr. Schiffman was ready to take him off the bill.”

Once safely onstage, Willie John began to work the magic that would soon make him one of the most popular performers at the Apollo. Frank Schiffman’s son Bobby, who during his 31-year stint as the Apollo’s manager, was privileged to see some of the most transcendent performances in the history of popular music, states flatly in Showtime at the Apollo. “Willie John was the best male singer I ever heard. He used to send chills up and down my spine, and I never met a singer who had that kind of emotion and feeling in his songs. Willie would appear at the theater and I would stand in the wings and watch every show. He was incredible.” Another backstage viewer was a young screamer from Macon, Georgia, named James Brown who often opened shows for Willie during that period. The two became close, and John took an active interest in Brown’s nascent career.

John married an Apollo showgirl and the couple had two children. At first he took his family on the road with him, but after a time they stayed behind in a home he had bought for them in Miami. Away from them, Willie’s behavior began to disintegrate.

“Willie was a very active type person,” a friend told writer Ted Fox. “If he comes inside the place, you’re going to know he’s there. Everybody from the front desk on upwould know that Willie was in the house. He had that kind of charisma. Things happened at a young age for him, and he tried to handle things, but he wasn’t ready. That’s why he got into difficult scrapes. He was a riot, a constant riot all day long.”

“He liked to dress in women’s clothes,” claimed Doc Anderson. “On the last show he would come out onstage like that and the audience would break up. I thought it was just for comedy, but sometimes I wondered, you know. I figured he had practiced a lot, because he wore those high heels and he didn’t stumble or anything. He seemed quite comfortable in them.”

“Willie John was a ter4rible money handler,” according to Bobby Schiffman. “He would squander his money allover the world. He was borrowing from people, especially the people he did business with.”

If cash flow had been his only problem, Willie John might have come out on the other side a wiser man. But after six years, the hits dried up and Willie John suffered. In 1961 he was busted for possession of marijuana in North Carolina. John started drinking heavily, which made the epileptic seizures he had suffered from since childhood more frequent and helped to bring on a diabetic condition. He started carrying a gun.

Friends tried to cool John’s spiraling wildness, but in August of 1964 he was charged with assault after going after a man with a broken bottle in Miami. John jumped bail and headed for Los Angeles, where he began a series of one-nighters on the West Coast. Over the weekend of October 16 and 17, Willie John did six shows at a downtown Seattle nightclub called the Magic Inn.

After John finished his last show at the Magic Inn at 1:30 on a Sunday morning, he and Eddie Moore, his chauffeur/valet, drove to Birdland, a popular black-and-tan nightspot at 23rd and Madison and the spawning ground of such talents as Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, and Ernestine Anderson. There John had a few drinks and jumped onstage to sing a few tunes before he and Moore moved on to a place called the South End Improvement Club, where they met two women, Sylvia Banks and Kay Morgan. The foursome went to a nearby house for a few hours. When they left, a man named Kendall Roundtree was along for the ride.

Roundtree was a big man—six foot two and over 200 pounds. A native of North Carolina, he liked to drink, and when he was drunk he liked to fight. His arrest record was the mark of a man who regularly wore out his welcome. A long litany of drunk and disorderly charges punctuated by armed robbery, auto theft, and assault charges, it covered eight states. February of 1964 found Roundtree in jail in Chicago for vagrancy; in June of that year, he was serving 10 days in a Bakersfield, California, lockup for public drunkenness. By October he had surfaced in Seattle. A straightlaced city of tidy neighborhoods, the city by Puget Sound had begun to shed its provincial image two years earlier  by hosting a world’s fair that had left it with a new landscape and a sense of boom time. Seattle was on an upswing, and if Kendall Roundtree was hoping to cash in on it, reality found him soon after his arrival in the Jet City. He began working as a trashman on a Northern Pacific Railroad work gang and sleeping at the Union Gospel Mission on the city’s waterfront.

Roundtree, John, Moore, Banks, and Morgan drove to a house on 23rd Avenue owned by a man named Theodore Roosevelt Richardson. Richardson had installed locks and soundproofing in the upstairs rooms and a makeshift bar in the back of the house and had built up a thriving business offering the place as a combination whorehouse and after-hours speakeasy. Liquor was illegal in Seattle on the Sabbath, so Sunday was Richardson’s biggest day of the week. There were already a half a dozen people in the house when John arrived in the early afternoon.

By 3:30 most of Richardson’s customers were in the bar near the kitchen. Roundtree had downed four or fivce drinks and was in a rancorous argument with a local black attorney named Jim McIver about the civil rights movement. McIver’s endorsement of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent methods had enraged Roundtree. He became so hostile that McIver broke off the conversation, grabbed his drink moved to another table.

Sylvia Banks left her barstool to go to the bathroom, and Roundtree sat down in her place. When she returned moments later, Willie John turned to Roundtree.

“Why don’t you get up and give the lady a seat?” he said.

“If you want me up, put me up,” muttered Roundtree, who stood up and took off his sweater. He turned to face the much smaller singer and punched him once, hard in the mouth.

“He hit me in the mouth!” John shouted, backpedaling into the kitchen. “I make my living singing and he punched me in the mouth!”

Roundtree lunged toward him. John grabbed a small, bone-handled paring knife off a drainboard. Richardson, McIver, and a man named K. P. Smith grabbed Roundtree and stalled him upright in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Willie John leaped up from behind them and with a quick, overhand motion swung the knife up and over, against Roundtree’s chest.

Roundtree’s handlers managed to turn him around and propel him through the living room toward the front door. But before they reached it, their wounded cargo slid to the floor, unconscious, down between the sofa and the wall.

K. P. Smith walked back to the kitchen. “That man was cut,” Sylvia Banks told him. Spotting the paring knife, he picked it up and went out into the back yard. Pulling back a bush near the fence, he knelt down and plunged the blade up to its handle in the soft dirt.

Eddie Moore and John went into a bathroom off the bar to wash John’s face. “He copped a Sunday on me,” the singer complained. He then added Moore to check on Roundtree.

When Moore walked into the living room, T. R. Richardson was trying to lift his 200-pound problem onto a sofa. Roundtree was not moving, but he was still able to walk.

“No, leave me be. Leave me here,” muttered Roundtree. Then he lost consciousness.

T. R. Richardson thought that the man on the floor was more drunk than hurt. He looked Roundtree over and noticed for the first time slight traces of blood on the man’s chest and carefully wiped them away with a towel.

About this time, a young accountant named Eleanor McCaffrey arrived at Richardson’s house expecting to buy some liquor. She saw a large man lying on the floor; a woman sitting nearby, crying; and several men who were having an intense discussion about how to deal with the situation without calling the police. Informed by those present that none of this was any of her business, McCaffrey quickly strode through the house, went out the back door into the yard, and vaulted the fence like a hurdler.

It was now about an hour after Roundtree had collapsed. T. R. Richardson knelt down once again to check on him. He slapped Roundtree’s face. He borrowed Kay Morgan’s makeup mirror and held it up to Roundtree’s nose. There was no sign of breathing.

Jim McIver got on the phone and began calling doctors. The seventh physician he talked to urged him to do the obvious and call for an ambulance, which McIver finally did.

When the medics arrive, they found Roundtree lying just inside the front door. They were told that the victim had shown up in a taxi just minutes before and had suddenly collapsed, most likely from a heart attack., The attendants loaded Roundtree onto a stretcher. As medic David Hiklan was covering him with a blanket, he noticed some small bloodstains on the man’s chest. He unbuttoned Roundtree’s shirt and saw what looked like a stab wound.

“This changes things,” he said. “I better call the police.” While he phoned, his partner went through Roundtree’s pockets, which yielded a wallet with a social security card and a Northern Pacific Railroad pay stub.

Two police officers arrived to hear basically the same story the ambulance drivers had been told. The seven people present were all taken in for questioning.

At police headquarters in downtown Seattle, Smith, McIver, and Morgan all denied seeing the stabbing. Smith did admit hiding the knife, which officers later found in Richardson’s back yard.

Willi John did not give a full statement, but he did tell police that he had had a severe epileptic attack shortly after arriving at the house on 23rd and could remember nothing after that. He claimed that he had also drunk seven or eight cognacs in the last 12 hours and that he was taking phenobarbital for his epilepsy.

But when it was Eddie Moore’s turn to talk to the police, he told a different story. John had not had an epileptic seizure that day. He was sure of this because in the four months he had spent with the singer he had witnessed three such attacks. “He always loses control of himself,” Moore claimed. “He falls down, passes out, shakes, and froths at the mouth. He knows when one is coming—he doesn’t feel well beforehand. He takes a pill every four hours and one phenobarbital a day. Willie was not drunk when this happened. He was tired.”

Moore stated that he had seen the singer stab Roundtree. T. R. Richardson told detectives the same thing, and Sylvia Banks signed a statement saying, “The next thing I saw was John with a knife in his hand and he stuck the knife in the chest of the man he had been arguing with.”

Pathologist Gayle Wilson performed an autopsy on Roundtree the next morning and found him an impressive physical specimen, even as a corpse. “Well developed and very muscular….A pale blue ‘Jesus Saves’ tattoo on right arm,” he noted in his report. Wilson concluded that the knife had entered near the collarbone after a downward thrust, penetrating the lung and slightly puncturing the aorta. A vast quantity of blood was found in the chest cavity. Roundtree had bled to death internally, probably within 15 minutes after the stabbing.

On Monday afternoon formal murder charges were filed against Little Willie John. A few days later, the singer entered a plea of not guilty, posted a $10,000 bond, and left Seattle.

Newspapers around the country had carried the story of Willie John’s arrest, and it struck a chord with someone in Dowagiac, Michigan. An envelope mailed from there and addressed to “Detective Bureau/Seattle, Wash.” found its way to Seattle police headquarters in November. It contained this letter, written in pencil:

Dear Sir:

I am Writing this letter in Witch I May be of help to little Willie John. I am Pretty Near Blind. I was a sweetheart of this Kendall Roundtree in Witch I was and still is in love with. But tell little Willie to hold his head up, that he did not do no wrong if you can get in touch with little Willie tell him to contact me I am for him all the way throw and may be a lot of help to him Please for god sake dont hurt little Willie Because What happen to Roundtree he Brought it on his self. I Woulden know the kid if I would see him. But I cant give you a lot of details PS tell little Willie to contact me.and I may be all the help he needs.

Yours Very Truely

Mrs. Cecil M. Wilson

If I was a judge I’d send her to the chair
I’d sit right down beside her and never leave her here
—Heartbreak (It’s Hurting Me)

When Willie John appeared in court on January 12, 1965, to face a charge of second-degree murder, he was in the company of attorney Bill Lanning. Lanning occasionally defended musician clients who were steered his way by a relative who was an officer of the Seattle local of the musician’s union. (Such cases were rarely profitable. When Lanning was working to free Stan Getz after the saxophone star had been arresting for robbing a Seattle liquor store in the early 1950’s, he made sure he had Getz’ tenor in case he had any trouble collecting his fee. When Getz left for California immediately after his release, Lanning discovered that the horn had been rented and that he had been stuck with the bill.)

Lanning had his work cut out for him. Three witnesses had fingered his client as Roundtree’s killer. John was out of his element in the Pacific Northwest; empaneling a jury of John’s peers was an impossibility in a solidly middle-class stronghold of Scandinavian mores like Seattle. Then there was the client himself. Bill Lanning’s version of Little Willie John more than stretches belief: a man who was fluent in seven languages, usually spoke in a genteel British accent, sported cowboy boots encrusted with rubies and emeralds, and claimed his flashy gold bracelet was a memento from a recent tryst with Ava Gardner in Spain.

John’s trial took only three days. The prosecution put Gayle Wilson on the stand to testify that the nature of Roundtree’s wound was consistent with a knife being wielded by someone standing in front of the victim. Lanning, who tried to argue that the blow could have come from behind, at one point handed Wilson a pen. Parting his own jacket, the frustrated defense attorney asked the pathologist to draw the location of the wound on his white shirt.

“You mean you want me to draw in ink on your shirt?” asked the perplexed Wilson.

“Go ahead,” said Lanning, and the physician sketched the location of the heart, the aorta, and the knife wound on his shirt. Despite his grandstanding, Lanning failed to shake Wilson’s testimony.

After Wilson left the stand, the prosecution’s case began to soften. T. R. Richardson and Eddie Moore both contradicted their earlier statements and denied in court that they had ever seen John stab Roundtree. Jim McIver, the next witness, gave the trial’s most memorable testimony. Lanning needed an alternative murderer, and McIver was the best candidate. Lanning pressed McIver with questions about the argument he had with Roundtree on the afternoon of the murder and about his conflicting statements to police. Changing his story several times under Lanning’s cross examination, McIver finally contended that he had been asleep during most of the incident. It was a dubious performance. “He was really sweating,” contends prosecutor Art Swanson. “I remember thinking what a laying son of a bitch he was,” recalls juror Alfred Rousseau.

The prosecution’s case eroded still further when Kay Morgan testified that she had seen no knife that day. Rousseau remembers the judge tittering during Morgan’s testimony. She was followed by Sylvia Banks, who became evasive on the stand and refused to say that she had actually seen John stab anyone. Art Swanson had carefully repped his witnesses, and during his cross-examination he tried to salvage some of the sting he had expected from Banks’s testimony.

“She really liked Willie. She was changing her story all over the place. I had to scream and holler at her on the stand,” recalls Swanson.

Swanson managed to get in enough references to Banks’s previous statements to police to clue the jury that she had changed her story. Under Swanson’s relentless probing, she also admitted that John had recently told her that she and her children would be harmed if she named him as Roundtree’s killer. The prosecution rested.

Lanning had planned to put John on the stand the next day. That morning, the lawyer watched as his client stumbled into the courtroom at the center of a large retinue.

“They were all dead drunk,” Lanning remembers. “I think they had partied all night. I had to do something. I know the judge had a son who had epilepsy. I saw Little Willie down in the back of the courtroom and went to talk with the judge. I told him, ‘I’ve got Willie John out there, and he looks drunk to me, but he claims he’s had an epileptic attack.’ The judge looked at me and said, ‘You just don’t understand epilepsy, Bill. After an attack, these people often seem drunk.’” On the judge’s advice, Lanning took John to a doctor on Capitol Hill who signed a note asking that the singer be excused from testifying that day. “He didn’t say anything about Willie stinking of booze,” Lanning laughingly recalls.

On Monday, January 18, the man the Post-Intelligencer called “a $100,000-a-year Negro rock and roll singer took the stand in his own defense.

Willie John never sported his gold bracelets or his bejeweled cowboy boots in the courtroom, but his natural cockiness never left him. He was supremely confident on the stand. Lanning began by asking his client to give his occupation. “Entertainer unlimited,” John shot back. John recounted how he and his friends had been invited to T. R. Richardson’s house for “Sunday dinner.” He told how Roundtree had struck him in the mouth, breaking a tooth and drawing blood.

John denied stabbing anyone. After the fight, he had found a knife and had laid it on a table. He claimed that he had had an epileptic seizure the morning of the murder and that he couldn’t remember much of the events that followed.

Lanning had John briefly describe the highlights of his career for the jury: performances with Lionel Hampton, an overseas tour with Bob Hope, work on the television series Route 66, and the authorship of two million-selling songs. His accomplishments seem to have been lost on the middle-class Seattle jury. “I remember they said he was a rock and roll singer,” recalls one member of the panel. “And I remember wondering about his masculinity.”

At 2:55 that afternoon the jury received its instructions and retired to reach a verdict. According to the jury’s foreman, there was never any doubt during the deliberations that John had done the stabbing; an initial straw vote was 10 to two in favor of a guilty verdict.

“One of the women that voted for acquittal had sat behind me during the trial and snored through the whole thing,” recollected juror Rousseau. “The general feeling was that something was being covered up. Willie John was a little slick and overconfident. He thought he could take his way out of it. He acted like he earned his living talking smooth.”

Art Swanson remembers that “when the jury was out, Willie was laughing and joking with us and everybody else. It was the damnedest thing.” Swanson calls the trial “the one case I’ll never forget. It was a real fun case to work on. It was a real weird cast of characters. We hear rumors about lots of well-connected people—city officials, prominent attorneys and the like—who had been in that house that day, but we could never pin them down. [One of our witnesses] ended up in an asylum ‘unavailable for testimony’ when the trial got underway.

“I really learned to like Little Willie. The guy was obviously very talented. Usually, there’s a guy sitting across from you and you hate him and he hates you. And you have the power to put him in the hot seat. This wasn’t like that at all. Little Willie was very calm throughout the trial. He obviously didn’t feel that he was in jeopardy.”

“It was a real friendly trial,” contends Thomas Stang, another one of John’s prosecutors. “Willie offered to sell me a record once. I remember the day he called me ‘colored.’ ‘You’re the one that’s colored,’ he told me. ‘Look—you got yellow hair and blue eyes and white skin—I’m brown all over.’”

By 10:30 that evening jury members had agreed to reject the charge of second-degree murder because they felt that John had reacted to Roundtree’s initial attack. The 12 then returned to the courtroom to announce that they had found Willie John guilty of manslaughter with a deadly weapon.

Lanning remembers berating jurors after the verdict. “Willie John’s manner on the stand convicted him, without a doubt,” he still contends. “If he had just told the jury the way he told it to me, he never would have been convicted. He came off as an arrogant, smart-ass black kid. I never felt, however, that racism played a role in the verdict.”

“I wouldn’t say John’s testimony was that big a thing, really,” says Alfred Rousseau. “Lanning didn’t help him. He was an ambulance-chaser type.”

For I’ve had my taste of love, life and money
And I lost all three
If it’s gonna rain down misery
Why does it all have to fall on me?
--“Life, Love, and Money”:

John posted a $20,000 bond, left Seattle, and dropped out of sight. Lanning filed for a new trial, which was denied on March 2.

A group of black promoters from Indianapolis approached Lanning after the trial, and a benefit performance in that city by John was arranged. John was to receive $15,000 toward his defense fund. He never made the gig. “He had to change planes in Chicago and he must have gotten drunk or something,” says Lanning.

Lanning filed an appeal. He needed $1,500 to cover the costs, but he couldn’t find his client. He finally sent a plaintive letter to John in care of the Apollo Theater. “I realize that it is possible that your statements to the effect that you have adequate funds at your disposal may be just ‘big talk,’ and that you may in fact be without funds and have no way of obtaining them,” wrote Lanning. “If this is the case, now is the time to quit talking foolishness and come to Seattle, so that we may file an affidavit in Forma Pauperis.”

In early May, Willie John was finally tracked down by U.S. marshals, arrested, and returned to Seattle. “He didn’t have a dime,” says Lanning. The attorney arranged for a court hearing to plead that the singer was unable to afford the costs of his appeal. “I put him on the stand and what does he do but brag about how much money he had and how he owed the IRS $50,000,” Lanning claims. “The judge turned us down.”

A few days later, Lanning was notified by mail that he had been replaced as John’s counsel by another Seattle attorney. John had in fact given up on the system. There is no evidence that his appeal was pursued.

“It was just such a shame,” says Lanning. “I’m sure he would have won on appeal. Everybody in the house was drunk out of their gourds. If somebody had gotten help for Roundtree sooner he probably would’ve lived. I’m still not convinced that Willie did the stabbing. Jim McIver made a far better suspect as far as I was concerned. I never got a dime from Little Willie John. I even got stuck with his hotel bill. I should’ve pulled those cowboy boots right off him.”

“If you get into it so young, you don’t have a complete childhood,” John’s sister Mabel pointed out. “That’s what happened to Willie.”

On July 6, 1966—more than a year and a half after the verdict—Willie John was sentenced to eight to 20 years n prison, with a minimum sentence of seven and a half years, and transferred to the penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington.

Art Swanson has no doubt that Willie John did the stabbing, but adds that “it was really unjust in a way that Little Willie got so much time in jail, compared to the really heavy cases we had.”

Many of John’s show business friends tried to rally behind him. James Brown and Bobby Schiffman spearheaded an attempt to get him released.

St. Clair Pickney, James Brown’s long-time bandleader, remembers the last time he saw Little Willie John. “Me and James…went up to the penitentiary. He said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to get out of here.’ He had been sick and was riding in a wheelchair, and he’d say, ‘This wheelchair is my pleasure here.’ James would get kind of upset about Willie, and Willie would say, ‘Don’t ever let it worry you that way. ‘Cause I might not come out no way. If I get out, I get out. If I stay, I stay. Still gonna be the same man in or out of here.’”

On May 28, 1968, the Seattle Times ran the following article:

WALLA WALLA (AP)—A rock-n-roll and blues singer who helped write the popular song “Fever” died in his sleep Sunday at the Washington State penitentiary, authorities said today.

He was Willie John, 30, known in the entertainment world as Little Willie John. William Macklin, associate superintendent at the prison, said John was found dead with a mild case of pneumonia.

It was an old story, and many thought the worst. There have been persistent rumors that Willie John died after an operating meant to relieve pressure on is brain following a savage beating.

Bill Lanning didn’t believe the papers. “Somebody killed him over there. He was tough and arrogant. He didn’t like for anybody to be on equal footing with him.”

“When somebody is badly beaten, fluid often forms in the lungs,” notes Art Swanson grimly. “Pneumonia can be a handy diagnosis in those situations.” John’s death certificate states that he in fact died of a heart attack.

But the real mystery—and the real magic—was when Little Willie John would tilt his head back in controlled rapture and unleash a voice that would galvanize anyone within its huge range.

James Brown—who recorded a tribute album to John after his death—remembers that voice. As he told writer Gerri Hirshey: “Please, do not forget the man I was opening for in 1956, ’57. Little Willie John was a sould singer before anyone thought to call it that…The man left his mark. On my music, on lots of singers who understand how to seeng with feelin’… Willie John did not scream it. No. But you could hear it. To me it was very loud…I don’t understand why people miss Sam Cooke so, and not Little Willie John. I loved that man’s voice to death.”