Background
Williams was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, United States, to parents who were both musicians. He was raised in Houston, Texas, and moved to Belzoni, Mississippi to live with his uncle Anthony Williams after his mother died around 1917.
Williams was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, United States, to parents who were both musicians. He was raised in Houston, Texas, and moved to Belzoni, Mississippi to live with his uncle Anthony Williams after his mother died around 1917.
After traveling North during the 1920s, he returned to Belzoni around 1930, where he occasionally played locally. Moving to Chicago in 1938, he worked at first in the defense industry and later for Oscar Mayer. By 1943 he was playing in clubs in the evenings while working as a meat packer in the daytime, working with Theodore "Hound Dog" Taylor around 1944.
In 1944 he lost the end of a finger in a meat grinder and gave up playing the guitar for a year, until he saw Blind Arvella Gray, who was missing two fingers from his left hand, playing on Maxwell Street, and learned to play the guitar without the missing finger.
Around this time, he acquired the nickname "Uncle Johnny", by which he was known among his blues associates for the rest of his life. After 1953 Williams continued to work with Hound Dog Taylor and others, but stopped playing blues in 1959 after a religious conversion, and joined the Baptist church, becoming an ordained minister in the early 1960s.
Williams died in Chicago on March 6, 2006, at the age of 99. Blues musicians John Lee Hooker and Baby Boy Warren have also used the name Johnny Williams.