Background
He was born in Bayland, Yazoo County, Mississippi.
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Willie Wright
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He turned down offers to sign with a major label, and according to his current record label "deliberately chose artistic freedom over the sharecropper"s existence to which many of the best artists of his generation were subjected.".
Career
Later, the three formed the Willie Wright Trio. Wright then began performing as a solo singer and songwriter in clubs in Greenwich Village, and also played flute with The Three Degrees. He moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he continued to sing in clubs, setting up his own label, Hotel Records, in 1969, and releasing a single.
In the early 1970s, he released his first album, Lack of Education, which mostly contained cover versions of other musicians" songs, including Curtis Mayfield"s "Right On Foreign The Darkness".
In 1976 he began performing for tourists and vacationers at Nantucket. He decided to move there, and started to write more songs.
The following year he recorded a second album, Telling the Truth, in New New York austere production.. dictated by the fact it was recorded in a single day." He again released the album himself, and mainly sold it at performances. In the early 1990s he moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he continued to perform and still resides.
He retired from live performance in 2002, after recording and releasing a live album, Brother Bill.
"Right On Foreign The Darkness" was included on several compilation albums of rare soul music, and was recognised as a highly collectible record, but Wright remained a relatively obscure figure until 2011, when Telling the Truth was reissued on Civil Defense by the Numero Group. The interest that this generated led Wright, despite the onset of Parkinson"s disease, to record a new album, This Is Not A Dream, in Burlington, Vermont. The album was issued by Green Coil Records in 2012.
