His son Derrick Williams said the cause was cancer.
In a decade when mainstream white audiences were watching “Father Knows Best” on television, Williams was recording provocative songs like “Jail Bait” (1957), a sly warning to men inclined to date teenage girls. It ends with a narrator pleading with a judge for leniency and promising to abandon his lecherous ways:
I ain’t gonna bother none 15,
I ain’t gonna bother none 16,
I ain’t gonna bother none 17,
I ain’t gonna mess with none 18,
I’m gonna leave them 20-year-old ones alone too,
Gonna get me a girl about 42.
Williams’ best-known song was probably “Shake a Tail Feather,” written with Otha Hayes and Verlie Rice, which was first recorded in 1963 by the Five Du-Tones (a version heard in the 1988 John Waters movie “Hairspray”) and also turned up in the 1980 film “The Blues Brothers” performed by Ray Charles.
“He sang of the joys of poultry, pork, prepubescent flesh and being ‘The Only Black Man in South Dakota,'” writer and radio personality James Marshall said by email, referencing another Williams song, “yet he never sounded trite, clichéd or banal.”
Williams didn’t sing so much as speak his lyrics, in a casual sort of growl, and as a result he is sometimes called a harbinger of rap. Though he was never a household name or a million-selling artist, his style influenced garage bands and punk rockers, as well as performers like Ike and Tina Turner, who also recorded “Shake a Tail Feather.”
By the 1970s, however, drugs and alcohol had begun to derail his career. He was homeless for a time, panhandling.
“Between 7 and 9 was when the money came in,” he explained in Tricia Todd’s 2008 documentary, “Agile, Mobile, Hostile: A Year With Andre Williams,” revisiting the spot on the Randolph Street Bridge in Chicago where he used to ask for handouts. “All of the rich folks got off of that train, and they had to come down this bridge to go to all of them places where they steal folks’ money.”
Punk rockers and others rediscovered Williams in the 1990s, and he began recording again. Miriam Linna, who runs independent label Norton Records, recalled in a telephone interview how George Paulus of St. George Records helped revive Williams’ career.
“One day he calls us up and says, ‘I found Andre Williams,'” she said. The rediscovery led to the 1996 album “Greasy,” with Norton issuing the vinyl and Paulus’ label issuing the CD.
“It was a great montage of the old and the new,” Linna said of that record, on which Williams was backed by doo-wop group El Dorados. A new version of “Jail Bait” led off the record.
Williams followed that in 1998 with “Silky,” an album that showed him to be, if anything, more raunchy than ever. The Dallas Observer called the record “an affirmation that none of those wild young garage rockers who admire him so much can get as down and dirty as he can.”
Some of the record’s song titles are unprintable here. To those who might have a problem with that, or with lyrics like “I want to be your favorite girdle so I can cling to your curvy hips” (from the track “I Wanna Be Your Favorite Pair of Pajamas”), he had an unapologetic response.
“Get off my back about the language,” he said in an interview with The Observer. “I’m trying to tell a story. Dig the theme. We can’t all go on the expressway. Sometimes some of us got to take the low road.”
Zephire Andre Williams was born on Nov. 1, 1936, in Bessemer, Alabama, to Tom and Fannie Williams. The family went north to Chicago when he was a child, but when his mother died in 1943 he returned to the South to live with relatives.
As a teenager Andre returned to his father in Chicago and used fake identification to enlist in the Navy, which discharged him when it discovered he was underage. He began singing with various groups and eventually signed with Fortune Records in Detroit.
“Back in the days of the rhythm-and-blues groups, the high voice was the big thing,” Williams explained years later. “I sang baritone, so I knew I couldn’t compete with Nolan Strong or Clyde McPhatter” — prominent tenors of the day — “so I came up with my own thing, the spoken thing.”
His first big success was “Bacon Fat,” which cracked the Top 10 of the Billboard R&B; chart in 1957. There was also “Pass the Biscuits Please,” a droll song that consisted of not much more than Williams imploring someone, anyone, to pass him the biscuits.
In the 1960s Williams spent several years writing and producing for the Motown label, working with the Temptations, the Contours and other acts.
Linna said that in 2007 Williams, in rehab and not for the first time, called her in distress about how to escape his addiction demons. She suggested he try writing a book. In 2009 she published his “Sweets and Other Stories,” a fictional work written from the perspective of a young woman.
“He wrote himself straight,” Linna said. “I didn’t think he was going to deliver. But he did.”
Williams’ wife, Yvonne (Jarman) Williams, died in 2004. In addition to his son Derrick, he is survived by two other sons, Renaldo and Andre; two daughters, Andrea Harling and Rashandra Owens; 12 grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
Williams was as energetic onstage in his 70s as he had been in his youth, and he was quick to offer up tales from his fast-lane life.
“Nobody who spent any time with Andre Williams came away from it without at least a story,” Marshall said. “Many came away with an arrest record. A few ended up dead.
“But mention his name to anyone and the first thing you’ll get is a smile. Possibly followed by a curse, but they always smile first.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.