About a month ago I tweeted out a great youtube video that I found of Willie Dixon singing “The Seventh Son”. As I watched I noticed Willie Dixon strutting and smiling as he sang those word: “I’m the one, yeah I’m the one …” and I thought to myself he’s right he was the one and he knew it too. Somehow modest, in my opinion, here he is larger than life in that bright pink jacket singing The Seventh Son’s great line “I’m the one” and smirking.
Yes he was the one alright! He’s the one who took Chicago Blues and so many performers with him to the world. Willie Dixon may not be as commonly known as say Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf or Little Walter but Willie did write over 90 blues tunes and was recorded by so many greats. Check this table I made from a quick analysis with the data from Wikipedia’s page on Willie Dixon.
| Artist | # of Willie Dixon Songs Artist Recorded |
|---|---|
| Muddy Waters | 19 |
| Howlin’ Wolf | 14 |
| Little Walter | 12 |
| Grateful Dead | 9 |
| Buddy Guy | 7 |
| The Rolling Stones | 5 |
| Eric Clapton | 5 |
| Bo Diddley | 5 |
| Stevie Ray Vaughan | 4 |
| Koko Taylor | 4 |
| George Thorogood | 4 |
| Canned Heat | 4 |
| The Doors | 4 |
| The Yardbirds | 4 |
| Otis Rush | 3 |
| Sonny Boy Williamson | 3 |
Willie Dixon was an incredible talent and his work still resonates in the works of rock songs past and present. I’m quite certain that Willie Dixon songs are among the most recorded blues songs out there. I have a database of 140,000+ blues CDs. Now there may be duplicates and non-blues albums in there but that’s some raw data I have. Now searching through it here are the most recorded Willie Dixon songs.
| Song Title | # of times title appears in CD Database* |
|---|---|
| Hoochie Coochie Man | 984 |
| I’m Ready | 671 |
| I Just Want To Make Love To You | 654 |
| Spoonful | 587 |
| Little Red Rooster | 499 |
| Bring It On Home | 462 |
| Wang Dang Doodle | 398 |
| Same Thing | 371 |
| Close to You | 369 |
* Theoretically this suggests the song appears on this many cds. I need to stress the database is not validated, may contain duplicates and other songs of the same title would have been counted. Still these types of numbers do not occur when I search for other song titles.
Willie himself was a bass player as well. Here is one final clip showing another side of Willie Dixon for all the Jazz fans out there.
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