The record, produced by Poliça’s Ryan Olson and featuring collaborations with Justin Vernon, Jenny Lewis, John Prine and Sam Amidon, is the result of a leap of faith from Williams knowing he wanted to change things up, he surrendered creative control as an experiment of sorts. So that’s where that ended until here lately.” Then they chickened out at the last minute because they were afraid of signing a black country act. Other people liked it, and Mercury wanted it. And then one day I decided, ‘I think I’ll try it.’ So I went in the studio with it. I liked it. “I was cutting this other country act, and then he went crazy on me. “I had tried to do it several years ago, in the ’80s, and I wasn’t really cutting Swamp Dogg into it,” he says. Now the psychedelic soul man is reinventing himself yet again he’s been influenced by country music for as long as he can remember - he co-wrote “Don’t Take Her (She’s All I Got),” popularized by Johnny Paycheck in 1971 - but with his latest album, Sorry You Couldn’t Make It (out today), he’s finally able to fully embrace the sound he grew up with. In 1970, Swamp Dogg was born.Īnd then, decades later, in 2018, he was reborn with the adventurous Love, Loss and Auto-Tune, which recently enjoyed a bump in sales thanks to a high-profile mention in Hulu’s High Fidelity remake. Eventually, though, Williams, now 77, realized the other artists whose confidence he envied were just as scared as he was, and he was able to get over his reservations about performing (“Year after year, you learn what’s wrong with you, and you work on it,” he explains). “I used to go on stage, and not only was I hesitant, but I was afraid the whole time I was on there,” he tells InsideHook.
But before he adopted the Swamp Dogg persona, back when he was still performing as Little Jerry Williams in the 1950s, the singer suffered from terrible stage fright. This is, after all, the man who put out an album (1971’s Rat On!) with a cover that featured a photo of him grinning while seated astride a giant rat - not exactly the move of someone who lacks confidence. It’s hard, these days, to imagine Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams being afraid of anything.
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