Jontavious Willis is not only a Grammy nominated blues artist, but the 28-year-old musician is also a scholar of the form.

A conversation regarding the recent books on Robert Johnson, which have demythologized Johnson’s origins while emphasizing his practice regimen and craft, leads Willis to reference Johnson’s antecedents.

“Even though Robert Johnson was a great player, there was almost 20 years of recorded blues going on before he ever recorded,” Willis points out. “‘The Memphis Blues’ came out in 1914, when Robert Johnson was 3 years old. I’d describe him as the third generation of blues artists. Some of the first generation was born right after slavery, like Jim and Andrew Baxter from Georgia. You also have Henry Thomas and Frank Stokes, who were both born in the 1870s. Then you have the older folk who were born in the late-19th century, like Ma Rainey, Sippy Wallace, Papa Charlie Jackson and Lead Belly. They were born in that generation where they weren’t calling it blues; they were calling it reels or they were just calling it folk music. After that, you come into the generation of the people born in the early 1900s, like Son House, Scrapper Blackwell and all those folks.

“So Robert Johnson was just a great musician, who like most of us went down to the crossroad with hard work and dedication. You can hear that when you listen to him but you can also hear the people who influenced him because he put in all the effort. That’s what dedication does.”

As Willis considers some of these pioneering blues figures, he makes another point that is also applicable to his own life and work. “To us, the people who were writing those songs and later making those recordings, seemed like they were really old,” he notes. “But if you think about it, so many of them were creating all that while they were in their 20s.”

Willis was 14 when he first connected with the blues, initially as a fan. He grew up in the small, rural town of Greenville, Ga., where he sang gospel at the local Baptist church. Then, one day he happened upon a YouTube video of Muddy Waters playing “Hoochie Coochie Man.” Willis recalls, “When I saw him playing in front of a Black audience, it reminded me of church where the pastors had motivated me to want to be a performer.”

Although Willis began on an electric guitar, within a matter of months, he gravitated to an acoustic, which he found at a yard sale. He explains, “Once I started playing on the acoustic, I fell in love. I don’t think of it as unplugged. A lot of folks use the electric guitar approach on the acoustic, but I feel like acoustic is its own thing. It’s got such a nice, warm voice and you don’t have that sustain or anything between you and the music.”

While he is a particularly gifted fingerpicker and is also adept with a slide, Willis emphasizes that this is only one aspect of his art. “I like to think of myself as a blues singer who plays blues accompaniment,” he remarks. “I like singing the blues. I listen to a lot of the early blues singers, and the key to the blues is the story. You can’t have the story without words. So to me, the voice is always front and center and should be the most important part of the blues.”

Willis has been lauded for this approach. His 2016 debut recording, Blue Metamorphosis, won the Blues Foundation’s International Blues Challenge Award for Best Self-Produced CD. His follow-up, 2019’s Spectacular Class, garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Blues Album.

Spectacular Class was produced by Keb’ Mo’, with Taj Mahal serving as executive producer. This pairing ensued after Willis opened for both of these blues icons on their TajMo tour in 2018. Mahal had discovered Willis’ music a couple years earlier, hailing him as “my Wonderboy, the Wunderkind” and identifying him as “a great new voice of the 21st century in the acoustic blues.”

Although Willis expresses deep admiration for his mentors, when it came time for his third record, he was eager to apply all his accumulated knowledge and once again occupy the producer’s chair. He began with over 200 songs, which he eventually winnowed down to the 15 that appear on West Georgia Blues. The sessions took place at Capricorn Studios in Macon, Ga., where his friend Jon Atkinson served as engineer and also contributed guitar to a song.

When it came time to enlist his studio collaborators, Willis had a particular goal in mind. “I didn’t just want to get session musicians who could play blues because, once you do that, then I think it sounds like a backing track more than a living thing,” he says. “I wanted to make sure that I was in the studio with musicians who had a knowledge of blues or appreciation of blues close to or just as much as I do. So if you’re playing bass, I want you to reference Ransom Knowling, Willie Dixon or Joe McCoy. If you’re playing piano, I want you to reference Sunnyland Slim, John Davis or Roosevelt Sykes. If you play harmonica, it’s Sonny Boy I or Little Walter.”

The resulting album, which debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard Blues Albums chart, manifests the energy and intent that Willis envisioned.

He is particularly proud of his storytelling on the record. As he considers the 15 tracks, Willis observes, “Some of the songs may sound like they’re old but that’s because I’m from a place where people talk a certain way and live a certain way. I’m from the country, and I like country blues, so I try to keep it in that realm.

“I think a lot of folks feel like you have to compromise the sound of the blues to make it progressive. I like modern music but I mostly listen to the blues. Again, it’s like those artists from Robert Johnson’s time and before him. They were young people playing music who wanted to represent themselves. That’s exactly how I feel, and the blues allows me to do it.”