Jody Williams

Retired from the Chicago blues business for decades and now back again and sounding as good as ever, Jody Williams' stinging lead guitar work is still stirringly felt every time someone punches up Billy Boy Arnold's "I Was Fooled," Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love," Otis Spann's "Five Spot," or Williams' eerie minor-key instrumental masterpiece "Lucky Lou."

Born in Alabama, Joseph Leon Williams moved to Chicago at age six. He grew up alongside Bo Diddley, the two trading licks as kids and playing for real by 1951. By the mid-'50s, Williams was ensconced as a Chicago session guitarist of high stature, but he began to grow disenchanted when the signature lick he created for newcomer Billy Stewart's Argo waxing of "Billy's Blues" was appropriated by Mickey Baker for the Mickey & Sylvia smash "Love Is Strange." Baker apparently caught Williams playing the riff in Washington, D.C., at the Howard Theatre. When the legal smoke had cleared, Diddley's wife owned the writing credit for "Love Is Strange" and Jody Williams had zipola by way of monetary compensation.

Williams made his recording debut (singing as well as playing) as a leader for powerhouse deejay Al Benson's Blue Lake imprint in 1955: "Looking for My Baby" was credited to Little Papa Joe. That alias pattern held in 1957, when Argo unleashed "Lucky Lou" and its sumptuous slow blues vocal flip "You May" as by Little Joe Lee (quite a band here -- saxists Harold Ashby and Red Holloway, keyboardist Lafayette Leake, and bassist Willie Dixon). In 1960, Herald Records labeled him Sugar Boy Williams on "Little Girl." 1960s outings for Nike, Jive, Smash, and Yulando rounded out Williams' slim discography.

Jody Williams dropped out of the blues game and went to work at Xerox as a technical engineer. He retired in 1994 and began to think about getting back into music. In 1999 at the urging of producer Dick Shurman, he went to a blues club for the first time in many, many years to see his old friend Robert Jr. Lockwood. Soon after that visit, Williams broke out some old tapes he made in 1964, liked what he heard so much that it brought tears to his eyes, and decided to recapture the sound he created back when he was a top sessionman. After playing some gigs in 2000 and 2001, Williams and Dick Shurman went into the studio to cut his first solo album. Return of a Legend was issued in 2002, garnering rave reviews and sparking newfound interest in one of the unsung heroes of the blues guitar.

from Wikipedia:

Jody Williams (born October 9, 1950, in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA) is an American teacher and aid worker who received the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the campaign she worked for, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). Williams first trained as a teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL), receiving a BA from the University of Vermont in 1972 and a Master's degree in teaching Spanish and ESL from the School for International Training (also in Vermont) in 1974. In 1984 she received a second M.A. in International Relations from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She taught ESL in Mexico, the United Kingdom, and finally Washington, D.C. before her first appointment in aid work, becoming a grocery worker of the "Nicaragua-Honduras Education Project" from 1984 to 1986. She then became deputy director of a Los Angeles-based charity, "Medical Aid for El Salvador", a position which she held until 1992 when she took up her position with the newly formed ICBL.

The organization ultimately achieved its goal in 1997 when an international treaty (Ottawa Treaty) banning antipersonnel landmines was signed in Ottawa in 1997 (though some nations, notably the United States, People's Republic of China (PRC), and Russia refrained).

One broader aspect of Williams' work was her pioneering use of People Power: massively distributed collaboration in trans-national political action, initially via fax and eventually via email—Williams' own explanation,

Imagine trying to get hundreds of organizations – each one independent and working on many, many issues – to feel that each is a critical element of the development of a new movement. I wanted each to feel that what they had to say about campaign planning, thinking, programs, actions was important. So, instead of sending letters, I’d send everyone faxes. People got in the habit of faxing back. This served two purposes – people would really have to think about what they were committing to doing before writing it down, and we have a permanent, written record of almost everything in the development of the campaign from day one.

Williams continues to serve the ICBL as a campaign ambassador and editor of the organization's landmine report, and, since 2003, has held a faculty position of distinguished professor of social work and global justice at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work.

In 2006, Williams was one of the founders of The Nobel Women's Initiative along with sister Nobel Peace Laureates Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Shirin Ebadi, Wangari Maathai, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan Maguire. Six women representing North America and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa decided to bring together their experiences in a united effort for peace with justice and equality. It is the goal of the Nobel Women's Initiative to help strengthen work being done in support of women's rights around the world.

She was the Head of Mission of the High-Level Mission dispatched by the Human Rights Council to report on the situation of human rights in Darfur and the needs of Sudan in this regard (established at the 4th special session of the Human Rights Council in decision S-4/101). The Mission issued its report on March 7, 2007.