The seeds of Music Maker were planted in 1989, even though our Foundation didn’t take its current shape until five years later. I was still in my last semester of study for my master’s degree in folklore at the University of North Carolina when I was sent to document the life of James “Guitar Slim” Stephens, a wonderful old blues guitarist and pianist. Within a year after I first met him, cancer had taken hold in his body, and he was on his deathbed. And when I visited him there, he told me I could not finish my education in the blues until I could find a man named Guitar Gabriel.

Finding the man in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, proved to be no straightforward task, but eventually I did, and we became friends. And Gabe told me from the beginning something he insisted I understand and should never forget.

Gabe told me that blues will never die, because it was a spirit. He told me it was a living representation of something essential to all African American people, the insatiable desire to overcome.

Music Maker has now spent more than a quarter-century trying to document the unsung heroes of the blues from all over the South, but it’s always been more important to us to attend to the players who are still with us, to do what we can to keep that flame Gabe told me about alive and burning.

Jontavious Willis

I remember Gabe’s lesson to me every time I hear the music of a 24-year-old player named Jontavious Willis. Jontavious was born 71 years after Gabe came to Earth, but in him I find reassurance that the spirit of the blues, one that goes back more than 150 years into American history, is in no danger of fading away.

Jontavious grew up in the church in Greenville, Georgia, watching a man named Robert Parks bring down the spirit of the Lord through his guitar every Sunday, and the instrument always entranced Jontavious. He began to teach himself on Christmas Eve of 2010, when he got a guitar as a gift. For the first five years of his playing, he had no teachers.

“I would say I was pretty much self-taught from 2010 on up to 2015,” Jontavious told us in a recent conversation. “Everything I had learned to that point was just what I had taught myself.” He watched tutorials on YouTube, he said, but “I couldn’t ever understand what they were talking about, but I just knew. I just went out into it, just going into it, just diving right in. Didn’t know any of the technicalities and stuff. I just taught myself.”

Then, in the summer of 2015, Music Maker got a call from Jontavious. He wanted to drive the six hours from Greenville to Hillsborough, North Carolina, our headquarters, and come see us. By that time, the spirit of the blues had consumed the 19-year-old Jontavious completely. And he was hungry to meet some of the greats.

“B.B. King had died in May of 2015,” Jontavious said. “I knew I wanted to meet Otis Rush, I was wanting to meet Buddy Guy, and I had wanted to meet B.B. King. Not necessarily because I was crazy about their style. I was just interested in their influences and how they started. I wanted to hear what they were listening to when they were younger and all that. That’s the kind of stuff I’m really crazy about, just the whole process of everything. I reached out to different people. I was just hitting up everybody I knew. I ended up hitting Music Maker, and they told me to come up there. I went up there with my mom and my aunt and my grandmother.”

Whenever a young person shows up at Music Maker with interest in what we do, we always roll out the red carpet. But when Jontavious sat down to play for us, we were blown away. We sent Jontavious home with a box full of books and CDs. But more importantly, we sent two of our staffers to take Jontavious to visit two of our partner artists, the late Boo Hanks and the now-retired John Dee Holeman.

It was Jontavious’ first chance to sit at the feet of his predecessors and learn. He had two rather different experiences, because throughout his entire self-taught experience on the guitar, he had played in open tunings. He hadn’t yet learned how to play in standard tuning. That was fine with Boo, but not so much with John Dee.

With Boo, Jontavious said, “It was cool. I had seen him on YouTube and stuff. Just to hear him play some of the older songs I knew and liked, it was great. He played some Blind Lemon songs and some Blind Boy Fuller stuff and some of the other popular songs, even Josh White. I would show him the way I played a song and he was showing me the way he played. He said, ‘Well, that’s all right.’ He said, ‘You still sound good.’ He said, ‘You got your own style.’ He said, ‘I like it.” That’s all I needed.”

With John Dee, though, Jontavious said, “It was a different story.” Holeman told Jontavious, “You need to find your song.” John Dee heard what Jontavious was missing in his playing, and he immediately went back to work, learning how to play better in standard tuning, learning the alternating bass lines that are central to the Piedmont blues Holeman plays.

“Luckily, I did see Mr. John Dee again,” Jontavious said. “When I started playing, he paid attention to me way more than he did when I came the first time.”

Jontavious had learned some lessons. “Now,” he said, “every set that I have, I play a song I got from Mr. John Dee, then I play a song I interpret from Mr. Boo Hanks. They have influenced me more than they would ever know.” His every-set tribute to Boo Hanks is “She Might Be Your Woman,” seen in the video below.

Jontavious was barely into his 20s when Music Maker Advisory Board member Taj Mahal took him under his wing, and now Keb’ Mo’ is a major mentor to Jontavious. Both men saw the spirit of the blues in him and knew he would carry the torch. And he’s taken it upon himself to ensure that he continues reaching backward to older blues players — and to pass the torch to younger ones.

In collaboration with LaGrange, Georgia, photographer and filmmaker Henry Jacobs, Jontavious created the Fall Line Blues Project to document aging musicians in the Fall Line regions of Georgia and Alabama. The result is a series of fascinating short documentaries featuring the likes of the late Henry “Gip” Gipson, the iconic bluesman and owner of Gip’s Place, a legendary juke joint in Bessemer, Alabama. Subsequent films have featured Horace Combs of Greenville, Georgia, Eddie Hinton of Pearson, Georgia, and Albert White of Atlanta.

Looking forward, Jontavious assembled a virtual group of seven young blues players after the pandemic hit, “and we started a whole bunch of stuff,” Jontavious said. The group ranges in age from 29-year-old Marquise Knox down to the 19-year-old Sean McDonald (seen playing with Jontavious in the video below). Jontavious spreads their work via social media and keeps uncovering young Black players who want to become part of the tradition.

“A guy commented and said, ‘Hey, Mr. Willis, I love your music. I’m from Baxley, Georgia.’ Young Black dude. As soon as I seen it, I loved his comment and he messaged me, and we started talking. When I started talking to him he was just playing harmonica. Then I told him, I said, ‘Now, you can make money playing harmonica but you’ll make more money if you play guitar, because people ain’t looking for just one harmonica player. You got to play something else.’

“Yeah, they’re here,” Jontavious continued. “It’s a lot of more of them than there’s ever been. I know a lot of them.”

Just like Guitar Gabriel told me all those years ago, the blues is a spirit that will never die. Seeing Jontavious Willis and the group of players he keeps assembling around him makes it impossible to believe the lie that the blues is a dying art form, that young people no longer have an interest in it. The fact is they do. They are keeping the spirit alive. And in these perilous times, that’s soul-saving news.

— Tim Duffy

Jontavious, then 19 years old, plays with the late Boo Hanks in 2015.