RIP Little Bill Englehart
Little Bill Engelhart has passed over. His death doesn’t just feel like the end of an era—it IS the end of an era. A time when black rhythm and blues first began to work its magic on bored white teenagers in sleepy post-war America.
Bill was born in 1939 and raised in Tacoma, Washington. He contracted polio at 11, which permanently weakened his legs and put him in a wheelchair. One day a musical cousin showed up with a guitar and strummed some tunes, and something clicked with Bill: “I couldn’t ride a bike, but I could play a guitar.”
By the time he was in high school, with a fearlessness that was a key to Bill’s makeup, he was playing dances at the black American legion hall in Tacoma. "It was great. They liked me right away," Bill once said. "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I had been playing most country music, but now I'm up there with these black guys playing the blues."
A discussion with other teenagers at a Tacoma hamburger stand one night in 1955 revealed a common interest in music, and just like that a band was born. Little Bill and the Blue Notes were the very first rock and roll band in Tacoma, and they harnessed their teenaged energy into creating their own scene. They rented halls, printed flyers, collected admission at the door, and played the music. At one show, teenaged fans overwhelmed the dance hall the band had rented, and the Tacoma police showed up to shut the event down. The band members went into full-press mode and convinced the cops to let them play one last song. It lasted thirty minutes, and the response by city authorities to this poke in the eye by a bunch of delinquents was to ban Little Bill and the Blue Notes from every playing inside the city limits of Tacoma again.
The members of what became Little Bill and the Blue Notes were not just discovering music together, they were zeroing in on black rhythm and blues in particular.
As Bill told it in an interview, “One of the guys in the band and I went downtown to the record store in Tacoma. It was owned by a Black man. There were all these posters on the wall. And so we were looking at the posters and it said James Brown would be at a little hall in Tacoma City. Bands would come through there. They were all rhythm and blues bands. And we were hooked. We saw everybody you could imagine. Anybody that was a big deal in rhythm and blues at that time. That's when we found our style—the blues. I continued singing blues until I retired a couple of years ago. That's how the music happened for us. When we went to the Evergreen Ballroom we saw James Brown, B.B. King, and on and on and on.”
Bill told me once about being ushered backstage to meet Ray Charles during this time. Bill told Charles that he was a musician. Ray asked Bill what kind of music he played, and Bill told him that he played the blues. “Are you white?” Ray asked Bill. When Bill confirmed that, Ray paused for a moment and said, “Whatever you do, always respect the music.” Bill said he never forgot that.
The Blue Notes decided to spend some of their new-found money to make some recordings. Not, according to Bill, to make a record, but just to hear what they actually sounded like. The band booked time at Joe Boles’ studio in West Seattle. At the session, the band put a few instrumentals down on tape. When Boles told them that they still had a half an hour left, they decided to record “I Love an Angel,” a number that Bill had written and had been singing with the band. Immediately after they finished, Boles got on the phone to Dolton Records (a Seattle-based label that had just scored a huge national hit with a group of high-school students from Olympia called the Fleetwoods), and Little Bill and the band found themselves signing a contract with Dolton.
And damned if Dolton’s release of “I Love an Angel” didn’t become a big hit, quickly entering the Billboard Hot Hundred. Before he could blink, the label had put Bill out on a national tour with Bobby Vee and the Ventures.
But it didn’t last. "I couldn't follow it up with another hit," Bill told an interviewer. "It was like I was a has been, and I was not quite 20 years old. It was awful, it was really awful.” Bill struggled to get nightclub work and worked straight jobs for several years before recommitting to music in the late 1970s. Nearly fifty years and every music venue in the Pacific Northwest later, memory problems and the Covid shutdown finally convinced Bill to retire from music in 2020.
I met Bill in the late 1970s when he, guitarist Joe Johansen, and drummy Tommy Morgan held down a regular weekend gig at the Mint Lounge in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. They would often hire guest artists to join them on the weekends, and I worked with them off and on at the Mint for a good long stretch. Joe Johansen was a genius guitarist who had played in countless Northwest rock bands and who was a big influence on Jimi Hendrix and Larry Coryell during their stints in Seattle. Bill and Joe were still partying pretty hard in those days, and their sets were unpredictable to say the least, but there were always moments when they would focus and I would realize that they had forgotten more about music than I would ever know. (Bill got sober in the late 1980s.)
Bill was always great to me, and we became friends, mostly over our shared love of rhythm and blues. One night at the Mint Bill told me a story about an ill-fated evening spent partying in Seattle’s Central District with the singer Little Willie John that ended with John stabbing and killing someone in a fight, and years later I wrote a long piece about the murder for The Village Voice. ("Fever and Fate: The Strange Story of Little Willie John" by Kim Field)
Bill was a sweet human being. He loved music and he loved being a musician and hanging with other musicians, and he was certainly loved in return. Bill was a devoted family man. He always spoke with unabashed wonder of his good fortune in meeting his wife Jan.
My wife and I bought a 1963 Wurlitzer jukebox a few years ago from a guy in Corvallis, Oregon. It came loaded with a hundred 45s. The best of them was Little Bill’s “I Love an Angel,” with its signature New-Orleans-style horn section. It’s in heavy rotation today. So long, Bill, to you and to your era.