King Solomon Hill - Identity

Identity

The Mississippi blues artist Big Joe Williams took a fancy to the name King Solomon Hill and laid claim to it in interviews with Bob Koester, stating that the Hill sides were his first recordings . This was published to a wider audience by Sam Charters in his pioneering history The Country Blues. Big Joe had not known Blind Lemon Jefferson, so claimed that the song My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon was about another singer. In a footnote, Charters admitted that the story was open to question as the style, especially the singing style, on the King Solomon Hill sides was so different from Big Joe's usual style. In his later work The Bluesmen, Charters dismisses Big Joe's story, and comments on the strong resemblance between King Solomon Hill and Sam Collins, which led some blues enthusiasts to believe that they were the same man. The identification of Hill as Joe Holmes was made by one prominent Blues scholar Gayle Dean Wardlow and strongly contested by another, David Evans. Wardlow eventually found four informants who had known Joe Holmes and identified his voice on the records of King Solomon Hill. One informant lived in a section of Sibley, Louisiana known as Yellow Pine, within which there is a community formerly known as King Solomon Hill centred on an actual hill on which stood King Solomon Hill Baptist Church. A retired postal worker confirmed that King Solomon Hill would have been an acceptable postal address in 1932. The community is now known as Salt Works. No informant remembers Joe Holmes using the name King Solomon Hill, so Wardlow concludes that it was Paramount Records who chose to use his address as his recording name.