One of nine children born of unknown sharecroppers, Robert Williams (Pete was a teenage nickname) was raised on Mr. Anderson’s place in Zachary, Louisiana, and worked in the fields there from childhood. Uneducated, in 1934 he started to practice on a homemade guitar made up of a cigar box and five copper strings, and subsequently he played parties, dances, and fish fries in his native area and in Baton Rouge into the 1950s.
In 1948 Williams married his third wife,...