Willa Mae Buckner

Willa Mae Buckner was born on June 15th, 1922 in Augusta, Georgia. In her days as a touring performer, Buckner was known as “The Wild Enchantress,” “Princess Ejo,” “The Snake Lady,” and “The World’s Only Black Gypsy.” Buckner was a fearless woman who taught herself piano at age 21 and picked up the guitar at 35. She was known for many different lives: she knew seven languages, traveled with her own circus/snake show, was a guitar slinging burlesque dancer, and “settled down” by owning 28 snakes at the end of her life.

As to what Willa Mae Buckner meant to American music in the twentieth century, it’s hard to say. Her libidinous signature songs, “Peter Rumpkin” is not particularly well-known, and her music is available only on two compilations distributed by the nonprofit Music Maker Relief Foundation of Pinnacle, North Carolina. Buckner was a genuine trailblazer, though, an attraction on the ill-documented carnival and medicine show circuit. Like long-dead medicine show vets Pink Anderson and Peg Leg Sam, Willa borrowed liberally from vaudeville, knowing full well that the strange, sexy or hilarious was more likely to draw paying customers than the heartfelt and forlorn.

She was from the pre-television, segregation era, and Willa was a star. People think the blues is just Muddy Waters. In Southern, working-class African-American communities, though, they might not even know who Muddy Waters was, but they know Willa because she came to play the tent show every year. Three generations of people came out to see her snake shows. Buckner worked all sorts of carnival shows in the early years of her career. “I worked the nail bed,” she told Welker. “I ate fire. I also did the bronze dance: That’s where you go all over the body with mineral oil and you put that gold paint on. You did contortions when you were in that stuff, and if you weren’t careful you’d fall flat on your rear or your belly.” In 1946, Willa decided to get off the road and settle in Spanish Harlem. She sewed, worked at restaurants and in other people’s homes, and studied foreign languages at night school. She also took lessons in tap and gypsy-style belly dancing and played with a Calypso band in small clubs.

She was 42 when she began making plans to get back on the road. The 1964 World’s Fair was held at Flushing Meadow in the New York City borough of Queens, and among the featured performers was a Moroccan snake handler. After building a healthy collection of 28 snakes, she went to Philadelphia, bought a truck and a tent, and joined up with a traveling sideshow. She began billing herself as Princess Ejo, The Wild Enchantress or The World’s Only Black Gypsy, and her snake shows were popular facets of various carnivals. In 1973, Willa’s truck broke down and she left sideshow life to settle near her family in Winston-Salem.

In January 1994, the Music Maker Foundation was formed and it began spreading the word about Willa and other “forgotten heroes of the blues,” That same year she went back to New York, this time to play Carnegie Hall as part of a show called Circus Blues. By the summer of 1999, Willa’s mind and body began to shut down. She made it through the holidays, dying early in the morning on Jan. 8.