Daniel Williams, 83, local musician and repairman
Daniel Williams, a widely-respected local musician, bandleader and instrument repairman, will be remembered tomorrow in a memorial service at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow in the Griffin Funeral Home, 3232 S. King Dr.
Mr. Williams, 83, was born in Chicago on April 21, 1916, and died in the same home of his birth, a house his father had built in 1905.
A musician born into a musical family, the small child they called "Danny" sometimes toured Europe and the United States with his parents, who were part of the Williams Jubilee Singers.
His schools were all noted for producing talented musicians: McCosh Elementary, Englewood High School, the VanderCook College of Music, and finally Kentucky State University.
His first aggregation was appropriately call "The Danny Williams Orchestra," which he founded after graduation from high school.
"It was a pretty nice sounding little group," he recalled in a 1999 interview. "We were young and not very good musicians, but we got better as we went along. We played in Chicago. All the popular dance bands of the day influenced me. All the great bands that were broadcasting on the radio or recording records. Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway. The Bama State Collegians was a famous college band; they were out of Bama State College in Montgomery, Ala. They were young like us."
During a tour of Kentucky, the band got an offer from Kentucky State University. In exchange for free tuition, the band changed its name to the Kentucky State Collegians and played concerts in the south. Deeply affected by the southern segregation laws during that time, the band returned to Chicago.
"I never protested it, because it was the law," said Mr. Williams. "In 1938, my friends and I from Chicago certainly weren't going to go down to Kentucky and start infringing their laws."
Drafted in 1940, Mr. Williams spent the war years leading Army bands. He was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
Following the war, Mr. Williams played saxophone with the Cootie Williams Orchestra, playing concerts across the United States during the closing years of the Swing era.
As the big band era faded, Mr. Williams returned to Chicago to continue his career. Even in Chicago, Mr. Williams could not escape segregation. "The Chicago public schools hired band directors," he recalled, "but there was only one Black band director in the school system. When he died, they hired one more. So there didn't seem to be a great future in being a band director."
Mr. Williams opened his own musical instrument repair business. He spent eleven years running the repair shop at Lyon & Healy. He taught instrument repair at VanderCook College of Music. Before his death he had been helping to establish a technical training center for musical instrument repair in Normal, Illinois.
Mr. Williams was born, lived and died in his family home, a house built by his father in 1905. He died Thursday of heart failure, a condition from which he had suffered for about seven years. Mr. Williams is survived by his wife, Alma Williams, two children, Erick Williams, a lawyer in Michigan, and Yvonne Williams, a social worker in Washington, D.C. He has one grandchild, Elling Nielsen-Williams.
Article Copyright Sengstacke Enterprises, Inc.
Photo (Daniel Williams)
