Reading Time: 5 minutesYou may not know Spencer Williams by name, but I bet you know “Everybody Loves My Baby, but My Baby Don’t Love Nobody but Me,” or maybe “Basin Street Blues.” Perhaps you can even sing a few lines of “I Ain’t Got Nobody.” Spencer Williams composed from 200-500 songs, many of which were imbued with a deep sense of nostalgia for the New Orleans he knew in the 1910s (Edwards, n.d.; Chilla, 2022). He was known for being an original, and though some might warmly critique his ideas as ‘shortwinded’ and his harmonies as ‘modest,’ they would still agree “he could write a tune that got to the subject” (“Quite a Moment,” 1965).