Born in 1920 in Beaverdale, Iowa as the youngest of ten children, William Deafman was eager to make a name for himself from the start. Despite his father’s position as professor of pharmacology at nearby Drake University, the Deafmans lived a meager, spartan life in a Tudorbethan home in a small mining community. Deafman’s mother, the daughter of a minister, strove to instill her children with a strict moral compass. Nevertheless, young Willie was anxious to express his latent desires to travel south and become a blues singer.

Although Deafman’s father had played baritone in the East High School marching band, Willie had little to no exposure to music in the Deafman household. Deafman has claimed that the family lived without a radio until the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, but other accounts note that Professor Deafman enjoyed the occasional Paul Whiteman record. Despite (or perhaps in deference to) a lack of exposure to popular music of the time, Willie somehow became aware of the nascent Delta blues recordings of Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson, and he found kindred spirits in their expressive, plaintive melodies. But young Willie’s parents discouraged him from listening to blues recordings.

“My mama caught me listening to a Bo Carter record called ‘Your Biscuits Are Big Enough for Me,’ and she set me to hard labor for a week,” says Deafman.

When Willie got his hands on a guitar in a Des Moines pawn shop in 1933, he found a means to express his yearnings. It was the height of the Great Depression, and families throughout the country were tightening their belts and praying for recovery. But young Willie was earning his keep at thirteen by playing blues and country songs at Des Moines speakeasies. Encouraged by his success, Willie endeavored to head east to Chicago to seek opportunity as a performer.

“I could play any song I heard,” says Deafman. “[The patrons] would have me play a country song, or here or there a blues song, and I could play it right there on the spot. I was a little living, breathing jukebox, age thirteen and drinking and carrying on with the likes of them.”

An abortive trip to Chicago at age fourteen saw Willie slink home sans guitar and short fifty dollars. The Deafmans accepted their prodigal son home under tight restrictions. No blues music; no guitar playing; no trips to the speakeasy. It was a humiliating circumstance for Willie, but it was one that he took to heart. Blues scholars have long noted the presence of an imprisoned soul in Deafman’s records—a trapped spirit yearning for a distant place; an impossible dreamer longing for a faraway hope. As Willie buckled down and embraced the conditions of his labor, he composed an internal melody of desire and despair that would eventually carry him from Beaverdale to the world’s stage.

In a 65-year career that has spawned dozens of hit records, thousands of performances, and countless imitators and followers, Willie has remained true to his inner voice.

“I’ll always be that fifteen year old wanting to get the hell out of Iowa,” says Deafman. “Even at ninety, there’s a part of me still trying.”