Bell was born on the Davis Plantation, near
Fort Deposit, Alabama. As a child he moved with his family to
Greenville, Alabama. An older cousin, Joe Pat Dean, took Bell to
Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in 1919, where he learned to play the blues. In the early 1920s, Bell worked in agriculture and performed as a blues musician, often with his friend Pillie Bolling. He performed many times in
Philadelphia and
Ohio. His debut recording, of his own songs "Mamlish Blues" and "The Hambone Blues," was part of a four-song session for
Paramount Records in
Chicago in 1927. The word
mamlish is of unknown origin; it was used in several blues recordings of that period. He next recorded in April 1929, cutting eight songs for
QRS Records, billed on the releases as Sluefoot Joe, with
Clifford Gibson playing guitar and piano. The rest of his recordings were made in
Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929 and 1930, and released by
Columbia Records; on these records, he was billed as Barefoot Bill from Alabama. Bell and Bolling played together on two tracks, "I Don't Like That" and "She's Got a Nice Line". Bell's own songs of that time include "Squabbling Blues", recorded on April 20, 1930, in which the singer, close to death, asks that if people are unable to agree on who should have his body, then it should be thrown in the sea, so they would "quit squabblin' over me". Barefoot Bill's songs tend to themes of imprisonment and voodoo. Eventually tiring of the life of a traveling blues musician, Bell became a Baptist preacher, married and settled in
Montgomery, Alabama. Bell died in Greenville in 1960, 1965 or 1966. One source suggests that he may have died during a
civil rights march; other sources suggest that his death was due to
natural causes, murder on account of his involvement in the civil rights movement, or
black magic. ==Legacy==