LV at 25 is an occasional series about the history of Little Village, as the magazine celebrates its 25th year in print.
What’s in a name? In Little Village‘s case, a little bit of chaos sparked decades before its first issue appeared around Iowa City in July 2001.
As LV’s 25th anniversary approaches, this seems like an appropriate time to explain how this publication got its title. After all, Dec. 5 was the birthday of blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson II.
Any story involving Sonny Boy Williamson II and names should probably start by acknowledging Sonny Boy Williamson II wasn’t his name. At least not when he was born in 1912 (or possibly 1897) in Greenwood, Mississippi (or possibly Money, Mississippi). As a baby, he was known as Alex (or possibly Aleck) Ford. Growing up, he was known as Rice Miller. When he started his musical career in the 1930s, playing for tips in places around the Mississippi Delta, he performed under the name Little Boy Blue. Then in 1941, he got his big break when he was booked to perform on the King Biscuit Time radio show on station KFFA in Helena, Arkansas. That’s when he became Sonny Boy Williamson.
Exactly what happened is a little unclear, but it seems Interstate Grocery Co., which manufactured King Biscuit baking flour and sponsored the radio show, was looking for a way to boost sales of its Sonny Boy brand cornmeal to Black communities around Arkansas and the Delta. The company decided to use a newly renamed Sonny Boy to promote the corn meal, featuring him on the radio show and sending him out to perform at markets. They probably felt sure the name Sonny Boy Williamson would get people’s attention. That’s because there was already a famous blues musician named Sonny Boy Williamson.
The original Williamson (whose last name really was Williamson) lived in Chicago at the time, so perhaps Interstate Grocery and the newer Williamson didn’t think he’d notice. He did, and reportedly confronted the newer Williamson. After that, Clark/Miller/Little Boy Blue/Williamson became Sonny Boy Williamson II, as a way to indicate he wasn’t the original Williamson. That remained his name until he died in 1965.
Skip forward to Iowa City in the 1990s, where there’s an excellent publication in the alt-weekly tradition called Icon. In the late ’90s, a publishing company based in Indianapolis, Yesse! Communication, Inc. — which really did have an exclamation point in its name for some reason — bought an 80 percent interest in Icon. The company had been buying alt weeklies around the Midwest, as part of its master-plan to create a giant advertising network. The plan failed quickly, and Yesse! began shuttering the papers it had bought. The lights went out at Icon at the beginning of 2001. But members of Icon’s staff weren’t going to be stopped by a corporate decision in Indianapolis.
Matt Steele, who started working at Little Village as a volunteer in 2002 while he was a student at UI, explained what happened next, and how LV got its name, in a 2017 interview.
Beth Oxler was the art director with Icon, and she was a part of the relaunch with Little Village, and they were over at Beth’s house trying to figure out what they’re going to call this thing. And there’s a Sonny Boy Williamson song that’s pretty funny; it’s called “Little Village,” and Beth’s husband, an Iowa City blues musician Dave Zollo, was sort of razing them from the other room and he’s like, “you should call it Little Village, motherfucker!” And that was almost a direct quote from this Sonny Boy Williamson song, and it stuck.
It did stick. But “Little Village motherfucker!” isn’t from the song, although it is from the 1957 recording session where Williamson II performed “Little Village.”
After producer Leonard Chess started taping, he asked Williamson, “What’s the name of this?” A clearly annoyed Williamson replied, “‘Little Village.’ ‘A Little Village,’ motherfucker! ‘A Little Village!’”
A more-or-less good-natured argument followed.
Chess: “There isn’t a motherfucking thing there about a village, you son of a bitch! Nothing in the song has got anything to do with a village.”
Williamson: “Well, a small town.”
Chess: “I know what a village is!”
Williamson: “Well alright, goddamn it! You know, you don’t need no title. You name it up, you. I got to get through with it, son of a bitch. You name it what you wanna. You name it your mammy, if you wanna.”
After that, the music starts. Chess left the exchange — motherfuckers and all — in the final version of the recording, which helped “Little Village” achieve a certain legendary status among blues records. Fortunately, for us, Dave Zollo decided to yell “Little Village, motherfucker!” that night in 2001, and not “You name it your mammy, if you wanna.”
The name, however, has led to confusion over the years. Some people assume “Little Village” must be a nickname for Iowa City (it’s not) or that the magazine is somehow named for the Little Village neighborhood in Chicago. But the name does point to an important part of LV’s ethos: remaining local and independent.
Little Village has had a few owners/publishers over the years, but they’ve always been associated with the magazine before taking over. Matt Steele, who started out as a volunteer selling LV T-shirts on the Pentacrest as part of the starting-from-scratch magazine’s efforts to raise money to cover the printer’s bill, became owner/publisher in 2010. He transformed LV into the magazine you know today, produced at a real office (not someone’s dining room table) by a staff with adult-size paychecks.
After he moved to Washington State, Matt wanted to make sure LV remained locally rooted and started to look for the next owner/publisher. At the end of last year, he sold LV to Jordan Sellergren, who joined the staff in 2014 and had been LV’s art director since 2016.
So, 25 years after an out-of-state corporation killed Icon, Little Village is still alive and still local, motherfuckers.
