"Weepin`" Willie Robinson, a blues singer who performed with Steven Tyler and Bonnie Raitt but also spent time homeless, has died at age 81.

Robinson had been a sharecropper, an Army veteran and a friend of performers, including B.B.

King. "He was truly the elder statesman of the (Boston) blues.

He was our godfather.

He was the most dear man," Holly Harris, host of "Blues on Sunday" on WBOS radio, told The Boston Globe for Monday`s editions. When he sang, "you knew he meant it because he had passion," Harris said. Robinson died in a fire started by a cigarette he was smoking in bed, the Boston Fire Department said. William Lorenzo Robinson, better known as "Weepin` Willie," was born in Atlanta, Georgia, July 6, 1926.

His early years were mostly spent outdoors in the fields of Winter Garden and Belglade, Florida, under a humid and unyielding sun picking tomatoes, potatoes, beans, and assorted crops.

After his mother died when he was 10, Willie and his father migrated with the harvest seasons in a canvas-covered truck, driving from Florida through the Carolinas to Virginia.

Throughout this time while he traveled on the muddied back roads and labored in the fields, Willie knew there had to be some other way to make a living.

"I didn`t like this.

It was too hard," he said.

On one trip to Cheapside, Va., Willie`s father had arranged to have him and a family friend head further north to Trenton, N.J.

"My father said he`d join up with me in a few weeks.

But I haven`t seen him since," he said.

"I was just a kid, 15." He went to work on a Trenton farm milking cows, driving tractor and truck, performing the usual chores of the day.

"I got sick of picking potatoes and the rest, so they let me drive the truck.

It was better than picking," he said.

After a year or so, he moved into the city and became a dishwasher.

When he was 17 though, he enlisted in the Army.

Willie recounts, "I told them I was 18, but I was really 17 ...

In the Army they told me to listen up and pay attention, because if you don`t pay attention you`ll have to take basic training all over again and not get a chance to go overseas.

So, I didn`t pay attention and I didn`t go overseas.

I wasn`t mad at nobody." After three years in the service, Willie met a friend who booked bands in Trenton, and he started working as master of ceremonies in a nightclub.

The club booked such luminaries as B.B.

King, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Jackie Wilson, and Little Richard.

While King, Bland, Wilson, and Richard carried their own MC, Willie was the house MC who`d tell jokes, dance, sing, and generally warm up the people before the main performers came out.

"I got to know a lot of people personally this way, B.B., Bobby Bland, Big Joe Turner, they all came through." When Willie first started MC-ing in Trenton, the owner said that he needed to change his name.

They first tried Willie the Weeper, but that didn`t really fit.

So Willie shortened it to Weepin` Willie, and has been ever since.

B.B.

King was most responsible for the development of Willie as an entertainer.

B.B.

told him that if he wanted to sing, "then just sing.

The rest will take care of itself." "But I don`t know any songs except your songs," Willie told B.B.

one night.

"Then sing `em," B.