Bill Steber Archive
Bill Steber has documented blues culture in Mississippi decades, chronicling the state’s musicians, juke joints, churches, river baptisms, traditional farming methods, folk traditions and other significant traditions that influenced the blues. Steber, a native of Centerville, TN, was a staff photojournalist for the Tennessean in Nashville from 1989-2004, winning dozens of regional and national awards shooting everything from national politics to New York runway fashion and the Super Bowl.
Since 2007, Steber has explored 21st-century American culture through the use of 19th century wet plate photography, including tintypes, ambrotypes and glass negatives. In addition to his photography, Steber makes music with The Jake Leg Stompers, the Hoodoo Men, The Jericho Road Show and The Stoop Down Rounders. On the 100th anniversary of the birth of B.B. King. Spring Fed Records and MTSUs Center for Popular Music celebrates modern blues culture and Bill’s incredible archive with a look at the story and music of Joe Cole. Visit Bill Steber's website for more photography, music, and stories.
Bill Steber on Joe Cole
By his own account, Joe Cole was not a famous man, nor did he ever want to be. He was a sharecropper and farm mechanic who lived in a Delta shack with no running water for 50 years in Bobo, MS. He had one hell of a life, filled with more blues authenticity and credibility than most players would ever hope - or want- to acquire.
I only heard Joe play three different songs in seven years, but his playing and singing possessed more beauty and subtlety than anyone else I ever heard in twelve years of traveling Mississippi’s back roads. The thing is, Joe didn’t even consider himself a musician. In the summer of 1995, I found Joe Cole living with his wife in a ramshackle house along a bayou in a flat expanse of cotton fields. I told him that I heard he was a great musician. “I haven’t played guitar in over 20 years,” said Joe with a gentle chuckle of humility. I stepped up onto the rickety porch as a cat scurried behind a large rusty metal drum of water—Joe’s only drinking water. He opened a screen door with so many patched places it had become abstract art, and turned on a bare overhead bulb that revealed piles of dirty clothes, empty antifreeze jugs, and a gleaming white hand-cranked washing machine.
He reached behind a couch and pulled out a cheap classical guitar strung up with steel strings. The masking-tape price tag of one-dollar from the yard sale where he bought it was still on the headstock. He walked out to the front porch and sat on an old dresser and began to tune the guitar. One of the strings had broken and he had repaired it by looping the two halves together and tying them
Joe’s powerful-looking hands seemed too big for his body, but demonstrated incredible sensitivity as he began playing a gentle rolling figure in the key of E that recalled the bounce and gait of Mississippi hill country music. My mind turned to R.L. Burnside, but Joe’s playing had a gentleness that stood in stark contrast to the driving sensuality and aggression of Burnside’s music
I was about to hear “Feather Bed” for the first time, a lost hill country classic that has haunted me ever since. After a standard intro in the key of E, Joe jumped to B and began singing in a beautiful voice that was equal parts confidence and tenderness, “If I hada listened to what my mother said…” Then his hand dropped back to A and he hung there with this insistent rhythm that pulled and tugged at the vocal, begging for resolution. It made my heart start speeding up.
“Says I’d been at home sleeping in a feather bed.” Then back to E with the original loping rhythm: a playful descending bass couplet that propelled the song forward, accented by an ascending couplet of high notes in steady time like a beautiful call and response. But instead of inhabiting the cadences of the church, this push and pull had the primal feel of something much more carnal, playful.
The song was beautiful, insistent, pleading, emotionally and rhythmically complex. The dichotomy of the lyrics was delivered in a voice that was childlike, vulnerable. It contained some of the most tender and simultaneously problematic lyrics I ever heard.To me “Feather Bed” seemed completely fresh and original and still does to this day, 30 years later. I’ve never found another recorded example of this song anywhere. It was unique to Joe, and I consider his performance of the song one of the best things I’ve discovered in over three decades of field research in Mississippi.
Over the years I visited Joe three or four times a year and we became good friends. He told me he was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1921, and thought that he was a first cousin to Nat King Cole, a fellow native of Montgomery four years Joe’s senior. When Joe was about two years old, his father, a preacher who married five times, left he and his older brother in the care of his stepmother (Joe never met or even saw a photo of his real mother). While the stepmother was temporarily away from the house, the jealous husband of a woman whose Joe’s father was seeing set the house on fire.
“Daddy said, when he come in sight of the house, he could see the blaze and he went to runnin’,” said Joe. “He said he jumped way up and caught and went up in a window. When he got in there I was just standing there like this looking up and the fire was falling in my face, it just startled me, see I was the baby. He caught me and went to put me out [the window] and this arm here, all the skin came off this arm and I just fell down on the ground, all the skin come off this arm here when he dropped me out the window.
“Now he liked to have lost his life in there trying to save the other boy. See, the other boy was dodging running up hiding from the fire, he said he had to come out and catch his wind 2 or 3 times, said ‘Well, I’m gonna go back in and get him this time and if I don’t come back, I’m gonna get him.’” All three survived the ordeal.
The family moved to Mississippi when his father got into some trouble in Alabama, placing Joe and his brother in Charleston, MS on the edge of the hills. Joe learned guitar at age 14 while going to rural juke houses from a guitarist named Josh Peelo. It was during this period that Joe picked up his signature hill country style. In 1942 he entered the army, serving four years in the Pacific theater. After moving back to Charleston after the war, Joe had to flee for his life after fighting a local white man.
“The mistake he made was he didn’t take his gang with him,” said Joe. “As soon as we got back there, I jumped him. He wanted to whoop me and I got the best of it. [laughing] I tell you…I stayed in the army around 5 years, fighting for the United States, see, and he was back here with his family at home. He was a white man. When I come out he was gonna whoop me with a headache stick and that was his ass. I wasn’t gonna stand that. You don’t blame me do you?
Joe had given up on music in 1939, but a fateful thing happened in 1953 that would bring him back to playing. Joe was on his way to Clarksdale with another couple on a Saturday night when they stopped into one of 3 juke houses on the place. “[Owner Joe Louis] had a fellow in there with a guitar and he didn’t know much what he was doing. I said, ‘I used to play a little bit’ so I grabbed the guitar and played one verse of Feather Bed. I played that down there and then the next night they [said] ‘Come play, come play’ I went on a playing, started playing. Sure did.
Joe became famous locally as the resident entertainment on the place in the fifties on the strength of “Feather Bed” alone, but he never took it seriously. “I seen some good days here. Drinkin’ that corn whiskey and runnin’ them women down them turn rows…[laughs] Shoot! Man, I used to have a good time here.”
Joe eventually retired from farm work. He did some gardening and took care of his wife who Joe said suffered from “mentilation.” Over the years Joe made extra money by acting as a rural taxi driver to local women in need of a ride up to Tunica to play the nickel slots.
After seven years of friendship, I last saw Joe in the Fall of 2001. His living conditions and health had deteriorated considerably, and when I went to see him a few months later he was gone. A man on the place said one of Joe’s daughters had come to take him to live with her. Joe’s eight kids lived all over the country and I didn’t know any of their names. I tried for a while, but eventually gave up on ever finding out what happened to him. Then in late February of 2005, I got a call from his youngest daughter, Lilli Simmons Dear of Memphis, who had gotten my name off the back of one of the photos I took of Joe he had on his wall. She told me he had died in St. Louis on February 22nd, one year to the day after the death of my own father.
I was saddened to hear of the death of my friend, but it also completed the circle for me. I found out that in his last years he was surrounded by family and had recovered from the isolation and depression that he had fallen into while living alone between the bayou and cotton fields of rural Bobo. Perhaps in the end, it was a lack of ambition for money and fame that made me respect Joe enough not to let the world know about him until now. Joe Cole lived the kind of life that originally spawned the creation of the blues. But to simply reduce the whole of his life to that kind of a stereotype is to deny him his humanity.
The fact may be that in the rural South there have been thousands of people with stories much like Joe’s, but he was still a unique, deeply feeling man of a singular talent and sensitivity that makes him worthy of recognition whether he sought it or not. Joe Cole very well may represent some idealized notion of authenticity, purity and beauty in the folk idiom, all I know is that he was my friend and that I miss him. (Photography by Bill Steber ©&℗ 2025.)
