Tone Glow 191: Swamp Dogg
An interview with the legendary soul singer, songwriter, and record producer about growing up in Virginia, bad acid trips, and working with artists like Doris Duke, Irma Thomas, and Dr. Dre
Swamp Dogg
Swamp Dogg (b. 1942) is a singer, songwriter, and record producer born in Portsmouth, Virginia as Jerry Williams Jr. In 1954, he recorded his first song, “HTD Blues,” at 12 years old in his home. He would release music as Little Jerry and Little Jerry Williams through the ’50s and ’60s until donning the Swamp Dogg in 1970 for the album Total Destruction to Your Mind. He’s released dozens of albums throughout his career, with his latest being 2024’s Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St. He would also write hundreds of songs for other artists, from Doris Duke to Irma Thomas to Z.Z. Hill, and released music by other artists on his record label Swamp Dogg Entertainment Group. Last year, Magnolia Pictures released the documentary Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, directed by Ryan Olson & Isaac Gale. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Swamp Dogg on April 30th, 2025 to discuss his tumultuous relationship with his mother, how LSD affected his brain, and his secret to forgiving others.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: How you doing?
Swamp Dogg: I’m doing great, man! I woke up to do the first interview and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last two or three hours. I’m still in my pajamas! (laughter).
I wanted to start by asking you to describe Portsmouth, Virginia. What was it like growing up there in the ’40s and early ’50s?
Well, you’ve got the tri-counties… Portsmouth, Norfolk, and Newport News, Virginia. These places was real quiet as far as bigotry was concerned. There was segregation, yes, but it wasn’t like what you heard about it in Alabama or Mississippi. I’m not saying that Virginia was all that great… well, it was great because we didn’t have all of that mayhem and murder and hangings. You felt pretty safe. A Black person could walk through a white neighborhood and not be mauled or attacked or whatever. You could go in the store. Yeah, there was Black water fountains and white water fountains, and the Black side was never kept up as well as the white ones.
We had to sit in the back of the bus. Getting on the bus, I thought a racial message was being set up once—there was a sign by the driver that said, “Passengers Stand Behind the White Line.” And actually, that was for safety, but a lot of us didn’t realize it. We had to ride in the back of the bus anyway, and we thought “passenger” was a reminder of us being “colored” and that therefore we had to go to the back. But that wasn’t what it was; it was a safety feature for everybody.
Virginia was sweet. I would still be living there if I could’ve made money. I knew early on that it wasn’t for me as far as becoming what I wanted to be. At one time, there was only two record stores—Groove Record Shop and Stewart’s Record Mart. That’s where I got most all of my records.
Do you remember the first record that you bought? Or the first one you bought that had a significant impact on you?
Yeah! From Groove Record Shop it was Run Joe (1948) by Louis Jordan. I think I was 5 or 6 years old. One of my mother’s friends was, as we’d say today, an exotic dancer—in those days we called it a “shake dancer”—she took me there. She didn’t live in Virginia; she was visiting my mother who was also in show business, so they became friends. Her name was Flash Gordon.
Obviously you played music with your family. Do you think there are qualities that your parents had that you feel are present in who you are?
Oh, yeah. It was a lot of women in my family, and they did more raisin’ than my mother because my mother was always gone on the road. They played lounges, places like the Holiday Inn—I don’t even know if it was around then, but those kind of places—where you would go in and there was a band playin’ and they were background music. They played some clubs, but it was mostly those kind of places. My grandmother and my great aunt and her daughter were the biggest influences. My mother was on the road so much that she didn’t really ever have a chance to be momma. She would come in off the road and try to change a lot of things that was bein’ done that she thought was bein’ done wrong, but they’d say, “Hey, you weren’t here, so just go with this—this is the program.” My stepfather, Nat Cross, he was there most my growin’ up period. He was part of this combo that had my momma on drums, Nat on guitar, and a bass player, Hayward.
My momma didn’t have a lot to do with my raisin’ and [the other women in my family] were rough, tough women. They had that genteel side also but they didn’t take no shit. They treated me like I was a god; I was the male that they could relate to and love and all of that. Those husbands had to walk a chalk line. They didn’t take no shit. When my mother would sing, they’d say, “It has no taste! It just doesn’t have any taste!” (laughter). That was their phrasing. They’d say, “Junior, you should go on the Arthur Godfrey Show or The Ed Sullivan Show and sing!” They had this idea that you could just go to New York and walk on stage! I didn’t know better, but I kind of knew better (laughter). You can’t just walk on them people’s stages!
They supported me 100%. And there was a little, teeny bit of jealousy from my mother’s standpoint. They did a record session in 1954 and they got ready to record. I’m under the impression that I’m gonna be on it too, but they had no plans for me to be on it. What happened was that they ended up with about a half hour left over, and they had set the thing up in my house—people came in with a 1-track recorder and it was a company out of Mechanicville, New York. It was Mechanic Records. That little half hour that was left over, I’m crying real tears and I said, “Can I sing? I wanna sing!” And I think it was my stepfather who said, “Let him sing, we had to pay for that half hour anyway.” I ran through my song right quick and it was called “Heartsick Troublesome Downout Blues.”
I put out an anthology album and everything was in chronological order, and you can hear it—I’m playing this wild piano. People didn’t do nothin’ but that stuff. People were playin’ the blues and shoutin’ the blues, and that’s what I was doing. I was listening to people like Big Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris, Louis Jordon, Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters—that kind of thing. They was still messin’ around with songs from the ’30s and early ’40s because the rhythm & blues took off in the ’40s. Top of the ’40s, you had people like The Mills Brothers. You had a lot of Black acts that had already made it, so they was still around of course. When I got my first management contract, my mother went with me over to the record shop in Norfolk where I signed management to this guy named Woody. On the bus she said, “I don’t know why they want you and don’t want me.” I don’t know if I ever told anybody this, but it was weird. It hit me as weird then, and later on I understood that that’s why she didn’t give me no push at all. But my aunts and my grandmas and them was behind me 100%. That was what kept me going in my early days.
So your mom didn’t push you because she was jealous?
Yes. She died in ’93. I loved her and I think she loved me, but we weren’t really close.
Was it a weird thing to navigate the relationship you had with your mother?
Yeah. Before she passed, I took her on the road with me because she never played outside of the United States except for Cuba. They played Cuba in the ’50s. I took her on the road with me because I was doing a lot of foreign things, and I knew she hadn’t been to these places. She had never sung for 10,000 or 20,000 people at these festivals and so forth. I had her with me, featured. I did an album and put it out, it went up on the Billboard jazz charts. I’ve got an unreleased album by her now too. I was getting her some nice exposure and people enjoyed it. But she had that bullshit charm going. She made you think that you were the greatest, the sweetest, the most wonderful, and more than likely you’d find out that she didn’t feel that way.
Ruth Brown was from our hometown in Portsmouth, Virginia. They were both on a talent contest and Ruth Brown won. That hurt my mother. But she couldn’t outsing Ruth Brown—Ruth sang circles around her! I wasn’t there and I didn’t see it or hear it, but she always spoke of Ruth Brown like she was the devil or something. But Ruth Brown had it goin’ on! My mother had a certain amount of bullshit with her. When my mother would tear you down, she’d start with, “I don’t like your lifestyle.” That’s what she would be saying to gays and so forth. I don’t know. This interview is turning into a psychiatrist kind of thing (laughter).
What was it like to bring her on for these shows?
I did a duet with her for at least one song. They liked her.
Did she enjoy it?
My mother didn’t enjoy too much of anything. She thought men, and she included her son right in it, were put on Earth to be used for anything that a woman wanted. That was her attitude. I don’t know where she got it from, and there was things that I didn’t want to know. A couple things that I did find out hurt me. I wasn’t seekin’ anything, it just jumped in front of my eyes, you know?
What do you mean? What sort of things did you not want to know?
I’m still trying to keep it concealed but alright, Imma go with the lightest one. I didn’t know that my mother smoked grass until she came out to California and was visiting us. I just happened to come out the door and my mother and this guy she brought with her and my oldest daughter, who wasn’t old enough, were out there smokin’ weed—grass, marijuana, whatever you wanna say. I didn’t believe it. I smelled it, I saw it, but I didn’t believe it. That’s one of the things that I could’ve done without. I wish I had stayed in the house. That’s one example. To me there are other things that get worse, but it was her business, it wasn’t none of my business—don’t make it my business. Do what you do some place else or when I’m gone or whatever. That’s what I meant.
Is this because you were against smoking marijuana or because you just didn’t want to know that your mother was doing it?
That my mother was doing it. When we lived in Miami I’d done LSD, I’d smoked black ganja cheeba cheeba and all that shit. But with the way we were raised, momma didn’t do nothing bad that was considered bad. That’s how I felt.
Do you feel like taking drugs impacted the way you approached music?
Yeah. On my first album, Total Destruction to Your Mind (1970), there’s a couple songs on there. “I Kissed Your Face,” “Dust Your Head Color Red.” They was written on LSD. And you can tell one of the songs, “Dust Your Head Color Red,” people like it, but it really don’t make sense (laughter). It’s what I was experiencing while I was on a trip. I didn’t go on a trip no more than four times in my life. I don’t know what milligram they were, but it was enough to fuck my mind up and made me have bad dreams, illusions, all kinds of stuff that’s been attributed to LSD.
LSD made me afraid of people. We could be great friends, sittin’ down talkin’, and I’m lookin’ at you and then all of a sudden, your face turns into some monster (growls). I’d say “I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go” or “Leave, please leave, please leave.” It’s a mind-expansion drug, but with me, it allowed me to see too much. Let’s use newspaper. You look at the newspaper and it’s got all this print from top to bottom, and I could look at ‘em and I could count the number of letters on that paper. It was almost like it was a magnifying glass, and I could count ‘em and tell you how many it was.
One night, we were living in Miami then, which is where I first encountered LSD, and it was slipped on me at a party. After I left that party, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was walking home and on the way home, I saw what looked like a shortcut, but it was a lake. I got ready to take that shortcut, and I would’ve more than likely drowned. But as I got closer to it, my mind cleared up a little bit—something was tellin’ me to turn around—that I’m goin’ wrong—and I did and I got home. I thought I was a snake and I tried to wrap myself around my wife, all kinds of shit.
There’s still some weirdness that has remained in me. It used to be so bad. My wife and I were out shopping and she’d go in the lady’s room, and when she came out I’d be crouched down near the door—I’d be crying because I was scared. All of a sudden I was scared of bein’ alone, just scared as shit. That was a helluva part of my life, at least until today. They don’t really know the real causes of doing LSD trips and they can’t tell you how long they last. I think it lasts a lifetime, they may just dwindle down to less encounters of bad shit. I never had anything that’d be considered good shit while I was on LSD. That’s 10% of the problems.
Do you feel, though, that you were able to write and sing certain songs because of these really intense emotional experiences? That story reminds me of a song like “I Can Stand the Lonely Days (But Can't Stand the Lonely Nights).”
I think it’s the opposite. I usually don’t perform those songs, like the one you just named. I never performed it in public. I put it on record, and just about anything I think of, I can write about somewhat intelligently and I’ll record it. But that’s where I usually leave it. There’s certain songs that bring me joy and happiness, and even if it’s a downward spiral kind of song, I enjoy doing it. Right now, I’m talkin’ to you and I’m ramblin’ a little bit, and I think it’s ’cause I don’t think that shit’s ever worn off. I think that it affected my fuckin’ brain or something.
As a matter of fact, I was living in Miami but I was working in New York and I was given some weed that had been sprinkled with LSD. Goin’ back to my hotel room—I was stayin’ at the Henry Hudson Hotel—and I was so screwed up that these two other writers that wrote songs with me—one of them was Larry Harrison, me and him were real tight—they stayed with me most of the night because I actually thought I could fly. I was gettin’ ready to jump out of the Henry Hudson Hotel window and they kept holding me back. They stayed with me all night until I came down. That would’ve been considered a suicide, but it wasn’t. It was what I thought I could do. It was something I wanted to do. It was rainin’ that night and the rain felt good. I pity anyone who’s ever done that shit.
Have you used music as a way to process these experiences that you’ve had?
No. Music makes me happy. Right now, I could go on a gig and I could be legs sore or something, and as soon as the music kicks in, I stop hurtin’. I did a three-hour concert about two Fridays ago. I don’t go on stage lookin’ at my watch. Unless I’m given a time, and even when I’m given a time that I need to be off, they usually have to tell one of the musicians to be pointin’ at their watch like, (whispers) “Hey, five more minutes.” Especially if the audience is with me, and lately they have been all the way with me. They be singin’ my songs better than me—they don’t really need me. But all that drug shit. I ain’t ever do heroin or none of that shit.
You’ve been a part of a lot of other musicians’ lives. Do you mind talking to me about Doris Duke? What was it like to work with her?
First thing that comes to mind is that she hated me and I hated her (laughter).
Then how was it doing the music together?
Fan-tastic. She carried a little Bible in her purse at all times. And I didn’t realize that she was gettin’ drunk until one of my partners told me. First of all, her road manager—who also wrote some songs with me—was Troy Davis. She wanted him as her lover, but he didn’t care nothin’ about Doris. He’s the one who brought Doris to me. She was singin’ background for Nina Simone and when they got back in the country, Troy said, “Man, I got a girl you got to hear!” He brought her out to my house and I was livin’ in East Elmhurt, New York now.
I loved her voice. The real endorsement was the fact that Nina Simone was close to perfect as you could get, or it felt that way anyway. She demanded excellence, and anything less than excellence she couldn’t deal with. So because of that, I knew Doris could sing. We started writing songs, Gary [Bonds] and I, and we had this one song, “To the Other Woman.” We gave her a little samplin’ of it and I said, “Oh yeah.” And I signed her. I was her manager and her producer.
She used to tell people I was her chauffeur. She was mean—real mean. She got me sued by James Brown. James Brown had hired her to do a show with him, I think it was in Cincinnati, Ohio, and she didn’t go. I didn’t know she didn’t go, I thought she went, but she was home to collect her welfare check. That was weird. I was gettin’ her a grand a night, which was pretty damn good in 1970, and she didn’t go. The next thing I know, I got James Brown’s attorneys on the phone and while I got it resolved with my attorneys—I don’t know what went down—I had to give my deposit back, which was $500.
I remember one night she was in North Carolina, and I was no longer her manager, but she called me in the middle of the night at like 1 o’clock in the morning. Then this guy’s talking to me all rough and tough and he was the manager of the club. They had the band all scared because they shot the tires off the car, I think it was a Buick station wagon—that was their transportation and they were playin’ Chitlin’ Circuit. What he was doing was that he was gon’ have sex with her—hell, he already had sex with her—and wasn’t gonna give her the other part of the money. I think she was down there and did two nights, and that’s a couple grand. I had to call up some associates of mine who was doin’ collections on the outside. They were loan sharks, really. I didn’t want none of their money, but I called them and they said, “Look, give us the information, we’ll take care of it.” Next thing I know, the guy was in the hospital. I don’t know if they did it or if there was some incident, but I know he didn’t wanna be Doris’ manager no more.
In the studio, she was as professional as you could get. She was the greatest. She was also pissed at me because Dee Dee Warwick, Dionne’s sister, had a hit record called “She Didn’t Know.” I was plannin’ on doing that for Doris on her next album but Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records called me in the middle of the night and asked me, “I’m down here and I’m cuttin’ Dee Dee Warwick, you got anythin’ funky and good?” And as a songwriter I naturally said, “Yes, I’ve got the very thing!” And we did, but we hadn’t finished it. “Get it down to me overnight if you can,” and I said okay. Gary and I finished the song and I sung it on a little tape, we went out to the airport. We didn’t have no FedEx at the time. All we had to do was hand our package to one of the stewardesses and the party just had to be at the airport when the plane would land—they’d hand it to you. She didn’t know if there was a bomb in there or nothin’ else (laughter), but we weren’t doin’ that in those days. I rushed it out there, the song hit the charts and got nominated for a Grammy, but Doris said she wanted it and I gave it to Dee Dee Warwick. That made her hate me even more.
The things she would do… like there was a guy who worked at the back entrance of the Apollo Theater, and his name was either Mississippi or Minnesota, one of those two names. He was an old freaky guy. I came to the Apollo and she was there for a week. I got to the Apollo and he used to like for women to defecate on his chest, and Doris did it. The Delfonics was the star and she was the co-star, and there were some other people with their records but nowhere near as big as Doris. Then I confronted her at her dressing room and I pissed her off. She would run around with her wig off and she looked like shit with that wig off. Now, today, you see a Black woman with her hair natural, it looks natural. But in those days, you ain’t do that. It was like, “What’s this ugly motherfucker doing?” That wasn’t the only time that she fired me as her manager. I went along with her bullshit because she was a moneymaker. You wanna know how I get along with Doris? That’s basically it. Put yourself in my place and see how much you would take.
All of this is really crazy. How did you know about this shitting on the chest story?
Because he was known for that! When I got to the Apollo that day, I was told about it. I didn’t see it, but ooh, Doris was out of her mind.
I have to ask now what it was like working with Irma Thomas.
Irma was great, but Irma hates me now (laughter). She thinks I made millions of dollars off of her and that I didn’t give her anything. What she hasn’t looked at is that both labels that I had her on went bankrupt. I didn’t get shit. When she signed with me, I think I gave her like $5000. I was recordin’ her for Canyon Records, and Canyon went out of business and the owner—Wally Roker—and I became good friends and remained great friends until he died a couple years ago. He sold most of the Canyon catalogue to me and Irma Thomas was in it. I pulled her out right away and took her in the studio and cut some more stuff. She only had a couple of sides cut while she was at Canyon, and I took her in the studio to do a full album.
What got her was that the little bass player, [Robert] Popwell, had drilled a hole in the wall. There was the utility room and he drilled a hole through the partition so he could look at women’s asses. She caught him, and she got mad at me! I never looked through the hole! Not sayin’ that I wouldn’t of, but he got caught so quickly, and she disliked me for that. I saw her 20 years ago, maybe, at Sea-Saint Studios in New Orleans and she walked out in the lobby and I said, “Irma! How you do? It’s Swamp Dogg.” And I always say my name at the end now just in case a muthafucka don’t recognize me anymore, you know? There are people I don’t recognize anymore. She just rolled her eyes and kept on goin’ down the hall. She was mad at me. She told a couple people that I made millions off of her. I wish I had, but I didn’t.
A lot of acts didn’t get paid in the ’50s and ’60s and I don’t think she got paid correctly when she had that Wish Someone Would Care (1964). I didn’t know what the outcome of that was. The label actually paid people but the contract that the people signed was not proper. You sign on to do something for 20 cent when you actually supposed to get a dollar. They give you your 20 cent but then you find out that everybody else got a dollar, and that makes you think, “Hell, I didn’t get paid.” You got paid, but you got paid for what you signed for. And nobody encouraged you to go to an attorney.
I didn’t know I was supposed to get paid, I was just so anxious to go in the studio. You could sign a contract to get a penny per record—you in debt as soon as you sign the contract! I didn’t give her a bad contract, by no means, and she did take me to an attorney and I had good attorneys working on my end and they had a good reputation, but they were about to ruin it by inviting some bullshit. I just found out a year or so ago when I was doin’ an interview just like. He had interviewed Irma Thomas and she had told him what a bastard I was. Well, we hit the charts a couple times. Our label was being distributed by BASF but hell, they went out of business. They were a German company. [The owner] spent too much money too fast. A lot of the laws we have now were not in effect at that time. Not only did she not get all of her money, neither did I. Everybody’s got a story, but that’s my story.
You talked about how Doris was in the studio, what was Irma like in the studio or when she was performing?
Fan-fucking-tastic! That’s why I wanted her contract! She was better than good, she was top-notch. I mean, I gotta give her credit. Just because she hates me don’t mean I didn’t like what she did.
On your label in the ’90s, you were releasing music from rappers: MC Breed, Bottom Posse, MC Nero-Baby, World Class Wreckin’ Cru. What was it like working with them compared to working with soul singers?
To me, it was like the young man’s blues. The old guys talked about whiskey and beatin’ up each other and cuttin’ folks and shit. They were talkin’ about what was happening in their community, and rappers were doin’ the same thing, but they couldn’t sing, most of them. They became poets, and they got rhythmic. Well, he could sing a little bit, Gil Scott-Heron. It wasn’t the rap that we went on to hear with the LL Cool Js and all that kind of stuff, but I liked them a lot and that’s why I signed these people and took them in the studio. The first ones I had were the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, which had Dr. Dre in it. So I was managing Dr. Dre at the time.
These guys were a joy to work with. It was difficult to book ‘em but I made ‘em money. I was making ‘em $10,000 a show. I was playing two shows each night in different cities. I had a plane and a bus and I would map their stuff out where they would play Dallas on Friday and then be in Tyler, Texas on Saturday. And then wherever I could get the club owners to put on a Sunday show down that way, they would—they just had to put a sheet over all of the liquor because they couldn’t serve any liquor on Sunday, and they definitely couldn’t serve it to minors, and they were all under 18. That was a challenge, but I enjoyed that challenge because… well, because I like challenges. I had good success with them and, as a matter of fact, Alonzo Williams who was in that documentary, they called me the Granddaddy of Hip-Hop.
One of my favorite songs was [Bottom Posse’s] “I Feel Like Killing a N*****.” The company that was distributing me wanted me to get “N*****” out of it so it became “I Feel Like Pulling the Trigger,” but it didn’t have the same impact. That deal went through the toilet. It wasn’t a killer and that’s because we didn’t have killer money. We needed a distributor to pay us to stay in business but the distributor didn’t pay us on time, they kept us behind. But that was some good, good rappers. There was Cold Blue, I put out a couple records from him. MC Breed went on to become phenomenal.
Were you inspired by what you were seeing from these rappers in what you did yourself? Did it have an impact on your own music?
It had an impact on me—a good impact—but no. I always know what I want to do with Swamp Dogg, and I have had artist participation from outside a couple times—there was Esther Phillips on “The Love We Got Ain’t Worth Two Dead Flies.” I loved Esther’s voice and she was the only singer I could ever imitate—I could almost sound like her. She did one of my songs, “You And Me Together Forever,” and there was George Benson on that record too. They had all the good jazz musicians on that label, Kudu. That was Creed Taylor’s label.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
I forgot who I’m mad at. I don’t anger because I forget. My wife manages to remember everything that ever happened at any time, and she would say, “I thought you said that you hated him?” “What he do?” “You said that he did blah blah blah.” “Oh yeah, he’s alright now.” (laughter). I do forgive, and I’ll forgive in a minute—especially if you got talent. If you can help make my life better, I’ll forgive you. And I try to be fair. I haven’t been totally fair with everybody, but I try my damndest to be fair with the people who will allow me to be fair, and most of them do.
Do you feel like you were always like that?
It came about because I was an only child. If I got mad at somebody, I would have to forgive ‘em because I didn’t have anybody to play with (laughter). Seriously! My very best friend at that time is still my very best friend now—he was like the first Black president of NASA. That’s Dr. Julian M. Earls. I introduced him to his wife when he was in college. He only lived two doors from me. I think I beat him one time—I’m talkin’ about fights. He must’ve beat me 100 times. I never could beat this motherfucker (laughter). We’d get in fights over little things, whatever. Just things that kids get pissed about, but I forgave him and he forgave me and we just went on.
More information about Swamp Dogg and his music can be found at his website. His music can be found at Bandcamp. Information about the documentary Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted can be found at the Magnolia Pictures website.
Thank you for reading the 191st issue of Tone Glow. Forget and forgive.
If you appreciate what we do, please consider donating via Ko-fi or becoming a Patreon patron. Tone Glow is dedicated to forever providing its content for free, but please know that all our writers are paid for the work they do. All donations will be used for paying writers, and if we get enough money, Tone Glow will be able to publish issues more frequently.