Joe Williams Is Singing Those Blues, but Usually on an Optimistic Note

Memphis Slim wrote it. But the song “Everyday I Have the Blues” has been Joe Williams’ since fans at Chicago’s long-gone Club DeLisa began requesting it from the brassy-toned vocalist about 40 years ago. So how does he keep it sounding fresh after all these years?

“It’s the treatment,” he answered in a phone conversation from his Las Vegas home earlier this week. “I’m with Miles Davis on this. I think the treatment of a song is the thing that interests me more than anything else. Like Frank Sinatra, who gives such marvelous treatments, his arrangements are good, the orchestrations are super . . . you can just feel the music.”

Indeed, on his most recent release, “Every Night” (Verve), recorded live at L.A.’s Vine St. Bar and Grill, Williams brings new life to his theme song by singing it over an arrangement of Miles’ “All Blues.” The resulting blend is a sweet counterpoint of moods.

Williams, who will be appearing Sunday on a double bill with Nancy Wilson at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, has an upbeat way with even the most down-and-out lyric. There’s no self pity in his style.

“At the time I started to sing ‘Every Day,’ I was coming out of a period in my life where I was at a very low ebb and literally felt that nobody understood me and nobody cared about me,” he said, paraphrasing one of the tune’s lines.

“But that brought out another attitude. You realize that every tub sits on its own bottom, everybody has his own thing to do, and they don’t really have the time to worry about you. So you go straight ahead. You have to get definitive about how to handle the fact that ‘nobody loves me, nobody seems to care.’ ”

It’s difficult not to love Williams. His physical and vocal presence commands attention whether he appears in intimate clubs or in large venues such as the Hollywood Bowl. A big man with a big sound, he has a spirited, good-natured way with standards and ballads as well as the blues.

“I don’t think blues singing is always ‘I’m beaten down, poor and hurting, I’m in pain, my woman left me.’ Because then in the next breath you’re singing a bluesy tune called ‘I Had Someone Before I Had You and I’ll Have Somebody After You’re Gone,’ which is a happy blues, a very happy blues.”

Williams began sitting in with Chicago bands when he was 16 and spent time with Coleman Hawkins, Andy Kirk and Lionel Hampton before his historic first tour with Count Basie in 1950. The orchestra leader made Williams a star, dubbing him his “number one son” and later helping him establish a career of his own.

Williams’ respect for Basie is apparent when the name is brought up. “He was a quiet man, a very quiet man,” Williams recalls. “He gave everybody in the organization the space to contribute and was willing to have that contribution become part of the overall repertoire. That’s one of the reasons so many musicians came up through him and went on to greater success.”

At 70, Williams stays busy. He recently toured Japan and the East Coast and will be performing throughout Europe and Japan this summer. A new album, to be released this month, features two numbers each with Shirley Horn, Marlena Shaw and Supersax.

Add to this his ongoing role as Claire Huxtable’s father on “The Cosby Show” and the poor guy has little time for one of his true loves--golf--though he plans to play in this year’s Bing Crosby Tournament in Winston Salem, N.C.

But he makes sure he has time for another of his passions: “Days of Our Lives.”

“That’s life and death,” according to Jillean, his wife of 24 years. “Our whole day revolves around it.”

Despite years of this hectic pace, Williams’ voice is still radiant and strong. “When you have the instrument,” he said, “you’ve got to use it judiciously, to take care of it the best you can--without isolating yourself completely from fun and living.”

Though there is a lack of commercial exposure for his kind of music, Williams is optimistic for its future. “We’ve always had an audience and always will,” he said. “The music that we do has always been for a more sophisticated group, as opposed to the masses. The audience grows to us; we don’t have to change. Kids, when they’re 15 or 16 years old, listen to one thing. As they get older, their tastes change. They’ll come to us.”

Joe Williams and Nancy Wilson sing Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $10 to $28. Information: (714) 556-2787.