Image via MSP Film
Staley Sharples’ Letterboxd page will receive its own documentary one day.
Swamp Dogg is one of the last true 20th Century American originals still standing, an eccentric and eclectic soulman long overlooked for his major contributions to R&B, folk, and country. But with the documentary, Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, the strange 60-year journey and complex genius of Jerry Williams Jr., has finally been captured in the right light.
Filmed over the course of seven years, Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted is framed within the playful absurdity that defines the musician, writer, producer, record label owner, music manager, father, and now, documentary star. Directors Ryan Olsen and Isaac Gale are intimately familiar with their subject, having connected during the making of Swamp’s acclaimed 2018 album Love, Loss, and Autotune. Olsen provided additional production on the project, and brought Gale in to shoot a music video for Swamp.
Upon discovering the interdimensional portal that is Swamp Dogg’s house, the decision to document Dogg, along with his live-in found family Moogstar and the late Guitar Shorty, was an instinctive decision for the filmmakers and their Marijuana Deathsquads bandmates. Gale puts it simply: “once you go to the house, you never want to leave.” Immersed in an alternate reality powered by brightly-lit TVs (Swamp Dogg loves television sets) and “a fleet of unnecessary automobiles” (which reached a total of nine at the collection’s peak), Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted is a portrait of Swamp Dogg at his most unexpected and unfiltered.
Claiming himself to be the original “dogg” of the music industry, Jerry Williams Jr. reasoned that a dog can “get away with stuff,” which reflects the security that the Swamp Dogg persona has brought to his wild, uncharted path to self-discovery. Swamp Dogg was born only after years of writing and performing music during the 1950s and 1960s. Originally known to the world as Little Jerry Williams – a name that the musician would later label “too soft”— he first found success with hits like “I’m The Lover Man”, which he originally penned for Frankie Valli.
At the height of the song’s popularity in 1964, a Vermont nightclub promoter booked Williams to perform before an audience of screaming fans. Following the set, the promoter pulled him aside to tell him that he hadn’t realized Williams was Black before inviting him. Experiences like this birthed Swamp Dogg, Williams’s “ass kicker” who could protect his deep sensitivity and curiosity while boosting his bravado and magnetic weirdness. With a cup of coffee in hand by his “dry, dilapidated pool,” Williams peers deep into the heart of this alter ego. A pivotal scene in the documentary finds him wryly musing, “what Swamp Dogg truly was about was being somebody else while I looked for Jerry Williams, cause I had lost him somewhere along the line.”
Williams’s self-doubt and anxiety is part of what makes his work so relatable. Despite the tough-guy, swaggering exterior, the Virginia native has struggled with debilitating panic attacks throughout his life, stemming from the personal pressure to ensure that those around him were taken care of. Suffering from what felt like “five heart attacks a day,” Swamp Dogg was once “taking Zoloft like you eat M&Ms.” Although in the documentary, he claims that a small amount of acid was able to do wonders for his mental health.
It was the 1970s when Swamp Dogg “did all [his] crazy shit.” Prior to his 1972 reception in the country music mecca of Nashville in 1972, Swamp Dogg landed himself on the FBI’s watchlist for his involvement in Vietnam war protest group FTA (popularized by Jane Fonda.) He toured military bases and played controversial songs like “God Bless America For What.” According to Swamp, the United States Government viewed his “acts of resilience” as “acts of defiance” and targeted him. The conflict caused him to be dropped from Elektra Records for defying the conventional expectations of recording artists at the time. In translation, he did whatever the hell he wanted.
Despite the challenges, Williams never backed down in the face of adversity or absurdity. With the birth of the Swamp Dogg moniker came a torrent of too-crazy-to-be-true occurrences and business ventures. Aided by his beloved late wife Yvonne, the pair launched the SDEG (Swamp Dogg Entertainment Group), which nurtured the careers of the World Class Wrecking Crew and its members Dr Dre, Yella, and Alonzo Williams. The label’s most profitable release was Beatle Barkers, which featured covers of Beatles songs as performed by dogs, sheep, and other animals. Their most loyal buyer was a pet supply store in Spain, which purchased 30,000 cassette tape copies.
Swamp Dogg wrote hits for Gene Pitney, Tanya Tucker, and Conway Twitty, He racked up gold and platinum records, and a country crossover with the smash hit “Don’t Take Her, She’s All I Got.” He’s been sampled by Kid Rock and collaborated with Bon Iver and John Prine. Throughout it all, he’s never stopped making music.
In Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, directors Ryan Olsen and Isaac Gale capture the give-no-fucks essence of one of the great cult figures of American music. In these later decades of his life Swamp Dogg still finds himself looking for Jerry Williams, Jr.. He connects the most with bluegrass because to him, it encapsulates the human experience.
With the passing of his wife and his close friend Guitar Shorty, the next chapter is on Swamp Dogg’s mind. “If I’m lucky I got 20 more years here, but who gets lucky, you know?” he says in the film. “I got some stuff I want to leave for people to hear and know what I was about.”
His latest album, Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th Street, is a poignant encapsulation of the artist’s current mindset. In the search for himself, Swamp Dogg has released 26 full-length albums, produced and written countless hit singles, and changed the course of music history with his gonzo-style tongue-in-cheek approach to the classic Southern soul. Swamp Dogg’s philosophy is short and sweet: ”It’s fun being yourself, but you gotta find yourself.”
As it continues to screen at film festivals across America, I spoke with Ryan Olsen and Isaac Gale about the making of Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted.