Ben Wiley Payton born 5 January 1948

Ben Wiley Payton (5 January 1948 - 4 December 2020) was a Mississippi bluesman who became an important guitar player and singer on the acoustic blues scene.    

Ben Wiley Payton was born in Coila (pronounced co-why-la), Mississippi, a small community in the hill country of Carroll County, just east of the Mississippi Delta.  The middle of five children, Payton worked in cotton fields when he was not in school. His father was a gravel truck driver and was killed in a truck explosion in 1954, just before Payton’s 6th birthday. Following his father’s death, the family settled in the Delta town of Itta Bena, where his mother worked as a cook in both local restaurants and private homes. 

Payton’s early musical influences include his pianist grandmother, Mabel Johnson, and his uncle Wiley, who played guitar and sang in gospel quartets. Payton’s mother and father also played guitar casually at family gatherings, and he credits the narrative style of his performance style to his mother’s storytelling skills. Payton was given a toy guitar as a young boy living in the Delta, but it was not until his family moved to Chicago in April 1964 that he became immersed in music. 

At 17 he began working as a bassist and backup vocalist in a soul band, which practiced on the porches of their homes in the south side of Chicago, in the neighborhood of 45th and Michigan. After the band was fired from a gig, Payton committed himself to learning to play guitar in a skillful manner. He began taking private guitar lessons with retired DuSable High School music instructor John House, and later continued to school himself through instructional books and practice. 

             Here’s “Back With My Baby Again” from above album.

                                     

Payton was in a variety bands throughout the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, playing contemporary soul music in small clubs and at private parties.  He worked regularly with groups including Bobby Rush and Joe Evans and the Supersonics, and as a member of house bands backed many prominent artists at clubs including Peyton Place.  During this time Payton began to seriously study sounds and chords, and ultimately found his musical direction during a seven-month long stay in Tangier, Morocco in 1970, where he performed in a review featuring famed jazz pianist Randy Weston. 

Payton recalls that when he returned to the Chicago deejays were taking over he club scene, but he nevertheless found work playing with groups including the Wolf Gang, the late Howlin’ Wolf’s backing band, replacing an ill Hubert Sumlin. In 1977 Payton became interested in acoustic blues music after hearing Robert Johnson recordings for the first time. 

Around this time he married and started a family, and although he stopped performing in clubs he continued to play guitar and sing at home and served as Minister of Music at the New Mount Vernon MB Church.  Through listening to public radio programs Payton explored various musical genres, including blues, and continued to study the sounds and styles he had been exposed to in Morocco. 

In 2002 Payton returned to music and his home state of Mississippi. Over the past decade, he had developed a distinctive guitar style that nods to pre-War War II blues style while displaying an innovative and artistic technique all his own. His 2006 debut album, “Diggin’ Up Old Country Blues,” exhibited his varied musical interests. In 2009 Payton played at the Chicago Blues Festival, but was diagnosed with colon cancer. Surgery soon followed and the respect he had gained among fellow musicians and blues fans was reflected in generous fund raisers to help cover his medical bills. He recovered successfully and in 2010 taught blues vocals at Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington and served as an artist in residence at the Berklee School of Music. He also toured England, performing at London’s blues festivals. 

Payton released another album, Caught Up In The Blues, in 2018 that updated his blues even more, incorporating some of the African influences that he picked up in Morocco on a couple of tracks. To find more gigs, Ben moved two more times, returning to Greenwood around 2015 and where he also resumed church preaching, and early 2020 to Clarksdale, Mississippi appearing as a speaker and panelist at several blues events.  But due to the Covid lockdowns and despite streaming videos, this project to be able to play more again could not succeed because he died there eleven months later on 4 December 2020.He was buried in Forest Park-Chicago, IL. 

(Edited from Mississippi Folklife, Living Blues Magazine, Jazz Hot & Blues Bytes)