That should give you a general idea of Bill's gentle, almost sly humour. It's tempting to call it folksy, but considering his attitude towards labels I'll just shy away from that. Most of his little talks are introductions to his songs and they are like mini histories for each of them. It can be what he knows about the history of the song, who wrote it etc., the historical events the song is based on ("Back-Water Blues" is about the 1920's flooding of the Gulf Coast Mississippi towns during a storm where 1200 hundred black people lost their lives. The back-water of the title refers to what happened when the Levees of Louisiana were closed which forced all the water to "back" up and flooded out the poor black coastal communities further down the river)
In some ways listening to these concerts Bill gave is to take part in an oral history class of the South from a black person's perspective at that time. You learn more from listening to him and his songs than you would ever learn from a textbook covering the same period. What makes him so good is he just makes observations, he's never overtly political, critical, or anything at all like that. He simply points out things he sees and lets the audience formulate their own opinions from the implications of what he has described.
He has a wonderful voice; I suppose it would be a baritone, which serves him well on any of the songs he sings. It has a richness and fullness I more associate with a singer like Paul Robeson than other Blues singers. I'm tempted to use the word relaxed to describe his singing style, but that implies he lacks intensity, which is definitely not the case.
Perhaps it's more that unlike his contemporaries he doesn't have to push his voice to get it to do what he wants it to do. He just opens up his mouth and the music pours out unimpeded and smooth.
As well as the two discs, the package Amsterdam Live Concerts 1953 includes an extensive booklet with both background on the history of the recordings, and first hand recollections of the people who knew Bill when he was in Holland and Europe for those years, including those of his second wife, a Dutch woman named Pim van Isveldt. But Bill never really got to enjoy his second marriage because he died of cancer of the vocal chords in 1958. It seems a sad irony that a man with such a smooth sounding voice should have died losing his voice, and for the last year of his life talking was problematic and he couldn't sing a note.
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