SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SPRING, 2017
VOLUME FOUR NUMBER ONE
VOLUME FOUR NUMBER ONE
JILL SCOTT
DAVID MURRAY
(February 25--March 3)
OLIVER LAKE
(March 4–10)
GERALD WILSON
(March 11-17)
DON BYRON
(March 18-24)
KENNY GARRETT
(March 25-31)
COLEMAN HAWKINS
(April 1-7)
ELMORE JAMES
(April 8-14)
WES MONTGOMERY
(April 15-21)
FELA KUTI
(April 22-28)
OLIVER NELSON
(April 29-May 5)
SON HOUSE
(May 6-12)
JOHN LEE HOOKER
(May 13-19)
Son House
(1902-1988)
Artist Biography by Cub Koda
Son House's
place, not only in the history of Delta blues, but in the overall
history of the music, is a very high one indeed. He was a major
innovator of the Delta style, along with his playing partners Charley Patton and Willie Brown. Few listening experiences in the blues are as intense as hearing one of Son House's
original 1930s recordings for the Paramount label. Entombed in a
hailstorm of surface noise and scratches, one can still be awestruck by
the emotional fervor House
puts into his singing and slide playing. Little wonder then that the
man became more than just an influence on some white English kid with a
big amp; he was the main source of inspiration to both Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, and it doesn't get much more pivotal than that. Even after his rediscovery in the mid-'60s, House
was such a potent musical force that what would have been a normally
genteel performance by any other bluesmen in a "folk" setting turned
into a night in the nastiest juke joint you could imagine, scaring the
daylights out of young white enthusiasts expecting something far more
prosaic and comfortable. Not out of Son House,
no sir. When the man hit the downbeat on his National steel-bodied
guitar and you saw his eyes disappear into the back of his head, you
knew you were going to hear some blues. And when he wasn't shouting the
blues, he was singing spirituals, a cappella. Right up to the end, no
bluesman was torn between the sacred and the profane more than Son House.
He was born Eddie James House, Jr., on March 21, 1902, in Riverton, MS. By the age of 15, he was preaching the gospel in various Baptist churches as the family seemingly wandered from one plantation to the next. He didn't even bother picking up a guitar until he turned 25; to quote House, "I didn't like no guitar when I first heard it; oh gee, I couldn't stand a guy playin' a guitar. I didn't like none of it." But if his ambivalence to the instrument was obvious, even more obvious was the simple fact that Son hated plantation labor even more and had developed a taste for corn whiskey. After drunkenly launching into a blues at a house frolic in Lyon, MS, one night and picking up some coin for doing it, the die seemed to be cast; Son House may have been a preacher, but he was part of the blues world now.
If the romantic notion that the blues life is said to be a life full of trouble is true, then Son found a barrel of it one night at another house frolic in Lyon. He shot a man dead that night and was immediately sentenced to imprisonment at Parchman Farm. He ended up only serving two years of his sentence, with his parents both lobbying hard for his release, claiming self defense. Upon his release -- after a Clarksdale judge told him never to set foot in town again -- he started a new life in the Delta as a full-time man of the blues.
After hitchhiking and hoboing the rails, he made it down to Lula, MS, and ran into the most legendary character the blues had to offer at that point, the one and only Charley Patton. The two men couldn't have been less similar in disposition, stature, and in musical and performance outlook if they had purposely planned it that way. Patton was described as a funny, loud-mouthed little guy who was a noisy, passionate showman, using every trick in the book to win over a crowd. The tall and skinny House was by nature a gloomy man with a saturnine disposition who still felt extremely guilt-ridden about playing the blues and working in juke joints. Yet when he ripped into one, Son imbued it with so much raw feeling that the performance became the show itself, sans gimmicks. The two of them argued and bickered constantly, and the only thing these two men seemed to have in common was a penchant for imbibing whatever alcoholic potable came their way. Though House would later refer in interviews to Patton as a "jerk" and other unprintables, it was Patton's success as a bluesman -- both live and especially on record -- that got Son's foot in the door as a recording artist. He followed Patton up to Grafton, WI, and recorded a handful of sides for the Paramount label. These records today (selling scant few copies in their time, the few that did survived a life of huge steel needles, even bigger scratches, and generally lousy care) are some of the most highly prized collectors' items of Delta blues recordings, much tougher to find than, say, a Robert Johnson or even a Charley Patton 78. Paramount used a pressing compound for their 78 singles that was so noisy and inferior sounding that should someone actually come across a clean copy of any of Son's original recordings, it's a pretty safe bet that the listener would still be greeted with a blizzard of surface noise once the needle made contact with the disc.
But audio concerns aside, the absolutely demonic performances House laid down on these three two-part 78s ("My Black Mama," "Preachin' the Blues," and "Dry Spell Blues," with an unreleased test acetate of "Walkin' Blues" showing up decades later) cut through the hisses and pops like a brick through a stained glass window.
It was those recordings that led Alan Lomax to his door in 1941 to record him for the Library of Congress. Lomax was cutting acetates on a "portable" recording machine weighing over 300 pounds. Son was still playing (actually at the peak of his powers, some would say), but had backed off of it a bit since Charley Patton died in 1934. House did some tunes solo, as Lomax asked him to do, but also cut a session backed by a rocking little string band. As the band laid down long and loose (some tracks went on for over six minutes) versions of their favorite numbers, all that was missing was the guitars being plugged in and a drummer's backbeat and you were getting a glimpse of the future of the music.
But just as House had gone a full decade without recording, this time after the Lomax recordings, he just as quickly disappeared, moving to Rochester, NY. When folk-blues researchers finally found him in 1964, he was cheerfully exclaiming that he hadn't touched a guitar in years. One of the researchers, a young guitarist named Alan Wilson (later of the blues-rock group Canned Heat) literally sat down and retaught Son House how to play like Son House. Once the old master was up to speed, the festival and coffeehouse circuit became his oyster. He recorded again, the recordings becoming an important introduction to his music and, for some, a lot easier to take than those old Paramount 78s from a strict audio standpoint. In 1965, he played Carnegie Hall and four years later found himself the subject of an eponymously titled film documentary, all of this another world removed from Clarksdale, MS, indeed. Everywhere he played, he was besieged by young fans, asking him about Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and others. For young white blues fans, these were merely exotic names from the past, heard only to them on old, highly prized recordings; for Son House they were flesh and blood contemporaries, not just some names on a record label. Hailed as the greatest living Delta singer still actively performing, nobody dared call himself the king of the blues as long as Son House was around.
He fell into ill health by the early '70s; what was later diagnosed as both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease first affected his memory and his ability to recall songs on-stage and, later, his hands, which shook so bad he finally had to give up the guitar and eventually leave performing altogether by 1976. He lived quietly in Detroit, MI, for another 12 years, passing away on October 19, 1988. His induction into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1980 was no less than his due. Son House was the blues.
He was born Eddie James House, Jr., on March 21, 1902, in Riverton, MS. By the age of 15, he was preaching the gospel in various Baptist churches as the family seemingly wandered from one plantation to the next. He didn't even bother picking up a guitar until he turned 25; to quote House, "I didn't like no guitar when I first heard it; oh gee, I couldn't stand a guy playin' a guitar. I didn't like none of it." But if his ambivalence to the instrument was obvious, even more obvious was the simple fact that Son hated plantation labor even more and had developed a taste for corn whiskey. After drunkenly launching into a blues at a house frolic in Lyon, MS, one night and picking up some coin for doing it, the die seemed to be cast; Son House may have been a preacher, but he was part of the blues world now.
If the romantic notion that the blues life is said to be a life full of trouble is true, then Son found a barrel of it one night at another house frolic in Lyon. He shot a man dead that night and was immediately sentenced to imprisonment at Parchman Farm. He ended up only serving two years of his sentence, with his parents both lobbying hard for his release, claiming self defense. Upon his release -- after a Clarksdale judge told him never to set foot in town again -- he started a new life in the Delta as a full-time man of the blues.
After hitchhiking and hoboing the rails, he made it down to Lula, MS, and ran into the most legendary character the blues had to offer at that point, the one and only Charley Patton. The two men couldn't have been less similar in disposition, stature, and in musical and performance outlook if they had purposely planned it that way. Patton was described as a funny, loud-mouthed little guy who was a noisy, passionate showman, using every trick in the book to win over a crowd. The tall and skinny House was by nature a gloomy man with a saturnine disposition who still felt extremely guilt-ridden about playing the blues and working in juke joints. Yet when he ripped into one, Son imbued it with so much raw feeling that the performance became the show itself, sans gimmicks. The two of them argued and bickered constantly, and the only thing these two men seemed to have in common was a penchant for imbibing whatever alcoholic potable came their way. Though House would later refer in interviews to Patton as a "jerk" and other unprintables, it was Patton's success as a bluesman -- both live and especially on record -- that got Son's foot in the door as a recording artist. He followed Patton up to Grafton, WI, and recorded a handful of sides for the Paramount label. These records today (selling scant few copies in their time, the few that did survived a life of huge steel needles, even bigger scratches, and generally lousy care) are some of the most highly prized collectors' items of Delta blues recordings, much tougher to find than, say, a Robert Johnson or even a Charley Patton 78. Paramount used a pressing compound for their 78 singles that was so noisy and inferior sounding that should someone actually come across a clean copy of any of Son's original recordings, it's a pretty safe bet that the listener would still be greeted with a blizzard of surface noise once the needle made contact with the disc.
But audio concerns aside, the absolutely demonic performances House laid down on these three two-part 78s ("My Black Mama," "Preachin' the Blues," and "Dry Spell Blues," with an unreleased test acetate of "Walkin' Blues" showing up decades later) cut through the hisses and pops like a brick through a stained glass window.
It was those recordings that led Alan Lomax to his door in 1941 to record him for the Library of Congress. Lomax was cutting acetates on a "portable" recording machine weighing over 300 pounds. Son was still playing (actually at the peak of his powers, some would say), but had backed off of it a bit since Charley Patton died in 1934. House did some tunes solo, as Lomax asked him to do, but also cut a session backed by a rocking little string band. As the band laid down long and loose (some tracks went on for over six minutes) versions of their favorite numbers, all that was missing was the guitars being plugged in and a drummer's backbeat and you were getting a glimpse of the future of the music.
But just as House had gone a full decade without recording, this time after the Lomax recordings, he just as quickly disappeared, moving to Rochester, NY. When folk-blues researchers finally found him in 1964, he was cheerfully exclaiming that he hadn't touched a guitar in years. One of the researchers, a young guitarist named Alan Wilson (later of the blues-rock group Canned Heat) literally sat down and retaught Son House how to play like Son House. Once the old master was up to speed, the festival and coffeehouse circuit became his oyster. He recorded again, the recordings becoming an important introduction to his music and, for some, a lot easier to take than those old Paramount 78s from a strict audio standpoint. In 1965, he played Carnegie Hall and four years later found himself the subject of an eponymously titled film documentary, all of this another world removed from Clarksdale, MS, indeed. Everywhere he played, he was besieged by young fans, asking him about Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and others. For young white blues fans, these were merely exotic names from the past, heard only to them on old, highly prized recordings; for Son House they were flesh and blood contemporaries, not just some names on a record label. Hailed as the greatest living Delta singer still actively performing, nobody dared call himself the king of the blues as long as Son House was around.
He fell into ill health by the early '70s; what was later diagnosed as both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease first affected his memory and his ability to recall songs on-stage and, later, his hands, which shook so bad he finally had to give up the guitar and eventually leave performing altogether by 1976. He lived quietly in Detroit, MI, for another 12 years, passing away on October 19, 1988. His induction into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1980 was no less than his due. Son House was the blues.
A Preacher, A Killer: the incredible story of Son House, king of the Delta Blues
How the life and legacy of one of the most influential bluesmen of them all was dragged from obscurity
“They came to Rochester seeking an older black man who had been a blues musician in Mississippi before World War 2,” wrote blues historian Daniel Beaumont in his book Preachin’ The Blues: The Life & Times Of Son House.
“Their search had begun with some liner notes on a record album and some mistaken information from another blues musician about the man’s whereabouts. But following a trail of tips, they had finally spoken to the man himself by telephone from Memphis two days earlier.”
The rediscovery of Delta bluesman Eddie James “Son” House Jr is one of the most fascinating tales in 20th century music. As Beaumont reports in his highly-recommended book, the search for House took blues obsessives Nick Perls – “a skinny 22-year- old New Yorker” – and his two companions, Dick Waterman [then a freelance writer for The National Observer] and Phil Spiro on a journey into the deep south. “The trip – long, hot and cramped – had taken the three young men from New York City to Memphis. From that city on the banks of a new-world Nile, their search had led them down into sweltering small towns and plantations of the north Mississippi Delta.”
When they did finally track down Son House, they found him living in obscurity in Rochester, New York. House had given up playing music in the early 40s when he moved to the city. He who had run with Charley Patton, mentored and inspired Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and cut blues masterpieces My Black Mama Part 1 and Part 2. The latter provided the foundation for his best known recording Death Letter Blues cut in 1965, a song knitted into the DNA of Jack White. House was a complex character. As a preacher, he’d once shunned secular music – or the devil’s music as it seemed to southern Christians. He killed a man in 1928 and found himself in Parchman Farm, aka the Mississippi State Penitentiary. On his release, he fell in with Charley Patton and his place in blues folklore was secured.
Robert Johnson’s rediscovery and subsequent icon status – though well deserved – has obscured the importance of Son House to all but the most informed of blues aficionados. A four-day celebration of the man’s life and legacy held in Rochester, New York last year told his story through music, theatre, film and lectures. It revealed how, after his rediscovery, House began recording and performing again – after relearning his style with the help of guitarist Al Wilson of Canned Heat. The Delta veteran found himself in demand again, not least in Europe, which is where we find him in this archive interview from Sounds magazine from 1970.
It was the final day of Eddie “Son” House’s final sortie away from the US. Outside, the rain was pouring down; inside the car sat Son, apparently oblivious to the surroundings, singing I Wanna Go Home On The Morning Train.
Someone broke the spell by pointing out that Son would be flying back to his home in Rochester, New York, and the old gent laughed good-naturedly and then nodded in concordance, as though humouring the other man.
For a man of 69, it had been a strenuous tour, recording an album one minute, then appearing for the BBC, then a long drive to a northern venue, back to London’s 100 Club and so on.
Yet throughout the entire month, Son was never less than dignified and amicable as he chatted affably with the hundreds of European blues hounds who milled to catch a few words with the great man at every gig he played. It was as though Son, neatly clad in frilled shirt, bow tie and ubiquitous hat, was determined to put on a good stand as the sole survivor of the idiom which produced from the deep south men like Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson and Skip James, and their progeny Bukka White and Muddy Waters.
Son House is akin to an opening batsman who is still undefeated when the innings is closed and all the others are out. His return to New York State for the last time is a sad farewell, for his retirement marks the end of an era.
The tour had only been made possible because of the close link between Dick Waterman and The Blues Foundation, coupled with the bona fide intention of both factions to put a little cash into Son’s pockets for his retirement.
“Sure I enjoyed the trip but I wanna have finish with all the thissin’ and thattin’; I wanna git back to Rochester and see if the ol’ lady’s still there,” Son remarked.
But he was happy to cast a tired and troubled mind back across the rugged path, which has been lifted straight out of context for the interest of endless blues devotees. From the horse’s mouth, so to speak, the recounting of Son’s profligacy seemed all the more stark and paradoxical.
“Five or six years ago now I ran into a little trouble and had to kill a guy. I spent eight days in jail in New York City, but the judge and everybody, they knew it wasn’t my fault, and that I had to do it, and they let me go out on probation or somethin’. Some years ago when I was younger I used to get into a little more trouble because I didn’t have the brains I should have had then. If my mind had been like it is now, then I wouldn’ve been stuck in jailhouses and pens,” Son admitted, making his tale sound for all the while as though he were reading it straight from a story book.
“I like friends, and I don’t want to know about no nasty folks. Because I didn’t keep track of some of these guys, [that’s] why they’ve beaten me outta money, cos I was an easy guy to get along with. I got some money, but never nothing like what was due to me. D’you know, one guy promised me money for a recording and I didn’t see him no more for 10 or 15 years. Then we was at the Newport Festival and I says to Dick: ‘Yonder goes that guy.’ But I still don’t think I got all my money.”
Son is fully aware of his unique position. A legend in his own lifetime is one of the great misused phrases, but it could be fitted into every sentence of Son’s eulogy. He is now in frail health and suffers from short pangs; his hands are badly frostbitten and he knows that his time will come.
“All ’em old boys has left me by myself; they’s all dead and gone – Charley Patton, Blind Lemon, Willie Brown, Skip James,” he says. “I’m 69 now and it won’t be long before I’m 70; I may be old but you know I still have young ideas. I’ve been having these short fits – not illness like most people, sick and all that, but sometimes at nights I have some kind of spells and I’ll die like that one of these days. I don’t know I been ill but my ol’ lady tells me in the morning: ‘You know you was ill again last night.’”
But Son’s words are not pre-dooming, and scarcely conjure up any presentiments and premonitions; he is a happy man, with faith and determination. “A man’s mind, you know it has a lot to do with him; you can knock yourself out with it but you can do what you think you can do and what you’re determined to do.”
Gradually, the many qualities of Son House come to light, so that by the time you’ve finished talking to him you are thoroughly overcome by the impeccability of the man, who positively exudes the many blessings which make up perfection. Modesty is, perhaps, his chief asset.
What’ll you do when you get back to Rochester, Son?
“Why I’ll jus’ be cocking up my heels and resting awhile, watching TV as usual.”
What he didn’t mention was the fact that he was invited to play the final set on the final night of the mighty Ann Arbor Festival, which contained just about every famous blues personality. “It’s a massive festival, and only fitting and right that Son should be asked to provide the climax. The most he will do after that is a very occasional major package in the States, and the universities,” interrupted Dick Waterman, who in recent years has nurtured the blues like a newborn baby, and looked after the welfare of Skip James, Mance Lipscomb, JB Hutto, Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Arthur Crudup and others.
“It was in 1927 that I started playing what I call the real blues; just before that I didn’t like the blues because I was too churchy for all that. But when I saw these other guys playing then I wanted to learn too,” Son recalled.
He was particularly fascinated by early bottleneck players around his hometown of Clarksdale, and he adopted his own method of producing the whine up the treble strings – a copper ring which was to become the trademark of his music. Son is now using a piece of copper tubing, and has been known to use other implements including a penknife.
“I was born and raised in Clarksdale but Charley [Patton] was living in Jackson, Mississippi when I first ran into him. I couldn’t play the blues like him by just learning straight off. So I stayed around with him for a little while, then I moved on and ran into Willie Brown. We started playing together, Bill and me, and soon after that Charley was recording for Paramount and he wanted someone to play with him.
“I think Charley had heard people braggin’ on me, so me and Willie was talked into going down. So then there was Willie, me and Louise McGhee. Blind Lemon was way up ahead of us, and he left us there.”
Charley Patton, Willie Brown and Son House all recorded for Paramount at Grafton, Wisconsin in May 1930. House’s sides included versions of My Black Mama, Preachin’ The Blues, Dry Spell Blues, Clarksdale Moan, Mississippi County Farm Blues and What Am I To Do Blues.
Muddy Waters, who also came from Clarksdale, is reported to have told writer Paul Oliver that Son was the best bluesman to play the jukes around Clarksdale. Muddy recalled that Son came from a plantation east of Clarksdale and played with the neck of a bottle over his little finger. Muddy admits to getting the idea from Son House, but felt that Son never came over as well on record as his live performances.
“A man from Jackson wanted us to make some records and he thought we was all sanctified folks, but we was just whiskey drinkers,” mused Son.“Then Charley died of pneumonia and me and Willie was up in Robinsonville at the time, and they wrote us a special; but there wasn’t nothing we could do nohow, so we just stayed right on and didn’t go the funeral.”
Around August 1941, Son and Willie recorded at Lake Cormorant for the Library Of Congress, and House’s Shetland Pony Blues, Fo’ Clock Blues, Camp Hollers, Delta Blues and Going To Fishing were subsequently released.
Son cut a further eight tracks for Alan Lomax at the General Store in Robinsonville in 1942, which were among his best sides. Six of these were reissued on an Xtra album with Jaydee Short. The sides are Sun Going Down, I Ain’t Goin’ To Cry No More, This War Will Last You For Years, Am I Right Or Wrong, My Black Mama and County Farm Blues. The other titles, Son’s famous Jinx Blues and The Pony Blues, a variant of his earlier Shetland Pony Blues, have recently been reissued on Roots. But most of the tracks have been retitled since they were originally recorded.
Son was given time off from the plantation to record for the Library Of Congress: “I was a tractor driver for six or seven dollars a week, but it didn’t matter what you went out and did to yourself at the weekends so long as you was there ready to start on Monday morning. Willie and me had moved back from Jackson about 25 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee; we weren’t making much money and I was drivin’ the tractors and ploughing the mules. At the weekends we played the juke joints and rent parties. We didn’t sleep on Saturday night, then we’d play on all day Sunday and Sunday night.”
Son’s Library Of Congress recordings are significant, for they revealed him as a folk artist as well as a rough-edged blues singer. For example, This War Will Last You For Years is a song about the second world war, the words of which Son still remembers clearly. “There won’t be enough Japs to shoot a little game of crap,” Son recalls with a laugh. But on a more serious note, his County Farm Blues was a straightforward directive at the plantation farm gang system by which he and his fellow men were exploited.
These Library Of Congress sides are also important because they marked Son’s final association with the rural south. The following year he moved up to Rochester and lived in relative obscurity until his rediscovery by Dick Waterman in 1964. A year later he cut nine sides for Columbia with the assistance of his old friend Al Wilson from Canned Heat on harmonica. Thus the star had been reborn.
Since 1966, though, Son House had only recorded once, a very poor performance for Roots which had failed to capture any of the emotion and lyricism which we could expect, prior to his recent tour.
But the two sessions which took place before enthusiastic audiences at the 100 Club in Oxford Street, London, were indeed exemplary, and released on Liberty.
Said Dick Waterman: “Al Wilson was at the first session, and [Canned Heat guitarist] Henry Vestine too. In fact Al was playing better than I’d heard him in years.”
Earlier Canned Heat frontman Bob Hite had remarked that during Canned Heat’s stay in England it was unlikely that the path of the group would cross with that of Son House. On the previous occasion, Son had failed to recognise Al – a typical sign of the old blues singer’s fading memory.
“Son didn’t play badly anywhere on the tour,” Dick Waterman concluded. “But we came in four days later than expected, and were moving around staying overnight which was very tiring just before the St Pancras gig. Unfortunately, this was the one where everyone went to judge him, and it was unfortunately his worst. The next day he was great, and he should now really be playing four or five times a week. The trouble is that Son is almost incapacitated by the third finger on his left hand, so now he can only play in open tuning. He got frostbite back in January and will be seeing a doctor as soon as we get back.”
Anyone who follows Son’s progress across England will agree that there was nothing as bad as that terrible opening gig, and by the time he came to record all the magic had returned – the vocal intensity matching the flamboyant sweeping across the strings with the right hand, and the primitive indecisive “steeling” with the left. Levee Camp Moan, an untitled blues, Good Morning Little School Girl, I Wanna Leave On The Morning Train and This Little Light Of Mine were captured at the first session, plus How To Treat A Man, Death Letter assisted by Dave Kelly, and two unaccompanied hollers, Grinning In Your Face and John The Revelator, which Son also recorded for Columbia.
Throughout the tour – in fact throughout his career – Son has been involved in the church-versus-blues syndrome, and he is still careful to keep his religious and non-religious songs apart.
It is also interesting to note that while Son’s appraisal of the blues is no more than the fundamental problems between man and woman, he will not sing any songs which he calls “foolish”.
“I don’t like no foolish songs; I like ’em to mean something. Those songs have got to be about something.”
At the same time, Son House has marked a penchant for the introductory prefaces to his songs – little fragments of Son House philosophy, mostly with religious connotations, directed at a hushed audience, like a preacher addressing his congregation. Then, without further introduction, Son would pound into Levee Camp Moan, or Empire State Express or Death Letter and we would see not only the great man himself come alive, but also everything within striking distance. Of course, he can still perform – it is no matter for conjecture; certainly not comparable to a crowd of admirers gathering round an effete steam engine which is no longer functional but preserved for posterity. Rather the experience of a Son House performance is like witnessing the engine firing on all pistons – a study in kinetics with each part flowing as gracefully as the next.
Because of the mystique surrounding that other great Delta bluesman, Robert Johnson, Son House has tended to be slightly overshadowed. Thus it was interesting to hear first-hand of Son’s encounter with Robert and a further aid to understanding the chromatics and semantics of the blues environment.
“I first met Robert in 1933, I think in Robinsonville. I got friendly with his mother and father, and he was blowing Jew’s harp. Why, even then he could blow the pants off just about anyone, but he wanted to play guitar. When he grabbed a guitar, the people would ask why don’t he stop; he was driving ’em all crazy with his noise. Then he slipped off to Arkansas somewhere, but sure enough he came back and he found us. We was asking if he remembered what we’d showed him, but then he showed us something, and we didn’t believe what we saw. I said to old Bill: ‘That boy’s good.’
“But Robert was too quick to get excited and he’d believe everything the girls say; they’d be saying things to him and he’d be thinking they was meanin’ it; but we told him they didn’t mean no good, and he went and got killed on the levee camp.”
Son House and Dick Waterman have an acute understanding and Son is obviously pleased that Dick gave him the chance to work again. Earlier in Rochester, he worked as a porter at the New York Central. “But I quit the job and made up a song Empire State Express. Then I went back to the church for a while; cos if I see I’m doing the right thing, then I like to get on one side or the other and not straddle the fence.
“I don’t care as much about playing as I used to, and I’m not writing any new songs, although I don’t take no one else’s. I move the verses around, and although it don’t take long to write a new song, the trouble is managing to hold ’em. Sometimes I didn’t play for three and four and five years, and when you lay off for that long you miss a whole lot of it because your mind goes off and you forget a lot of the words.
“Dick’s been good to me – he’s a good boss. He got me another National guitar because mine was stolen while I was asleep. He already had Skip, so after he got me, he pulled us both together. I’m happy now playing a little round Rochester, and there’s a few royalties once in a while.”
The music of Son House and the heritage of American black culture have been passed down, and the style of music is now being expedited by people like Bukka White and Joe Williams, and the newer wave of Chicago musicians like Johnny Shines, JB Hutto and, of course, Muddy Waters. A lot of blues singers have been vastly over-recorded over the years, and a lot more have not been given the opportunities they deserved until they have been far too old to work. Such is not the case with Son House.
In June and July this year we heard the music as it was and also managed to apprehend a little from the man about his life and times. But the sight of an old man wrestling with his heavy steel guitar is a sad one and, I suppose, we are fortunate in having caught a glimpse of Son House at all.
Son’s album will be released by Liberty. It will be entitled John The Revelator, and opens with a monologue on the blues. Son then breaks into Between Midnight And Day, a slow blues with harp accompaniment provided by Canned Heat’s Bob Hite. Al is also present on I Wanna Go Home On The Morning Train, which precedes a new version of the much-recorded Levee Camp Moan. Son’s slow version of the gospel song This Little Light Of Mine leads into a monologue on God and the devil. Side two opens with a monologue on “thinkin’ strong” and then comes the favourite, Death Letter Blues. An incredible 15-minute version of How To Treat A Man, with Dave Kelly on second guitar, gives way to the two unaccompanied numbers John The Revelator and Grinning In Your Face. It’s a revelation of its own.
Son House - The essential playlist
Walkin’ Blues (1930)
Unknown until modern times, this turned up as a test pressing in a pile of discs destined for a dumpster. House later recorded the song solo, but here Willie Brown plays second guitar. It’s House’s most obvious legacy to Robert Johnson.
My Black Mama – Parts 1 and II (1930)
The guitar riff is that of Walkin’ Blues, but compared with that one-act play this six-minute performance is a full-length drama, relentless in its momentum. ’Tain’t no heaven, tain’t no burnin’ hell, where I’m goin’ when I die, can’t nobody tell.’
Preachin’ The Blues – Parts I and II (1930)
House testifies from the border between righteous and riotous, the life of a saved man and that of a man lost in the blues. It’s hard listening – no copy survives in good condition – but a masterwork.
Mississippi County Farm Blues (1930)
The death of Blind Lemon Jefferson was recent news, and House remembered him with a song based on his See That My Grave Is Kept Clean. It took three quarters of a century before a copy of this Paramount 78 was found.
Levee Camp Blues (1941)
House’s first recording for the folklorist Alan Lomax, a thick weave of sound, House’s slide guitar knotted around with harmonica, mandolin and second guitar. Imagine rolling up to a Saturday-night juke joint and finding these men were the band.
Camp Hollers (1941)
Lomax asked for unaccompanied “field hollers” and House obliged with this medley of verses from prison and levee camp life, appreciated and encouraged by his fellow musicians. No guitar, but the rise and fall of House’s voice is music enough.
The Jinx Blues (No 1) (1942)
From his second session with Alan Lomax for the Library Of Congress comes this demonstration of how close House was to Charley Patton – the snapped-string descending bass figure matches Patton’s on numbers like Moon Going Down.
Death Letter (1965)
Uncertain but hopeful, a generation of blues enthusiasts bought House’s comeback LP The Legendary Son House – Father Of Folk Blues, put it on, heard this, and breathed a sigh of relief. The old man had still got it. Or most of it.
Empire State Express (1965)
Another track from House’s “rediscovery” LP, this song, like Death Letter, remained in his repertory for the rest of his life. Here Canned Heat guitarist Al Wilson underpins House’s guitar part, accelerating with him to a triumphant climax.
Grinnin’ In Your Face (1965)
House wavered all his life between worldly music and God’s, and never let his audiences forget it: no performance passed without a sacred song, and this was his favourite. ’Just bear this in mind – a true friend is hard to find.’
https://www.allaboutbluesmusic.com/son-house/
SON HOUSE
When Son House was ‘rediscovered’ in 1964, he was a prized example of
what the Folk/Blues revival fans had been searching for. The power and
conviction of this old man as he slashed down on his battered resonator guitar,
rolled back his eyes and gave out a big lungful of his Blues, left no
doubt that this was the real thing. Here was a man who had lived at
Dockery Plantation in the late 20s when a group of spectacularly good
musicians were giving us an insight into the origins of the Blues.
Eddie James House Jnr. was born in 1902, and by the time he was 15 he was a wandering preacher, touring the Delta plantations evoking hell-fire with an impact and fervour that became a feature of his later Blues career. He developed a taste for corn-whisky, and when he picked up his first guitar at the age of 25, a change of occupation beckoned. It didn’t last long because he shot a man at a house party in 1928, and was given life in Parchman Farm Penitentiary. It took two years for his parents to arrange a re-trial, where his plea of self-defence was accepted on condition that he left town and never went back!
In Lula, about 25 miles north of Clarksdale, Son met Charley Patton, and although the men had radically opposing characters and an ongoing mutual antipathy, they respected each others’ playing. They performed all over the Delta with their friend Willie Brown, and in 1930 the trio travelled to Wisconsin to record for Paramount Records. Charley Patton had a hit with ‘Pony Blues’ the previous year, and Paramount were keen for more. They played together on several tracks, and each man cut a few solo efforts too. Son House’s ‘Preachin’ the Blues’, about how the Blues stole his Soul from the Baptist Church, is truly hair-raising in its demonic fury.
The three men continued to play around the Delta, and about this time they witnessed the remarkable transformation of Robert Johnson from barely adequate strummer to outstanding technical innovator on guitar. Son House is often given the credit for this, but the legend says Robert’s new talent was gained in a pact with the Devil. Following Patton’s death in 1934, Son House and Willie Brown continued their double act. In 1941 Alan Lomax recorded a session with the men for the Library of Congress, but shortly after this both men dropped out of sight.
When researchers, including the writer and producer Dick Waterman, ‘discovered’ Son House in Rochester NY in 1964, the old man claimed not to have touched a guitar in decades. Dick later said Alan Wilson
(later of Canned Heat), coached Son in how to play like he did in his
prime, as the old songs came flooding back. Son House revelled in his
‘living legend’ status, and when the Folk/Blues revival was boosted by
new interest in all forms of Blues music after the British Invasion of
the mid-sixties, he toured extensively in the USA and Europe. A
documentary film was made of his life-story in 1969, but next year Son
House fell into ill-health. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease
and Altzheimers, and had given up performing completely by 1976. He died
in Detroit in 1988.
Son House Discography
When
Son House was recorded in 1965, the music he made opened a window on
the world as seen from the Dockery Plantation forty years earlier.
When wide-eyed fans asked Son House about Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, they were speaking of legends, but in his replies he was just talking about his friends. When he picked up his guitar, he flipped back to a different era, and gave us a taste of how the Blues used to be.
Son House’s legacy is still heard in the 21st Century
https://jbonamassa.com/influence-son-house-delta-chicago-blues-2/
House would play for both white and black audiences, with the latter often taking place in Mississippi Juke Joints. One young man who went to see Son House every chance he could get was an aspiring blues artist also from Mississippi by the name of Muddy Waters. One particular Juke Joint, The Oil Mill Quarters, also often had another patron that would become of great importance to the blues – a young man by the name of Robert Johnson. Often, Johnson would plant himself on the ground right in between Willie Brown and Son House for the sake of studying their guitar playing like a master pupil. Johnson was interested in the playing of Son House, Willie Brown, and Charley Patton too – basically, any of the greats that he could catch and latch onto, he would try to absorb as much as possible.
"Death Letter", also known as "Death Letter Blues", is the signature song of the Delta blues musician Son House. It is structured upon House's earlier recording "My Black Mama, Part 2" from 1930. House's 1965 performance was on a metal-bodied National resonator guitar using a copper slide.
One commentator noted that it is "one of the most anguished and emotionally stunning laments in the Delta blues œuvre."[4]
Lyrically, the song is about a man who learns of the death of the woman he loves through a letter delivered to him early in the morning. The narrator later views her body on the cooling board at the morgue, attends her funeral, and returns to his home in a state of depression.
House's lyrics draw from traditional sources. Other blues musicians recorded related songs, including Lead Belly ("Death Letter Blues"), Ishman Bracey ("Trouble Hearted Blues"), Ida Cox ("Death Letter Blues"), Robert Wilkins ("Nashville Stonewall") and Blind Willie McTell ("On the Cooling Board").
The Influence of Son House on the Delta and Chicago Blues
Eddie James “Son” House, Jr. was born on March 21, 1902. Although not as famous to the average household as Robert Johnson, it is undeniable that Son House was one of the most important musicians of the Delta Blues genre and incredibly influential on later musicians, Robert Johnson included. House is known for the intensity and passion of his playing and singing, which may have been somewhat influenced by his time preaching in the church. Ironically, in his youthful days he was so into religion that he passionately hated the blues, which he saw as profane music. But by the age of 25, he had changed his mind and took up the blues himself, to everyone’s good fortune. Together with Charley Patton and Willie Brown, he became one of the leading musicians of the Mississippi Delta, although he was not particularly well known on a national level.
House would play for both white and black audiences, with the latter often taking place in Mississippi Juke Joints. One young man who went to see Son House every chance he could get was an aspiring blues artist also from Mississippi by the name of Muddy Waters. One particular Juke Joint, The Oil Mill Quarters, also often had another patron that would become of great importance to the blues – a young man by the name of Robert Johnson. Often, Johnson would plant himself on the ground right in between Willie Brown and Son House for the sake of studying their guitar playing like a master pupil. Johnson was interested in the playing of Son House, Willie Brown, and Charley Patton too – basically, any of the greats that he could catch and latch onto, he would try to absorb as much as possible.
Robert Johnson formally met Son House when he was around 19 years old; often he would be in the Juke Joint blowing a harmonica. House appreciated that the young man had some skill on that instrument, but knew that what Robert Johnson really wanted was to play the guitar. The Juke Joints would be a bit rough and Johnson’s family would often be concerned about him going there to listen, but he essentially paid them no mind and would often sneak out of the house when they were sleeping to go watch Son House and his musical peers play.
Robert Johnson got the idea in his head that Son House and Willie Brown should let Johnson play guitar during their set breaks when they would go outside to smoke. And he would but the results weren’t pretty, and patrons of the Juke Joints would complain about the terrible rackets that Robert Johnson would make with the instrument. Although House would scold the young Johnson for causing these musical disturbances, Son House admired how much Johnson wanted to learn how to play and ultimately began to give him some private lessons. Willie Brown would also give Johnson some lessons. After some time passed, Robert Johnson left town for awhile, but when he returned, he was like a new guitarist. Son House was floored at the incredible abilities that Johnson had gained in that time, which he discovered when Johnson had begged House to let him sit in and play one night.
Robert Johnson would incorporate portions or entire Son House songs into his repertoire. The song “Walking Blues” was a combination of musical and lyrical elements from House’s tunes “Walking Blues” and “My Black Mama”. Other covers included “Up Jumped the Devil” and “Preachin’ the Blues”. But House’s influence on Johnson goes beyond just covers – you can certainly hear the influence of House’s guitar and vocal styles in Johnson’s playing. So, in many ways, Johnson was a real protege of Son House.
Another protege of Son House was a bluesman by the name of Howlin’ Wolf. In 1938, Wolf came to Robinsonville where House was at the time, and the two musicians began to gig around the same circuit, including shows at the Oil Mill Quarters. This ultimately lead to Wolf playing harmonica along with House and Willie Brown. Musical friendship blossomed into socializing in other contexts too. At one point, Son House, Willie Brown and Howlin’ Wolf were dating a trio of sisters.
Muddy Waters considered Son House to be his most important influence in the blues. Wolf thought that Son House was essentially the greatest blues musician and caught him play when he could; he was especially fond of House’s bottleneck slide style of playing. Muddy Waters said of Son House, “That man was the king“. We think so too.
--Brian R. J&R Adventures
http://jasobrecht.com/son-house-deep-mississippi-delta-blues/
In the years before World War II, Son House created some of the purest, most powerful Mississippi Delta blues on record. Playing with partners Charley Patton and Willie Brown, he exerted a profound influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, both of whom copied his music and carried it to new generations. House’s influence still echoes through the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and many other musicians. In many respects, he is the true father of “deep blues.”
Watching Son House perform bottleneck guitar was akin to seeing a locomotive on a downhill run. Sitting tall in a straight-back chair, he planted both feet on the ground and tapped time with his left foot. He set his propulsive rhythms in motion by waving his right arm up and down, almost like a symphony conductor, in an arc that typically traveled above the upper bout of his guitar. He held his right hand very loose, and he’d typically strike a bass note with his thumb during his arm’s downward swoop and then strum the treble strings with his nails on the way down or with his fingertips on the way back up. He wore a metal slide on his left-hand ring finger, which he held at a 45-degree angle to gliss the strings. For certain high-note slides, such as those in the “My Black Mama”/“Death Letter Blues” riff, House had a peculiar way of plucking the high E string with his index finger, trigger-like, during his hand’s upswing. An extremely physical guitarist, House not only kept time with his left foot and swinging right arm, but his whole being – his head, neck, shoulders, and all the rest – seemed to vibrate to the rhythm of his song. While the figures he played were often rudimentary, his performances were extraordinarily dynamic.
Even more compelling than his guitar playing, Son House’s voice really caught attention. Be it a window-rattling, impassioned plea like “Levee Camp Moan” or transcendent a cappella gospel like “John the Revelator,” it came from somewhere deep within his psyche. For sheer strength of delivery, he was on a par with Bessie Smith, Blind Willie Johnson, and precious few others, and every note he sang was uniquely his own. Original and uncompromising, House’s blues are intense, anguished, and as powerful as any recorded. Small wonder that as young plantation hands in the 1930s, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters were mesmerized when they saw him perform. Waters, for one, gave credit where credit was due.
When Muddy Waters made his initial recordings, in August 1941 for the Library of Congress, his first selection, “Country Blues,” was based on House’s “My Black Mama” riff. (A few years earlier, Robert Johnson had also used the riff for his recording of “Walking Blues.”) After Waters finished cutting the song, Alan Lomax asked him about its origins. The song, Waters responded, “come from the cotton field and the boy what put the record out – Robert Johnson – he put out ‘Walkin’ Blues.’ But I knowed the tune ’fore I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House; that’s a boy that picks a guitar. I been knowing Son since ’29. He was the best. Whenever I heard he was gonna play somewhere, I followed after him and stayed watching him. I learned how to play with the bottleneck by watching him for about a year. He helped me a lot. Showed me how to tune my guitar in three ways – natural, Spanish, and cross-note.” “Natural” refers to standard tuning. For “Spanish” – open G – the guitar is tuned D G D G B D, low to high. “Cross-note” – open D – is D A D F# A D.
Asked whether Johnson or House was the better player, Muddy responded, “I think they both about equal.” In a Living Blues interview, Muddy Waters elaborated further, telling Jim O’Neal: “I consider myself to be what you might call a mixture of all three – I had part of my own, part of Son House, and a little part of Robert Johnson. Really, though, it was Son House who influenced me to play. I was really behind Son House all the way.”
* * * *
Eddie James “Son” House was born a couple of miles from Clarksdale, Mississippi – “a little past Riverton,” as he described it – on March 21, 1902. A “churchified” field worker in his youth, House attended sabbath school at the Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church and preached his first sermon at 15. He had vivid childhood recollections of the hollers of solitary mule drivers echoing across cotton fields. His father, Eddie House, Sr., blew horn in a band with his seven brothers and knew a few songs on guitar. When House’s parents separated, he moved with his mother to Tallulah, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg. For many years after that, House preached the gospel and worked in cotton fields.
Throughout his church-going days, House shunned guitar players. “Now, just to tell the truth by it,” he explained to Sing Out! magazine in the mid 1960s, “I was brought up in church, from a little boy on up, and I didn’t believe in no blues. I was too churchy. I didn’t believe in that, and I talked against it. Just putting your hands on an old guitar, why, looked like that was a sin.” Willie Wilson, an unrecorded bottleneck player from Mattson, Mississippi, changed his opinion: “People were all crowded around,” House explained. “This boy, Willie Wilson, had a thing on his finger like a small medicine bottle, and he was zinging it, you know. I said, ‘Jesus! Wonder what’s that he’s playing?’ I knew that guitars hadn’t usually been sounding like that. So I eases up close enough to look and I see what he has on his finger. ‘Sounds good!’ I said. ‘Jesus, I like that!’ And from there, I got the idea and said, ‘I believe I want to play one of them things.’”
House paid $1.50 for a battered guitar, and Wilson taught him to tune to an open chord. He fashioned a bottle neck into a slider and learned to match thumbed bass notes with treble slides. A few weeks later, Wilson backed House at his first juke appearance. House also admired James McCoy, who taught him “Hold Up, Sally, Take Your Big Legs Offa Mine” and slideless arrangements of “My Black Mama” and “Preaching the Blues,” which House adapted for bottleneck.
In 1928, House shot a man at a Saturday night frolic in Lyon, Mississippi. He pleaded self-defense and was convicted of manslaughter, drawing 15 years on the penal farm at Parchman. A judge reviewing the case freed him two years later and warned him never to set foot in Clarksdale again. House hotfooted it to the small settlement of Lula, Mississippi. There, a friend introduced him to Charley Patton. House had heard Patton’s Paramount 78s and regarded him as the Delta’s most famous bluesman. House settled in nearby Lake Cormorant and became drinking buddies with Patton. Teaming up, they performed at juke joints and picnics with another local bluesman, Willie Brown, who worked mostly as a sideman. Many times, House recalled, the trio would throw their guitars over their shoulders and walk four or five miles to a gig. They’d line up three chairs and drink and play together, taking turns singing verses.
During May 1930, Art Laibly of Paramount Records visited Charley Patton in Lula to encourage him to record some new 78s for the label in Grafton, Wisconsin. Patton requested that House, Willie Brown, and pianist Louise Johnson come along. Laibly agreed. House recalled that at the time, all three guitarists were playing Stellas: “Me and Willie, we ordered ours from Chicago. We used to get these catalogs – Montgomery Ward. They didn’t cost much at that time. Mine cost $11, and so did Willie’s.” Wheeler Ford, a member of the Delta Big Four singing group, was hired to drive the musicians to Grafton.
In what proved to be one of the monumental Delta blues sessions, House, Patton, Brown, and Louise Johnson all recorded on or about May 28th in a damp stone building with large rooms outfitted with sliding-panel baffles. Son recalled that Paramount used blinking lights to cue performers, and the studio’s playback capabilities allowed the performers to hear what they’d just recorded. House inaugurated his recording career with his mantra-like two-part masterpiece, “My Black Mama.”
Tuning his guitar to open-G tuning, he began both sides of the 78 with a slide flourish and then slipped into a propulsive, trancelike riff highlighted by a bottleneck gliss to the fifth fret of the high E string. House then re-tuned his guitar to open D and followed with his two-part “Preachin’ the Blues,” which Stefan Grossman points to as “probably the finest example of Delta blues, with that rhythmic bass pattern played against a melodic bottleneck line – this incredible driving force. Who else had that?” Unsurpassed examples of Delta blues singing, these 78s featured stream-of-consciousness lyrics. “We changed them songs around all the time,” House explained upon hearing the records decades later. “I probably never done it again that way anyhow.”
As the session progressed, House sang “Clarksdale Moan” and gave a gripping account of a disastrous drought in his two-part “Dry Spell Blues,” using a melody common to Willie Brown’s “M&O Blues” and parts of Charley Patton’s “Pony Blues.” At the urging of Laibly, who had informed him that Blind Lemon Jefferson had recently died, House worked out an arrangement of a Jefferson hit, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” giving it a new theme and renaming it “Mississippi County Farm Blues.” A final House track – “Walkin’ Blues,” with Willie Brown on second guitar – was discovered among a cache of Paramount test pressings offered at a yard sale in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1985. Pure juke, this version differs significantly from the one Robert Johnson recorded in 1936, incorporating the common “Good morning blues, blues how do you do?” lyric. Willie Brown recorded “M&O Blues” and “Future Blues” at the session, and Charley Patton recorded four fabulous sides – “Dry Well Blues,” “Some Summer Day,” “Moon Going Down,” and “Bird Nest Bound.” Louise Johnson, meanwhile, celebrated the joys of straight-up fornication with her piano-driven “On the Wall” and featured the vocal support of Son House and Willie Brown on “All Night Long Blues.” With the Great Depression kicking in, the 1930 Grafton session turned out to be the sole prewar commercial session for House, Brown, and Johnson. On his return to Mississippi, Son House proudly displayed the $40 he’d been paid by Paramount.
Son House spent the next decade working plantations around Lake Cormorant, driving a tractor from sunup to sundown for a dollar a day. Patton died in 1934, but House and Brown continued to play together at juke joints on weekends. At one point, they reportedly added a trombonist and drummer to the lineup. House was typically the featured singer, while Brown acted as “commentor” during their numbers.
During the summer of 1941, on the same trip that produced Muddy Waters’ first recordings, Alan Lomax and John Work set up near Lake Cormorant in Clack’s Store, which was wired for electricity and doubled as a juke. There they made many fine recordings of Son House with a hot country band featuring Willie Brown, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin on mandolin, and harmonica wailer Leroy Williams. House’s original songs “Levee Camp Blues” and “Walking Blues” provide rare samples of extended prewar juke music. House paid tribute to Patton with “Shetland Pony Blues,” and worked “Delta Blues” into a five-minute duet with Williams. House and Brown also collaborated on the haunting “Camp Hollers.”
In his book Land Where the Blues Began, Alan Lomax remembered House as a “handsome, sensitive, intelligent man,” and wrote of the session, “Of all of my times with the blues, this one was the best, better than Leadbelly, better than Josh White, Sonny Terry, and all the rest of them. . . . At the center of [the group] was Son House, a man transformed, no longer the quiet, affable person I had met, but possessed by the song, as Gypsies in Spain are possessed, gone blind with music and poetry.”
Lomax returned to Robinsonville on July 17, 1942, and interviewed House on disc. House recut “Walking Blues” and played “Special Rider Blues,” “The Pony Blues,” and the two-part “The Jinx Blues.” Lomax’s scribbled notes indicate that “Special Rider Blues” was House’s “first blues, picked up by note from an old boy. Learned in 1928. Key Spanish A.” “Depot Blues,” Lomax noted, was “learned from Willie Williams of Greenwood, Miss. Basic chord is open or E major position. W.W. known as Lemon. Learned in 1930.” When Lomax asked how he’d learned so many tunings, House responded, “Just felt around and found ’em.” House reprised Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” melody for his bottleneck lament “County Farm Blues.” In “The Jinx Blues,” House sang of being awakened by “jinx all around my bed” – a theme from Patton’s 1934 “Revenue Man Blues” – and described the blues as “a lowdown shaking chill,” a phrase Robert Johnson also used. With his superb vocals and sure-handed bottleneck, House was at the peak of his powers on these Library of Congress recordings. His performance netted him a bottle of Coca-Cola.
Around 1943, House moved to Rochester, New York, and took a job as a rivet heater in the New York Central Railroad dispatch shop where boxcars were assembled. After the war he was promoted to porter and assigned the Empire State Express run to Chicago, a job he held for more than a decade. He stayed pals with Willie Brown, buying him a ticket to Rochester in the early 1950s and visiting him in Mississippi in the fall of 1952. When he received a telegram a few weeks later notifying him that Brown had died, House quit playing music. As he later explained to Sing Out!, “I said, ‘Well, sir, all my boys are gone.’ That was when I stopped playing. After he died I just decided I wouldn’t fool with playing any more. I don’t even know what I did with the guitar.” After that House “went right” and joined the Amen Baptist Church. With the resurgence of interest in the blues in the early 1960s, several record collectors began scouring the South to find bluesmen who’d recorded before the war. In June 1964, after weeks of hard searching, young blues enthusiasts Dick Waterman, Phil Spiro, and Nick Perls learned in Mississippi that Son House was still alive. Waterman recounts, “We met a guy named Benny Brown. His son had once been married to Son House’s step-daughter. So we found the son: ‘You had once been married to Son House’s step-daughter?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Got her name, number?, ‘Yeah, yeah. I got her number.’ So we called her. We knew he was alive in’41, ’42. This is now twenty-something years later. ‘Your mother is married to the blues singer Son House?’ ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s right. Living in Rochester, New York.’ ‘Is he still alive?’ ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We talk, but they don’t have no phone.’ So they gave me the neighbor’s number. The neighbor went and got Son, and we spoke to him on Sunday, June 21, 1964. Spiro says, ‘Are you the Son House who recorded for Paramount Records or recorded for Lomax, and you knew Charley Patton?’ He says, ‘Say! Who is this, anyway? Yeah, that’s me. I done them things. I done them things. Yeah, that’s me.’ ‘Okay, we’re on our way!’ That day, Sunday, June 21, 1964, was the day that [Andrew] Goodman, [Michael] Schwerner, and [James] Chaney were led out of the Philadelphia, Mississippi, jail in Neshoba County, and were murdered – that same day. Crazed. And we were in Mississippi, and George Wallace was running for President under the motto of ‘Send them a message.’ So we were right in the middle of it, without really knowing what we were in the middle of.” House, it turned out, was living at 61 Grieg Street in Rochester.
The July 13, 1964, issue of Newsweek magazine covered his rediscovery, reporting that when the researchers found him, House informed them that he hadn’t played in four years: “They came back with a guitar the next day but he could not make his fingers behave. A little wine eased the strain. First he began to recall snatches of songs, then little phrases, and finally whole songs with their complicated harmonies. ‘You sure they want to hear this old music?’ he asked of his marveling audience. The next day they taped his blues. By the end of the week, record companies were actively competing for him, and this month’s Newport Folk Festival has happily altered its plans in order to make way for the return of Son House.”
While House attended Newport, Waterman says, he did not make it to the stage. “Although he was brought to Newport for the 1964 festival, he did not perform because he took sick and was in the hospital there. His first comeback appearance was actually at the Philadelphia Folk Festival about six weeks later in late August.” To alleviate tremors and quell his nervousness, House, by now deeply alcoholic, downed double shots of bourbon.
Son House’s special affinity for Dick Waterman is confirmed by the recollections of those who were on the scene and by the facial expressions in the many stunning photos Waterman took of the elder bluesman . With Waterman working as his manager, House signed with Columbia Records. Recording executive John Hammond, father of the bluesman with the same name, produced House’s 1965 Father of the Folk Blues album. Alan Wilson provided guitar support and showed the bluesmen how to play parts he’d long since forgotten. “When Al Wilson recorded with Son House,” Waterman says, “he was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He later moved to L.A. to be part of Canned Heat.” While House overhauled his lyrics, his arrangements – mostly in open G or D – came straight out of the past, albeit with less precise technique than on the early recordings. His open-G “Death Letter Blues,” for instance, paralleled “My Black Mama,” while “Levee Camp Moan” was similar to 1942’s “Low Down Dirty Dog Blues.” His original “The Jinx Blues” echoed through “Empire State Express.” The potent a cappella “Grinnin’ in Your Face” was as moving as any song in his repertoire:
House’s rich, resonant moaning and his wavering bottleneck playing instantly captivated young white blues musicians including John Hammond, Rory Block, and Stefan Grossman, who presented House with the steel-bodied National guitar he used in concert and on records. “But what those guys really wanted,” Grossman says, “was an old Stella 6-string, the big-bodied ones, but they all disintegrated. Their necks would bow and break.”
“Watching Son House perform in the late ’60s helped me understand something about Robert Johnson’s playing,” says Rory Block. “Son House was an amazingly passionate man who totally lost himself in his playing. He would throw his head back, and he didn’t give a flying hoot what anybody was thinking or doing. He simply was playing for the power of the music. He shook because he was an old man, and he had an alcohol problem. He had to be rationed, and he would ask for his bottle a lot and talk about it.”
Onstage, House emerged as a passionate performer with a self-effacing personality. Performing alone, he often introduced songs with asides such as, “This is, uh, a little piece of blues that I hope you will like.” Then he’d thumb a bass note, slide his bottleneck up the strings, and work himself into a cathartic, near-hypnotic state. Sometimes he’d play the same riff for a quarter hour or longer. “Seeing him at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival,” recalls Johnny Winter, “was one of the high points in my musical listening. It gave me chills. It gave me chills. It was just him playing guitar and singing, and it was so good. This slapback echo was coming back, and you could hear a pin drop. Everybody was completely silent, and it was just amazing. I could just picture it being 1928 in Mississippi someplace. It was hard to believe it was a bunch of hippie kids at a big outdoor festival listening to him. It seemed like he played so slow, but right in meter, and his voice was just so great. He sang with his wife too. He said something about, ‘I’m gonna let my wife sing some now. She’s kind of churchy, but . . . .’ He looked like he didn’t really want to. But boy, it was amazing seeing him.”
For a few years after his rediscovery, House toured extensively and recorded for Blue Goose, Vanguard, Verve/Folkways, Liberty, and other labels. Fortunately, he was also filmed several times, and much of this footage is available on DVDs. One of the best is the Masters of Country Blues’ Son House & Bukka White, featuring B&W footage shot in 1967 or ’68 by the Seattle Folk Society. House is seen wailing on a metal-bodied guitar as intelligent close-ups reveal the techniques that fascinated young Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters: his high-slapping, open-handed rhythms, radically slanted ring-finger slide, and notes pulled pistol-like with the index finger. Son sings a capella gospel and introduces “Preaching the Blues” with a summary of his beliefs: “I really was called to preach the gospel. And that’s why I know it’s so good. I didn’t have to read the book so much – it come from above. Now, this is the truth – it’s not a lie. And I was taught all the things. I know everything about the King James version of the bible: 39 books in the Old Testament, 27 in the New, which makes it 66 books. And 450,000 words, and I knew ’em. I didn’t have to go to school to learn it ’cause the school teacher at that time, he didn’t know how to say his alphabets three ways, as far as that goes. Now, this is a thing that come from God. A lot of people don’t believe in God and don’t think it’s possible, but it is.
“I’m sitting here playing the blues, and I play church songs too, but you can’t take God and the devil along together. Them two fellows, they don’t communicate together so well. They don’t get along so well. The devil believes in one way, and God believes in a different way. Now, you got to separate them two guys. How you gonna do it? You got to follow one or the other. You can’t hold God in one hand, the devil in the other one. You got to turn one of them loose. Which side do you think is the best? Well, I already was regenerated and born again. I was born in sin, now I got to regenerate myself to realize what a great creator is. I didn’t give up God.”
Deteriorating health forced Son House’s retirement in 1976. He moved in with his family in Detroit, and for a long while had an apartment in Highland Park. On October 19, 1988, the last of the great first-generation Mississippi Delta blues singers died in his sleep at Detroit’s Harper Hospital. He was laid out at the Mayfield Baptist Church and buried in Mt. Hazel Cemetery. Son House was survived by his wife Evie, his daughters Beatrice and Sally, and two-dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren. House’s recordings, especially those magnificent Paramount and Library of Congress 78s, remain high-water marks of Mississippi country blues.
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© 2010 Jas Obrecht. All rights reserved. This article may not be reposted or reprinted without the author’s permission.
http://www.popmatters.com/feature/this-next-number-will-be-a-blues-son-house-endings-restarts-and-a-delta-tri/
These are my favorite Son House recordings. I wouldn’t want to suggest he sounds jaunty with his little band, but the terror in his music—which remains—is further outfitted with humor, some real swing and bounce, and shout outs to Willie Johnson, who was probably drunk out of his mind. At one point you can hear a train go by, because the store was situated next to the tracks. It’s a neat effect, like some kind of locomotive pun on the dogged, ever-advancing quality of House’s music, a product of the modern era, in one way, but one that has channeled the elements of the earth in others. His in-store performance—which meant something quite different back then—of “Walkin’ Blues” is one of the towering performances, regardless of genre, in 20th century music.
Alan Wilson, of the blues-rock outfit Canned Heat, was tasked by producer John Hammond, Sr. to not only find House, but to teach House his own music. House was located, and then re-taught both how to play like he did in 1941, and in 1930, so that he could do, for instance, both approaches to “Walkin’ Blues”. Wilson was 22 at the time. House’s 1965 sessions have, as you’d expect, the best fidelity of anything he ever recorded, and now his protean blues is a magisterial one.
Son House’s Deep Mississippi Delta Blues
Son House
photo courtesy Dick Waterman.
photo courtesy Dick Waterman.
In the years before World War II, Son House created some of the purest, most powerful Mississippi Delta blues on record. Playing with partners Charley Patton and Willie Brown, he exerted a profound influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, both of whom copied his music and carried it to new generations. House’s influence still echoes through the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and many other musicians. In many respects, he is the true father of “deep blues.”
Watching Son House perform bottleneck guitar was akin to seeing a locomotive on a downhill run. Sitting tall in a straight-back chair, he planted both feet on the ground and tapped time with his left foot. He set his propulsive rhythms in motion by waving his right arm up and down, almost like a symphony conductor, in an arc that typically traveled above the upper bout of his guitar. He held his right hand very loose, and he’d typically strike a bass note with his thumb during his arm’s downward swoop and then strum the treble strings with his nails on the way down or with his fingertips on the way back up. He wore a metal slide on his left-hand ring finger, which he held at a 45-degree angle to gliss the strings. For certain high-note slides, such as those in the “My Black Mama”/“Death Letter Blues” riff, House had a peculiar way of plucking the high E string with his index finger, trigger-like, during his hand’s upswing. An extremely physical guitarist, House not only kept time with his left foot and swinging right arm, but his whole being – his head, neck, shoulders, and all the rest – seemed to vibrate to the rhythm of his song. While the figures he played were often rudimentary, his performances were extraordinarily dynamic.
Even more compelling than his guitar playing, Son House’s voice really caught attention. Be it a window-rattling, impassioned plea like “Levee Camp Moan” or transcendent a cappella gospel like “John the Revelator,” it came from somewhere deep within his psyche. For sheer strength of delivery, he was on a par with Bessie Smith, Blind Willie Johnson, and precious few others, and every note he sang was uniquely his own. Original and uncompromising, House’s blues are intense, anguished, and as powerful as any recorded. Small wonder that as young plantation hands in the 1930s, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters were mesmerized when they saw him perform. Waters, for one, gave credit where credit was due.
When Muddy Waters made his initial recordings, in August 1941 for the Library of Congress, his first selection, “Country Blues,” was based on House’s “My Black Mama” riff. (A few years earlier, Robert Johnson had also used the riff for his recording of “Walking Blues.”) After Waters finished cutting the song, Alan Lomax asked him about its origins. The song, Waters responded, “come from the cotton field and the boy what put the record out – Robert Johnson – he put out ‘Walkin’ Blues.’ But I knowed the tune ’fore I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House; that’s a boy that picks a guitar. I been knowing Son since ’29. He was the best. Whenever I heard he was gonna play somewhere, I followed after him and stayed watching him. I learned how to play with the bottleneck by watching him for about a year. He helped me a lot. Showed me how to tune my guitar in three ways – natural, Spanish, and cross-note.” “Natural” refers to standard tuning. For “Spanish” – open G – the guitar is tuned D G D G B D, low to high. “Cross-note” – open D – is D A D F# A D.
Asked whether Johnson or House was the better player, Muddy responded, “I think they both about equal.” In a Living Blues interview, Muddy Waters elaborated further, telling Jim O’Neal: “I consider myself to be what you might call a mixture of all three – I had part of my own, part of Son House, and a little part of Robert Johnson. Really, though, it was Son House who influenced me to play. I was really behind Son House all the way.”
* * * *
Eddie James “Son” House was born a couple of miles from Clarksdale, Mississippi – “a little past Riverton,” as he described it – on March 21, 1902. A “churchified” field worker in his youth, House attended sabbath school at the Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church and preached his first sermon at 15. He had vivid childhood recollections of the hollers of solitary mule drivers echoing across cotton fields. His father, Eddie House, Sr., blew horn in a band with his seven brothers and knew a few songs on guitar. When House’s parents separated, he moved with his mother to Tallulah, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg. For many years after that, House preached the gospel and worked in cotton fields.
Throughout his church-going days, House shunned guitar players. “Now, just to tell the truth by it,” he explained to Sing Out! magazine in the mid 1960s, “I was brought up in church, from a little boy on up, and I didn’t believe in no blues. I was too churchy. I didn’t believe in that, and I talked against it. Just putting your hands on an old guitar, why, looked like that was a sin.” Willie Wilson, an unrecorded bottleneck player from Mattson, Mississippi, changed his opinion: “People were all crowded around,” House explained. “This boy, Willie Wilson, had a thing on his finger like a small medicine bottle, and he was zinging it, you know. I said, ‘Jesus! Wonder what’s that he’s playing?’ I knew that guitars hadn’t usually been sounding like that. So I eases up close enough to look and I see what he has on his finger. ‘Sounds good!’ I said. ‘Jesus, I like that!’ And from there, I got the idea and said, ‘I believe I want to play one of them things.’”
House paid $1.50 for a battered guitar, and Wilson taught him to tune to an open chord. He fashioned a bottle neck into a slider and learned to match thumbed bass notes with treble slides. A few weeks later, Wilson backed House at his first juke appearance. House also admired James McCoy, who taught him “Hold Up, Sally, Take Your Big Legs Offa Mine” and slideless arrangements of “My Black Mama” and “Preaching the Blues,” which House adapted for bottleneck.
In 1928, House shot a man at a Saturday night frolic in Lyon, Mississippi. He pleaded self-defense and was convicted of manslaughter, drawing 15 years on the penal farm at Parchman. A judge reviewing the case freed him two years later and warned him never to set foot in Clarksdale again. House hotfooted it to the small settlement of Lula, Mississippi. There, a friend introduced him to Charley Patton. House had heard Patton’s Paramount 78s and regarded him as the Delta’s most famous bluesman. House settled in nearby Lake Cormorant and became drinking buddies with Patton. Teaming up, they performed at juke joints and picnics with another local bluesman, Willie Brown, who worked mostly as a sideman. Many times, House recalled, the trio would throw their guitars over their shoulders and walk four or five miles to a gig. They’d line up three chairs and drink and play together, taking turns singing verses.
During May 1930, Art Laibly of Paramount Records visited Charley Patton in Lula to encourage him to record some new 78s for the label in Grafton, Wisconsin. Patton requested that House, Willie Brown, and pianist Louise Johnson come along. Laibly agreed. House recalled that at the time, all three guitarists were playing Stellas: “Me and Willie, we ordered ours from Chicago. We used to get these catalogs – Montgomery Ward. They didn’t cost much at that time. Mine cost $11, and so did Willie’s.” Wheeler Ford, a member of the Delta Big Four singing group, was hired to drive the musicians to Grafton.
In what proved to be one of the monumental Delta blues sessions, House, Patton, Brown, and Louise Johnson all recorded on or about May 28th in a damp stone building with large rooms outfitted with sliding-panel baffles. Son recalled that Paramount used blinking lights to cue performers, and the studio’s playback capabilities allowed the performers to hear what they’d just recorded. House inaugurated his recording career with his mantra-like two-part masterpiece, “My Black Mama.”
Tuning his guitar to open-G tuning, he began both sides of the 78 with a slide flourish and then slipped into a propulsive, trancelike riff highlighted by a bottleneck gliss to the fifth fret of the high E string. House then re-tuned his guitar to open D and followed with his two-part “Preachin’ the Blues,” which Stefan Grossman points to as “probably the finest example of Delta blues, with that rhythmic bass pattern played against a melodic bottleneck line – this incredible driving force. Who else had that?” Unsurpassed examples of Delta blues singing, these 78s featured stream-of-consciousness lyrics. “We changed them songs around all the time,” House explained upon hearing the records decades later. “I probably never done it again that way anyhow.”
As the session progressed, House sang “Clarksdale Moan” and gave a gripping account of a disastrous drought in his two-part “Dry Spell Blues,” using a melody common to Willie Brown’s “M&O Blues” and parts of Charley Patton’s “Pony Blues.” At the urging of Laibly, who had informed him that Blind Lemon Jefferson had recently died, House worked out an arrangement of a Jefferson hit, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” giving it a new theme and renaming it “Mississippi County Farm Blues.” A final House track – “Walkin’ Blues,” with Willie Brown on second guitar – was discovered among a cache of Paramount test pressings offered at a yard sale in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1985. Pure juke, this version differs significantly from the one Robert Johnson recorded in 1936, incorporating the common “Good morning blues, blues how do you do?” lyric. Willie Brown recorded “M&O Blues” and “Future Blues” at the session, and Charley Patton recorded four fabulous sides – “Dry Well Blues,” “Some Summer Day,” “Moon Going Down,” and “Bird Nest Bound.” Louise Johnson, meanwhile, celebrated the joys of straight-up fornication with her piano-driven “On the Wall” and featured the vocal support of Son House and Willie Brown on “All Night Long Blues.” With the Great Depression kicking in, the 1930 Grafton session turned out to be the sole prewar commercial session for House, Brown, and Johnson. On his return to Mississippi, Son House proudly displayed the $40 he’d been paid by Paramount.
Son House spent the next decade working plantations around Lake Cormorant, driving a tractor from sunup to sundown for a dollar a day. Patton died in 1934, but House and Brown continued to play together at juke joints on weekends. At one point, they reportedly added a trombonist and drummer to the lineup. House was typically the featured singer, while Brown acted as “commentor” during their numbers.
During the summer of 1941, on the same trip that produced Muddy Waters’ first recordings, Alan Lomax and John Work set up near Lake Cormorant in Clack’s Store, which was wired for electricity and doubled as a juke. There they made many fine recordings of Son House with a hot country band featuring Willie Brown, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin on mandolin, and harmonica wailer Leroy Williams. House’s original songs “Levee Camp Blues” and “Walking Blues” provide rare samples of extended prewar juke music. House paid tribute to Patton with “Shetland Pony Blues,” and worked “Delta Blues” into a five-minute duet with Williams. House and Brown also collaborated on the haunting “Camp Hollers.”
In his book Land Where the Blues Began, Alan Lomax remembered House as a “handsome, sensitive, intelligent man,” and wrote of the session, “Of all of my times with the blues, this one was the best, better than Leadbelly, better than Josh White, Sonny Terry, and all the rest of them. . . . At the center of [the group] was Son House, a man transformed, no longer the quiet, affable person I had met, but possessed by the song, as Gypsies in Spain are possessed, gone blind with music and poetry.”
Lomax returned to Robinsonville on July 17, 1942, and interviewed House on disc. House recut “Walking Blues” and played “Special Rider Blues,” “The Pony Blues,” and the two-part “The Jinx Blues.” Lomax’s scribbled notes indicate that “Special Rider Blues” was House’s “first blues, picked up by note from an old boy. Learned in 1928. Key Spanish A.” “Depot Blues,” Lomax noted, was “learned from Willie Williams of Greenwood, Miss. Basic chord is open or E major position. W.W. known as Lemon. Learned in 1930.” When Lomax asked how he’d learned so many tunings, House responded, “Just felt around and found ’em.” House reprised Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” melody for his bottleneck lament “County Farm Blues.” In “The Jinx Blues,” House sang of being awakened by “jinx all around my bed” – a theme from Patton’s 1934 “Revenue Man Blues” – and described the blues as “a lowdown shaking chill,” a phrase Robert Johnson also used. With his superb vocals and sure-handed bottleneck, House was at the peak of his powers on these Library of Congress recordings. His performance netted him a bottle of Coca-Cola.
Around 1943, House moved to Rochester, New York, and took a job as a rivet heater in the New York Central Railroad dispatch shop where boxcars were assembled. After the war he was promoted to porter and assigned the Empire State Express run to Chicago, a job he held for more than a decade. He stayed pals with Willie Brown, buying him a ticket to Rochester in the early 1950s and visiting him in Mississippi in the fall of 1952. When he received a telegram a few weeks later notifying him that Brown had died, House quit playing music. As he later explained to Sing Out!, “I said, ‘Well, sir, all my boys are gone.’ That was when I stopped playing. After he died I just decided I wouldn’t fool with playing any more. I don’t even know what I did with the guitar.” After that House “went right” and joined the Amen Baptist Church. With the resurgence of interest in the blues in the early 1960s, several record collectors began scouring the South to find bluesmen who’d recorded before the war. In June 1964, after weeks of hard searching, young blues enthusiasts Dick Waterman, Phil Spiro, and Nick Perls learned in Mississippi that Son House was still alive. Waterman recounts, “We met a guy named Benny Brown. His son had once been married to Son House’s step-daughter. So we found the son: ‘You had once been married to Son House’s step-daughter?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Got her name, number?, ‘Yeah, yeah. I got her number.’ So we called her. We knew he was alive in’41, ’42. This is now twenty-something years later. ‘Your mother is married to the blues singer Son House?’ ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s right. Living in Rochester, New York.’ ‘Is he still alive?’ ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We talk, but they don’t have no phone.’ So they gave me the neighbor’s number. The neighbor went and got Son, and we spoke to him on Sunday, June 21, 1964. Spiro says, ‘Are you the Son House who recorded for Paramount Records or recorded for Lomax, and you knew Charley Patton?’ He says, ‘Say! Who is this, anyway? Yeah, that’s me. I done them things. I done them things. Yeah, that’s me.’ ‘Okay, we’re on our way!’ That day, Sunday, June 21, 1964, was the day that [Andrew] Goodman, [Michael] Schwerner, and [James] Chaney were led out of the Philadelphia, Mississippi, jail in Neshoba County, and were murdered – that same day. Crazed. And we were in Mississippi, and George Wallace was running for President under the motto of ‘Send them a message.’ So we were right in the middle of it, without really knowing what we were in the middle of.” House, it turned out, was living at 61 Grieg Street in Rochester.
The July 13, 1964, issue of Newsweek magazine covered his rediscovery, reporting that when the researchers found him, House informed them that he hadn’t played in four years: “They came back with a guitar the next day but he could not make his fingers behave. A little wine eased the strain. First he began to recall snatches of songs, then little phrases, and finally whole songs with their complicated harmonies. ‘You sure they want to hear this old music?’ he asked of his marveling audience. The next day they taped his blues. By the end of the week, record companies were actively competing for him, and this month’s Newport Folk Festival has happily altered its plans in order to make way for the return of Son House.”
While House attended Newport, Waterman says, he did not make it to the stage. “Although he was brought to Newport for the 1964 festival, he did not perform because he took sick and was in the hospital there. His first comeback appearance was actually at the Philadelphia Folk Festival about six weeks later in late August.” To alleviate tremors and quell his nervousness, House, by now deeply alcoholic, downed double shots of bourbon.
Son House’s special affinity for Dick Waterman is confirmed by the recollections of those who were on the scene and by the facial expressions in the many stunning photos Waterman took of the elder bluesman . With Waterman working as his manager, House signed with Columbia Records. Recording executive John Hammond, father of the bluesman with the same name, produced House’s 1965 Father of the Folk Blues album. Alan Wilson provided guitar support and showed the bluesmen how to play parts he’d long since forgotten. “When Al Wilson recorded with Son House,” Waterman says, “he was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He later moved to L.A. to be part of Canned Heat.” While House overhauled his lyrics, his arrangements – mostly in open G or D – came straight out of the past, albeit with less precise technique than on the early recordings. His open-G “Death Letter Blues,” for instance, paralleled “My Black Mama,” while “Levee Camp Moan” was similar to 1942’s “Low Down Dirty Dog Blues.” His original “The Jinx Blues” echoed through “Empire State Express.” The potent a cappella “Grinnin’ in Your Face” was as moving as any song in his repertoire:
House’s rich, resonant moaning and his wavering bottleneck playing instantly captivated young white blues musicians including John Hammond, Rory Block, and Stefan Grossman, who presented House with the steel-bodied National guitar he used in concert and on records. “But what those guys really wanted,” Grossman says, “was an old Stella 6-string, the big-bodied ones, but they all disintegrated. Their necks would bow and break.”
“Watching Son House perform in the late ’60s helped me understand something about Robert Johnson’s playing,” says Rory Block. “Son House was an amazingly passionate man who totally lost himself in his playing. He would throw his head back, and he didn’t give a flying hoot what anybody was thinking or doing. He simply was playing for the power of the music. He shook because he was an old man, and he had an alcohol problem. He had to be rationed, and he would ask for his bottle a lot and talk about it.”
Onstage, House emerged as a passionate performer with a self-effacing personality. Performing alone, he often introduced songs with asides such as, “This is, uh, a little piece of blues that I hope you will like.” Then he’d thumb a bass note, slide his bottleneck up the strings, and work himself into a cathartic, near-hypnotic state. Sometimes he’d play the same riff for a quarter hour or longer. “Seeing him at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival,” recalls Johnny Winter, “was one of the high points in my musical listening. It gave me chills. It gave me chills. It was just him playing guitar and singing, and it was so good. This slapback echo was coming back, and you could hear a pin drop. Everybody was completely silent, and it was just amazing. I could just picture it being 1928 in Mississippi someplace. It was hard to believe it was a bunch of hippie kids at a big outdoor festival listening to him. It seemed like he played so slow, but right in meter, and his voice was just so great. He sang with his wife too. He said something about, ‘I’m gonna let my wife sing some now. She’s kind of churchy, but . . . .’ He looked like he didn’t really want to. But boy, it was amazing seeing him.”
For a few years after his rediscovery, House toured extensively and recorded for Blue Goose, Vanguard, Verve/Folkways, Liberty, and other labels. Fortunately, he was also filmed several times, and much of this footage is available on DVDs. One of the best is the Masters of Country Blues’ Son House & Bukka White, featuring B&W footage shot in 1967 or ’68 by the Seattle Folk Society. House is seen wailing on a metal-bodied guitar as intelligent close-ups reveal the techniques that fascinated young Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters: his high-slapping, open-handed rhythms, radically slanted ring-finger slide, and notes pulled pistol-like with the index finger. Son sings a capella gospel and introduces “Preaching the Blues” with a summary of his beliefs: “I really was called to preach the gospel. And that’s why I know it’s so good. I didn’t have to read the book so much – it come from above. Now, this is the truth – it’s not a lie. And I was taught all the things. I know everything about the King James version of the bible: 39 books in the Old Testament, 27 in the New, which makes it 66 books. And 450,000 words, and I knew ’em. I didn’t have to go to school to learn it ’cause the school teacher at that time, he didn’t know how to say his alphabets three ways, as far as that goes. Now, this is a thing that come from God. A lot of people don’t believe in God and don’t think it’s possible, but it is.
“I’m sitting here playing the blues, and I play church songs too, but you can’t take God and the devil along together. Them two fellows, they don’t communicate together so well. They don’t get along so well. The devil believes in one way, and God believes in a different way. Now, you got to separate them two guys. How you gonna do it? You got to follow one or the other. You can’t hold God in one hand, the devil in the other one. You got to turn one of them loose. Which side do you think is the best? Well, I already was regenerated and born again. I was born in sin, now I got to regenerate myself to realize what a great creator is. I didn’t give up God.”
Deteriorating health forced Son House’s retirement in 1976. He moved in with his family in Detroit, and for a long while had an apartment in Highland Park. On October 19, 1988, the last of the great first-generation Mississippi Delta blues singers died in his sleep at Detroit’s Harper Hospital. He was laid out at the Mayfield Baptist Church and buried in Mt. Hazel Cemetery. Son House was survived by his wife Evie, his daughters Beatrice and Sally, and two-dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren. House’s recordings, especially those magnificent Paramount and Library of Congress 78s, remain high-water marks of Mississippi country blues.
Donations to help maintain this Archive are appreciated.
© 2010 Jas Obrecht. All rights reserved. This article may not be reposted or reprinted without the author’s permission.
http://www.popmatters.com/feature/this-next-number-will-be-a-blues-son-house-endings-restarts-and-a-delta-tri/
The result of the big change-up, for House, as it has been for so many of us, was a woman. He married someone older, a woman farmer, despite his family’s objections. She put him to work on her father’s farm in Louisiana, and so out went the churching and in came the milking, until House basically said, enough, I’m out, fleeing the woman he later, and quite frequently, called a whore. His new hatred was less for secular music and more for farm work. Bad memories and all.
We’re somewhat foggy on the exact details of House’s backstory, but the gist is he travelled around, worked in a steel plant, spent time on a horse farm, and then in 1927, in his mid-20s, he heard his clarion call: the sound of a bottleneck guitar. We all have those moments when everything clicks into place, when you just know. House became an instant convert to the bottleneck style, and in only a few months, he was good enough to busk and make some money doing so.
It’s hard to conceive of now, when you hear the primacy that dominates the Delta blues medium, but the genre was the rock ‘n’ roll of its time, capable of shifting large quanties of records for people who preferred their music, shall we say, steeped in realism. They wanted something they could take their troubles to and find solace in, or inspiration, or, simply, someone whose burden might have been comparable to what they deemed theirs to be, that sublime commonality—or perceived commonality—from which the blues derives so much of its import and influence.
House, who was hanging with the musician Willie Brown, friend to the legendary Charley Patton, must have thought here was a way to preach his new fervor well beyond the walls of any church. He was honing his skills in a juke joint when, as the story goes, a man starting shooting up the place. Our Mr. House unholstered his gun—because what hoary bluesman didn’t have one on him—and killed the miscreant. Fifteen years in the state penitentary got knocked back to two, and that brings us to ‘30s, with House now hanging out with Charley Patton himself.
Patton is the only blues musician, in my view, close to being in House’s neighborhood so far as making you think, “Good God, man, you are beyond intense.” The joint sessions these two must have had comprise the top portions of my wish list for lost musical moments I most would have liked to be privy to. But whereas Patton was an established performer and showman, House was—well, no one was really sure what House was. Some thought he was over-the-top, others just too crude. He tagged along with Patton and thus got that initial studio time when the latter had finished recording his material, and if there is an audio equivalent of a jolt of straight up adenaline, it is those nine numbers.
Listening now, though, I hear sophistication beneath that r, as with the walking guitar line, appropriately enough, in “Walkin’ Blues”, a piece of blues poetry that takes such a simple conceit—really nothing more than putting one foot in front of the other, and ambling from point A to B—and turns it into something Dantean, the manful striding out of hell, away from evil, and maybe ontowards a new hell, but such is life, and one must walk if one wishes to live, rather than merely exist. And no, that’s not a gender thing, but it is a blues thing, and House embodied it. Embodies still, really.
I got up this morning, feeling sick and badThinking ‘bout the good times that I once have hadI said soon this morning, I was feeling so sick and badYou know I was thinking ‘bout the good times now that I-I once have had
House didn’t write the song; he is the deliverer of it, though, and that’s more than enough. The deliverer, as it were, of that precise feeling of desolation one encounters upon waking, having escaped the night before from one’s torments into sleep, only to arise with that reminder that, yes, that bad thing did happen to you, and now you have this unshakeable, it would seem, feeling. What to do, what to do.
If that’s not the riddle of life, it’s certainly the riddle of loss, which may well be the same thing. The eight sides released from the session didn’t sell at all. House continued to gig some, and drove a tractor for his day job. He figured he was done with making records.
We then jump ahead to 1941, as we approach the 75th anniversary of the recordings that musicologist / historian Alan Lomax made of House with a mini-band, almost, featuring pal Willie Johnson, at a store in Clack, Mississippi. Why a store? Because there was some empty space there that was handy, and Lomax was not in the business of making what were termed race records for a buying market. He simply wanted to preserve the most legit, organic music he could find, for future generations.
These are my favorite Son House recordings. I wouldn’t want to suggest he sounds jaunty with his little band, but the terror in his music—which remains—is further outfitted with humor, some real swing and bounce, and shout outs to Willie Johnson, who was probably drunk out of his mind. At one point you can hear a train go by, because the store was situated next to the tracks. It’s a neat effect, like some kind of locomotive pun on the dogged, ever-advancing quality of House’s music, a product of the modern era, in one way, but one that has channeled the elements of the earth in others. His in-store performance—which meant something quite different back then—of “Walkin’ Blues” is one of the towering performances, regardless of genre, in 20th century music.
The vocal is such that from the very first time you hear it you all but defy the world to find you a more impassioned one. That train outside goes rattling past, and it seems to quake as it does so, House’s voice remaining totally undettered even as the locomotive drowns out the band. There’s a jaw-dropper of a guitar break near the end, with House vocalizing atop it, grunts and wordless expressions of melody that ramp up the energy of the performance further. To be somewhat crude and use a blues-based analogy, it’s like the soul, having been pent up for too long, is being jerked off and about to explode all over the room. If you want a singular musical performance, this is where you come.
Lomax returned one year later, in the summer of 1942. House is every bit as good, and more chatty. The vibe is that of passing a jug of corn between two men who had a deep respect for each other, for different reasons. Lomax, you may know, made a lot of recordings that are essential listening, and yet I have never had the sense that anyone moved him as profoundly as House did.
Still, House disappeared, in the music-making sense, again, this time moving up north, to New York, and working as a railroad porter. I sometimes wonder if the sound of the latest passing train would ever remind him of that store shack session with Lomax. It’s so difficult to conceive of House taking your bags for you as you alighted from the car that just came in from Boston, but that’s what he did—as well as a stint as a chef (the man was nothing if not eclectic in his occupations) until we come to the mid-‘60s, when, about 50 years ago, House had his rediscovery.
Alan Wilson, of the blues-rock outfit Canned Heat, was tasked by producer John Hammond, Sr. to not only find House, but to teach House his own music. House was located, and then re-taught both how to play like he did in 1941, and in 1930, so that he could do, for instance, both approaches to “Walkin’ Blues”. Wilson was 22 at the time. House’s 1965 sessions have, as you’d expect, the best fidelity of anything he ever recorded, and now his protean blues is a magisterial one.
Which, I suppose, pleases some people and disappoints others. His guitar playing is cleaner; lines are picked with much fluidity, and he doesn’t slap his guitar for rhythmic effect nearly as much as he used to (a tactic he may have picked up, in part, from Charley Patton, who positively pounded the shit out of his guitar like it had made off with his woman the night before). House has found finesse, one might even say ease, although he was incapable of gentleness.
There’s something of what I think of as “the end” in these 1965 studio sides: the final phase, after so much musical journeying. The gap between House’s eras help you feel that way, but the man would live on until 1988. This always blows my mind, this idea that you can play around with; I mean, Son House could have watched a juiced up Jose Canseco in the baseball postseason that year. A conceptual overload, really, with two worlds existing simultaneously in the same sphere.
As much as I appreciate the 1965 studios recordings, there were some live sets taped around the same time and in the following years that represent House more at his essence, if you can get around the faltering fidelity. House was always good, but you didn’t know how much he was going to go for things, so to speak, to lay himself out fully from an emotional standpoint.
At New York City’s Gaslight Café in early January 1965, House bends forward into the microphone to announce the next number, “Death Letter Blues”, which will end up incomplete on the extant tape, the final portion having disappeared like House did, twice. “This next number will be a blues,” he says, and does so in such a way that you believe, for a moment, the word “number” could be replaced with just about any noun relevant to the depths of the human experience. Some music you come to, some music goes through. House’s finds you, no matter where you are, and his subsequent ingress is inevitable
http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=1709
SON HOUSE WITH STUDS TERKEL
Chicago 1965 [no label, 1CD]
Live at the WFMT Studios, Chicago, IL; Recorded April 19, 1965; Broadcast January 3, 2014. Excellent FM broadcast.
Thanks to mdshrk1 for sharing the tracks at The Traders’ Den.
Studs Terkel’s 1965 interview with Son House will be aired tonight (Fri January 3, 2014) on Chicago radio station WFMT - here’s the info posted on FB by WFMT’s Andrew Patner:
“This should be a must-hear program TONIGHT: Studs Terkel’s 1965 hour with legendary Mississippi Delta Blues singer and guitarist Son House (1902-1988). His first active period, from 1927 to 1943, made Son House an influence in live performance and recordings on Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Bob Dylan. “Rediscovered” in retirement from music in Rochester, New York, in 1964 Son House became a staple on the coffee house and campus folk revival scene, adding Bonnie Raitt and others to the roll of his disciples, until retiring a second time, in Detroit, in 1974.”
Thanks also to chazarrelli for the artwork.
Lineage:
HD over FM > Sangean HDT-1 > Rotel-05 SE > SoundBlaster (Live! 24 bit External) > wav (CD Wave Editor) > flac
Click on the highlighted tracks to download the MP3s (224 kbps). As far as we can ascertain, these tracks have never been officially released on CD.
Please Do Not Hammer The Links.
Due to the size of some of the files, please be very patient when downloading the tracks. It could be that the server was very busy. The tracks should still be around. Please try again later. Kindly email us at mybigo@bigozine.com if you encounter persistent problems downloading the files.
Track 01. Death Letter 3:33 (6.0MB)
Track 02. Interview 13:44 (23.1MB)
Track 03. Levee Camp Moan 4:03 (6.8MB)
Track 04. Interview 7:21 (12.4MB)
Track 05. Song Sermon 0:34 (943k)
Track 06. Interview 0:31 (878k)
Track 07. I Shall Not Be Moved 0:55 (1.5MB)
Track 08. Interview 4:55 (8.3MB)
Track 09. Preachin’ the Blues 3:21 (5.6MB)
Track 10. Interview 6:57 (11.7MB)
Track 11. Louise McGee 2:28 (4.2MB)
Track 12. Interview 5:01 (8.4MB)
Track 13. Empire State Express 2:31 (4.2MB)
Track 14. Interview 1:43 (2.9MB)
Track 15. Don’t Mind People Grinnin’ In Your Face 1:37 (2.7MB)
60 mins
Click here
to order Son House releases.
As much as I appreciate the 1965 studios recordings, there were some live sets taped around the same time and in the following years that represent House more at his essence, if you can get around the faltering fidelity. House was always good, but you didn’t know how much he was going to go for things, so to speak, to lay himself out fully from an emotional standpoint.
At New York City’s Gaslight Café in early January 1965, House bends forward into the microphone to announce the next number, “Death Letter Blues”, which will end up incomplete on the extant tape, the final portion having disappeared like House did, twice. “This next number will be a blues,” he says, and does so in such a way that you believe, for a moment, the word “number” could be replaced with just about any noun relevant to the depths of the human experience. Some music you come to, some music goes through. House’s finds you, no matter where you are, and his subsequent ingress is inevitable
http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=1709
SON HOUSE WITH STUDS TERKEL - CHICAGO 1965
January 14, 2014
SON HOUSE WITH STUDS TERKEL
Chicago 1965 [no label, 1CD]
Live at the WFMT Studios, Chicago, IL; Recorded April 19, 1965; Broadcast January 3, 2014. Excellent FM broadcast.
Thanks to mdshrk1 for sharing the tracks at The Traders’ Den.
Studs Terkel’s 1965 interview with Son House will be aired tonight (Fri January 3, 2014) on Chicago radio station WFMT - here’s the info posted on FB by WFMT’s Andrew Patner:
“This should be a must-hear program TONIGHT: Studs Terkel’s 1965 hour with legendary Mississippi Delta Blues singer and guitarist Son House (1902-1988). His first active period, from 1927 to 1943, made Son House an influence in live performance and recordings on Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Bob Dylan. “Rediscovered” in retirement from music in Rochester, New York, in 1964 Son House became a staple on the coffee house and campus folk revival scene, adding Bonnie Raitt and others to the roll of his disciples, until retiring a second time, in Detroit, in 1974.”
Thanks also to chazarrelli for the artwork.
Lineage:
HD over FM > Sangean HDT-1 > Rotel-05 SE > SoundBlaster (Live! 24 bit External) > wav (CD Wave Editor) > flac
Click on the highlighted tracks to download the MP3s (224 kbps). As far as we can ascertain, these tracks have never been officially released on CD.
Please Do Not Hammer The Links.
Due to the size of some of the files, please be very patient when downloading the tracks. It could be that the server was very busy. The tracks should still be around. Please try again later. Kindly email us at mybigo@bigozine.com if you encounter persistent problems downloading the files.
Track 01. Death Letter 3:33 (6.0MB)
Track 02. Interview 13:44 (23.1MB)
Track 03. Levee Camp Moan 4:03 (6.8MB)
Track 04. Interview 7:21 (12.4MB)
Track 05. Song Sermon 0:34 (943k)
Track 06. Interview 0:31 (878k)
Track 07. I Shall Not Be Moved 0:55 (1.5MB)
Track 08. Interview 4:55 (8.3MB)
Track 09. Preachin’ the Blues 3:21 (5.6MB)
Track 10. Interview 6:57 (11.7MB)
Track 11. Louise McGee 2:28 (4.2MB)
Track 12. Interview 5:01 (8.4MB)
Track 13. Empire State Express 2:31 (4.2MB)
Track 14. Interview 1:43 (2.9MB)
Track 15. Don’t Mind People Grinnin’ In Your Face 1:37 (2.7MB)
60 mins
Click here
to order Son House releases.
THE MUSIC OF SON HOUSE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. HOUSE:
Death Letter Blues:
Delta
blues great Eddie "Son" House performs his classic "Death Letter
Blues." From the Vestapol DVD "Legends of Country Blues Guitar, Vol.
One." More info at http://www.guitarvideos.com/products/…
"Death Letter", also known as "Death Letter Blues", is the signature song of the Delta blues musician Son House. It is structured upon House's earlier recording "My Black Mama, Part 2" from 1930. House's 1965 performance was on a metal-bodied National resonator guitar using a copper slide.
One commentator noted that it is "one of the most anguished and emotionally stunning laments in the Delta blues œuvre."[4]
Lyrically, the song is about a man who learns of the death of the woman he loves through a letter delivered to him early in the morning. The narrator later views her body on the cooling board at the morgue, attends her funeral, and returns to his home in a state of depression.
House's lyrics draw from traditional sources. Other blues musicians recorded related songs, including Lead Belly ("Death Letter Blues"), Ishman Bracey ("Trouble Hearted Blues"), Ida Cox ("Death Letter Blues"), Robert Wilkins ("Nashville Stonewall") and Blind Willie McTell ("On the Cooling Board").
Folk revival performances:
"Death Letter" was the centerpiece of Son House's live performances during the blues revival of the 1960s. House often altered the tempo and lyrics for different performances of "Death Letter", occasionally playing the song more than once during the same concert. Some renditions exceeded fifteen minutes in length.
Lyrics:
I got a letter this mornin, how do you reckon it read?
It said, "Hurry, hurry, yeah, your love is dead"
I got a letter this mornin, I say how do you reckon it read?
You know, it said, "Hurry, hurry, how come the gal you love is dead?"
It said, "Hurry, hurry, yeah, your love is dead"
I got a letter this mornin, I say how do you reckon it read?
You know, it said, "Hurry, hurry, how come the gal you love is dead?"
So, I grabbed up my suitcase, and took off down the road
When I got there she was layin' on a coolin' board
I grabbed up my suitcase, and I said and I took off down the road
I said, but when I got there she was already layin on a coolin' board
When I got there she was layin' on a coolin' board
I grabbed up my suitcase, and I said and I took off down the road
I said, but when I got there she was already layin on a coolin' board
Well, I walked up right close, looked down in her face
Said, the good ol' gal got to lay here 'til the Judgment Day
I walked up right close, and I said I looked down in her face
I said the good ol' gal, she got to lay here 'til the Judgment Day
Said, the good ol' gal got to lay here 'til the Judgment Day
I walked up right close, and I said I looked down in her face
I said the good ol' gal, she got to lay here 'til the Judgment Day
Looked like there was 10, 000 people standin' round the buryin' ground
I didn't know I loved her 'til they laid her down
Looked like 10, 000 were standin' round the buryin' ground
You know I didn't know I loved her 'til they damn laid her down
I didn't know I loved her 'til they laid her down
Looked like 10, 000 were standin' round the buryin' ground
You know I didn't know I loved her 'til they damn laid her down
Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul
I wouldn't mistreat you baby, for my weight in gold
I said, Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul
You know I wouldn't mistreat nobody, baby, not for my weight in gold
I wouldn't mistreat you baby, for my weight in gold
I said, Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul
You know I wouldn't mistreat nobody, baby, not for my weight in gold
Well, I folded up my arms and I slowly walked away
I said, "Farewell honey, I'll see you on Judgment Day"
Ah, yeah, oh, yes, I slowly walked away
I said, "Farewell, farewell, I'll see you on the Judgment Day"
I said, "Farewell honey, I'll see you on Judgment Day"
Ah, yeah, oh, yes, I slowly walked away
I said, "Farewell, farewell, I'll see you on the Judgment Day"
You know I went in my room, I bowed down to pray
The blues came along and drove my spirit away
I went in my room, I said I bowed down to pray
I said the blues came along and drove my spirit away
The blues came along and drove my spirit away
I went in my room, I said I bowed down to pray
I said the blues came along and drove my spirit away
You know I didn't feel so bad, 'til the good ol' sun went down
I didn't have a soul to throw my arms around
I didn't feel so bad, 'til the good ol' sun went down
You know, I didn't have nobody to throw my arms around
I didn't have a soul to throw my arms around
I didn't feel so bad, 'til the good ol' sun went down
You know, I didn't have nobody to throw my arms around
I loved you baby, like I love myself
You don't have me, you won't have nobody else
I loved you baby, better than I did myself
I said now if you don't have me, I didn't want you to have nobody else
You don't have me, you won't have nobody else
I loved you baby, better than I did myself
I said now if you don't have me, I didn't want you to have nobody else
You know, it's hard to love someone that don't love you
Ain't no satisfaction, don't care what in the world you do
Yeah, it's hard to love someone that don't love you
You know it don't look like satisfaction, don't care what in the world you do
Ain't no satisfaction, don't care what in the world you do
Yeah, it's hard to love someone that don't love you
You know it don't look like satisfaction, don't care what in the world you do
Got up this mornin', just about the break of day
A-huggin' the pillow where she used to lay
Got up this mornin', just about the break of day
A-huggin' the pillow where my good gal used to lay
A-huggin' the pillow where she used to lay
Got up this mornin', just about the break of day
A-huggin' the pillow where my good gal used to lay
Got up this mornin', feelin' round for my shoes
You know, I must-a had them old walkin' blues
Got up this mornin', feelin' round for my shoes
Yeah, you know bout that, I must-a had them old walkin' blues
You know, I must-a had them old walkin' blues
Got up this mornin', feelin' round for my shoes
Yeah, you know bout that, I must-a had them old walkin' blues
You know, I cried last night and all the night before
Gotta change my way a livin', so I don't have to cry no more
You know, I cried last night and all the night before
Gotta change my way a livin', you see, so I don't have to cry no more
Gotta change my way a livin', so I don't have to cry no more
You know, I cried last night and all the night before
Gotta change my way a livin', you see, so I don't have to cry no more
Ah, hush, thought I heard her call my name
If it wasn't so loud and so nice and plain
Ah, yeah
Mmmmmm
If it wasn't so loud and so nice and plain
Ah, yeah
Mmmmmm
Well, listen, whatever you do
This is one thing, honey, I tried to get along with you
Yes, no tellin' what you do
I done everything I could, just to try and get along with you
This is one thing, honey, I tried to get along with you
Yes, no tellin' what you do
I done everything I could, just to try and get along with you
Well, the minutes seemed like hours, hours they seemed like days
It seemed like my good, old gal outta done stopped her low-down ways
Minutes seemed like hours, hours they seemed like days
Seems like my good, old gal outta done stopped her low-down ways
It seemed like my good, old gal outta done stopped her low-down ways
Minutes seemed like hours, hours they seemed like days
Seems like my good, old gal outta done stopped her low-down ways
You know, love's a hard ol' fall, make you do things you don't wanna do
Love sometimes leaves you feeling sad and blue
You know, love's a hard ol' fall, make you do things you don't wanna do
Love sometimes make you feel sad and blue
Love sometimes leaves you feeling sad and blue
You know, love's a hard ol' fall, make you do things you don't wanna do
Love sometimes make you feel sad and blue
Written by Ida Cox, Jesse Crump • Copyright © Universal Music Publishing Group
Songs:
"Death Letter Blues"
"John the Revelator"
"Preachin' the Blues"
"I Wanna Live so God Can Use Me"
Eddie James "Son" House, Jr. (March 21, 1902[1] – October 19, 1988) was an American delta blues singer and guitarist, noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing.
After years of hostility to secular music, as a preacher and for a few years also as a church pastor, he turned to blues performance at the age of 25. He quickly developed a unique style by applying the rhythmic drive, vocal power and emotional intensity of his preaching to the newly learned idiom. In a short career interrupted by a spell in Parchman Farm penitentiary, he developed to the point that Charley Patton, the foremost blues artist of the Mississippi Delta region, invited him to share engagements and to accompany him to a 1930 recording session for Paramount Records.
Issued at the start of the Great Depression, the records did not sell and did not lead to national recognition. Locally, House remained popular, and in the 1930s, together with Patton's associate Willie Brown, he was the leading musician of Coahoma County. There he was a formative influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. In 1941 and 1942, House and the members of his band were recorded by Alan Lomax and John W. Work for the Library of Congress and Fisk University. The following year, he left the Delta for Rochester, New York, and gave up music.
In 1964, a group of young record collectors discovered House, whom they knew of from his records issued by Paramount and by the Library of Congress. With their encouragement, he relearned his repertoire and established a career as an entertainer, performing for young, mostly white audiences in coffeehouses, at folk festivals and on concert tours during the American folk music revival, billed as a "folk blues" singer. He recorded several albums, and some informally taped concerts have also been issued as albums. House died in 1988.[3]
In addition to his early influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, he was an inspiration to John Hammond, Alan Wilson (of Canned Heat), Bonnie Raitt, the White Stripes, Dallas Green and John Mooney.
House was born in the hamlet of Lyon, north of Clarksdale, Mississippi,[4] the second of three brothers, and lived in the rural Mississippi Delta until his parents separated, when he was about seven or eight years old. His father, Eddie House, Sr., was a musician, playing the tuba in a band with his brothers and sometimes playing the guitar. He was a church member but also a drinker; he left the church for a time, on account of his drinking, but then gave up alcohol and became a Baptist deacon. Young Eddie House adopted the family commitment to religion and churchgoing. He also absorbed the family love of music but confined himself to singing, showing no interest in the family instrumental band, and hostile to the blues on religious grounds.[5]
When House's parents separated, his mother took him to Tallulah, Louisiana, across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg, Mississippi. When he was in his early teens, they moved to Algiers, New Orleans. Recalling these years, he would later speak of his hatred of blues and his passion for churchgoing (he described himself as "churchy" and "churchified"). At fifteen, probably while living in Algiers, he began preaching sermons.[6]
At the age of nineteen, while living in the Delta, he married Carrie Martin, an older woman from New Orleans. This was a significant step for House; he married in church and against family opposition. The couple moved to her hometown of Centerville, Louisiana, to help run her father's farm. After a couple of years, feeling used and disillusioned, House recalled, "I left her hanging on the gatepost, with her father tellin' me to come back so we could plow some more." Around the same time, probably 1922, House's mother died. In later years, he was still angry about his marriage and said of Carrie, "She wasn't nothin' but one of them New Orleans whores".[7]
House's resentment of farming extended to the many menial jobs he took as a young adult. He moved frequently, on one occasion taking off to East Saint Louis to work in a steel plant. The one job he enjoyed was on a Louisiana horse ranch, which later he celebrated by wearing a cowboy hat in his performances.[8] He found an escape from manual labor when, following a conversion experience ("getting religion") in his early twenties, he was accepted as a paid pastor, first in the Baptist Church and then in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. However, he fell into habits which conflicted with his calling—drinking like his father and probably also womanizing. This led him after several years of conflict to leave the church, ceasing his full-time commitment, although he continued to preach sermons from time to time.[9]
Around 1927 or 1928, he had been playing in a juke joint when a man went on a shooting spree, wounding House in the leg, and he allegedly shot the man dead. House received a 15-year sentence at the Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman Farm), of which he served two years between 1928 and 1929.[11] He credited his re-examination and release to an appeal by his family, but also spoke of the intervention by the influential white planter for whom they worked.[12] The date of the killing and the duration of his sentence are unclear; House gave different accounts to different interviewers, and searches by his biographer Daniel Beaumont found no details in the court records of Coahoma County or in the archive of the Mississippi Department of Corrections.[13]
Upon his release in 1929 or early 1930, House was strongly advised to leave Clarksdale and stay away. He walked to Jonestown and caught a train to the small town of Lula, Mississippi, sixteen miles north of Clarksdale and eight miles from the blues hub of Helena, Arkansas. Coincidentally, the great star of Delta blues, Charley Patton, was also in virtual exile in Lula, having been expelled from his base on the Dockery Plantation. With his partner Willie Brown, Patton dominated the local market for professional blues performance. Patton watched House busking when he arrived penniless at Lula station, but did not approach him. He observed House's showmanship attracting a crowd to the café and bootleg whiskey business of a woman called Sara Knight. Patton invited House to be a regular musical partner with him and Brown. House formed a liaison with Knight, and both musicians profited from association with her bootlegging activities.[14] The musical partnership is disputed by Patton's biographers Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow. They consider that House's musicianship was too limited to play with Patton and Brown, who were also rumoured to be estranged at the time. They also cite one statement by House that he did not play for dances in Lula.[15] Beaumont concluded that House became a friend of Patton's, traveling with him to gigs but playing separately.[16]
Alan Lomax recorded House for the Library of Congress in 1941. Willie Brown, the mandolin player Fiddlin' Joe Martin, and the harmonica player Leroy Williams played with House on these recordings. Lomax returned to the area in 1942, where he recorded House once more.
House then faded from the public view, moving to Rochester, New York, in 1943, and working as a railroad porter for the New York Central Railroad and as a chef.[11]
He subsequently toured extensively in the United States and Europe and recorded for CBS Records. Like Mississippi John Hurt, he was welcomed into the music scene of the 1960s and played at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, the New York Folk Festival in July 1965,[17] and the October 1967 European tour of the American Folk Festival, along with Skip James and Bukka White.
The young guitarist Alan Wilson (later of Canned Heat) was a fan of House's. The producer John Hammond asked Wilson, who was just 22 years old, to teach "Son House how to play like Son House," because Wilson had such a good knowledge of blues styles. House subsequently recorded the album Father of Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions.[18] House performed with Wilson live, as can be heard on the album John the Revelator: The 1970 London Sessions.
In the summer of 1970, House toured Europe once again, including an appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival; a recording of his London concerts was released by Liberty Records. He also played at the two Days of Blues Festival in Toronto in 1974. On an appearance on the TV arts show Camera Three, he was accompanied by the blues guitarist Buddy Guy.
Ill health plagued House in his later years, and in 1974 he retired once again. He later moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he remained until his death from cancer of the larynx. He had been married five times. He was buried at the Mt. Hazel Cemetery. Members of the Detroit Blues Society raised money through benefit concerts to put a monument on his grave.
Recorded May 28, 1930, in Grafton, Wisconsin, for Paramount Records
Recorded August 1941, at Klack's Store, Lake Cormorant, Mississippi. There are some railway noises in the background on some titles, as the store (which had electricity necessary for the recording) was close to a branch line between Lake Cormorant and Robinsonville.
Singles
This list is incomplete. For a complete list, see external links.
Son House - Full Live Performance:
A classic clip of Son House performing:
Songs:
"Death Letter Blues"
"John the Revelator"
"Preachin' the Blues"
"I Wanna Live so God Can Use Me"
Son House - "Scary Delta Blues”-- (Live)
Son House - "Preaching the Blues”-- 1967:
Son House - "The Real Delta Blues - 14 Songs from the Man Who Taught Robert Johnson":
Although not released until 1974, this long out-of-print Blue Goose LP contains the first 1960s "post-rediscovery" recordings of Son House.
It has never been reissued on CD, so here it is in its entirety.
Track listing:
1. Milkcow's Calf Blues
2. I Shall Not Be Moved
3. Rochester Blues
4. Hobo
5. Lake Cormorant Blues
6. Motherless Children Have a Hard Time
7. Mississippi County Farm Blues
8. Pony Blues
9. Trouble Blues
10. This Little Light of Mine
11. A Down the Staff
12. The D.T. Moan
13. Lord Have Mercy When I Come to Die
14. Soon in the Morning
It has never been reissued on CD, so here it is in its entirety.
Track listing:
1. Milkcow's Calf Blues
2. I Shall Not Be Moved
3. Rochester Blues
4. Hobo
5. Lake Cormorant Blues
6. Motherless Children Have a Hard Time
7. Mississippi County Farm Blues
8. Pony Blues
9. Trouble Blues
10. This Little Light of Mine
11. A Down the Staff
12. The D.T. Moan
13. Lord Have Mercy When I Come to Die
14. Soon in the Morning
Son House tells us how to make the blues:
Son House Interview - '...I ain't talking about monkey junk..I am talking about blues!':
This is a short interview of SON HOUSE speaking about what the blues REALLY means to him.
He was very opinionated when it came to what he deemed to be real blues. He was quite critical of young blues players taking their "Jump" music and adding the blues on the title. His Blues was the REAL Blues, raw and from the heart, there's not a fancy backing band that accompanies Son House in most of his songs, just him, his guitar and a whole lot of grief
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_House
Son House
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Son House | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Edward James House, Jr. |
| Born | March 21, 1902[1] Lyon, Mississippi, United States[2] |
| Died | (aged 86) Detroit, Michigan |
| Genres | Delta blues |
| Occupation(s) | Musician |
| Instruments |
|
| Years active | 1930–1974 |
| Labels | |
Eddie James "Son" House, Jr. (March 21, 1902[1] – October 19, 1988) was an American delta blues singer and guitarist, noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing.
After years of hostility to secular music, as a preacher and for a few years also as a church pastor, he turned to blues performance at the age of 25. He quickly developed a unique style by applying the rhythmic drive, vocal power and emotional intensity of his preaching to the newly learned idiom. In a short career interrupted by a spell in Parchman Farm penitentiary, he developed to the point that Charley Patton, the foremost blues artist of the Mississippi Delta region, invited him to share engagements and to accompany him to a 1930 recording session for Paramount Records.
Issued at the start of the Great Depression, the records did not sell and did not lead to national recognition. Locally, House remained popular, and in the 1930s, together with Patton's associate Willie Brown, he was the leading musician of Coahoma County. There he was a formative influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. In 1941 and 1942, House and the members of his band were recorded by Alan Lomax and John W. Work for the Library of Congress and Fisk University. The following year, he left the Delta for Rochester, New York, and gave up music.
In 1964, a group of young record collectors discovered House, whom they knew of from his records issued by Paramount and by the Library of Congress. With their encouragement, he relearned his repertoire and established a career as an entertainer, performing for young, mostly white audiences in coffeehouses, at folk festivals and on concert tours during the American folk music revival, billed as a "folk blues" singer. He recorded several albums, and some informally taped concerts have also been issued as albums. House died in 1988.[3]
In addition to his early influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, he was an inspiration to John Hammond, Alan Wilson (of Canned Heat), Bonnie Raitt, the White Stripes, Dallas Green and John Mooney.
Contents
Biography
Early life
Mississippi State Penitentiary, where House was confined
House was born in the hamlet of Lyon, north of Clarksdale, Mississippi,[4] the second of three brothers, and lived in the rural Mississippi Delta until his parents separated, when he was about seven or eight years old. His father, Eddie House, Sr., was a musician, playing the tuba in a band with his brothers and sometimes playing the guitar. He was a church member but also a drinker; he left the church for a time, on account of his drinking, but then gave up alcohol and became a Baptist deacon. Young Eddie House adopted the family commitment to religion and churchgoing. He also absorbed the family love of music but confined himself to singing, showing no interest in the family instrumental band, and hostile to the blues on religious grounds.[5]
When House's parents separated, his mother took him to Tallulah, Louisiana, across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg, Mississippi. When he was in his early teens, they moved to Algiers, New Orleans. Recalling these years, he would later speak of his hatred of blues and his passion for churchgoing (he described himself as "churchy" and "churchified"). At fifteen, probably while living in Algiers, he began preaching sermons.[6]
At the age of nineteen, while living in the Delta, he married Carrie Martin, an older woman from New Orleans. This was a significant step for House; he married in church and against family opposition. The couple moved to her hometown of Centerville, Louisiana, to help run her father's farm. After a couple of years, feeling used and disillusioned, House recalled, "I left her hanging on the gatepost, with her father tellin' me to come back so we could plow some more." Around the same time, probably 1922, House's mother died. In later years, he was still angry about his marriage and said of Carrie, "She wasn't nothin' but one of them New Orleans whores".[7]
House's resentment of farming extended to the many menial jobs he took as a young adult. He moved frequently, on one occasion taking off to East Saint Louis to work in a steel plant. The one job he enjoyed was on a Louisiana horse ranch, which later he celebrated by wearing a cowboy hat in his performances.[8] He found an escape from manual labor when, following a conversion experience ("getting religion") in his early twenties, he was accepted as a paid pastor, first in the Baptist Church and then in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. However, he fell into habits which conflicted with his calling—drinking like his father and probably also womanizing. This led him after several years of conflict to leave the church, ceasing his full-time commitment, although he continued to preach sermons from time to time.[9]
Blues performer
In 1927, at the age of 25, House underwent a change of musical perspective as rapid and dramatic as a religious conversion. In a hamlet south of Clarksdale, he heard one of his drinking companions, either James McCoy or Willie Wilson (his recollections differed), playing bottleneck guitar, a style he had never heard before. He immediately changed his attitude about the blues, bought a guitar from a musician called Frank Hoskins, and within weeks was playing with Hoskins, McCoy and Wilson. Two songs he learned from McCoy would later be among his best known: "My Black Mama" and "Preachin' the Blues". Another source of inspiration was Rube Lacey, a much better known performer who had recorded for Columbia Records in 1927 (no titles were released) and for Paramount Records in 1928 (two titles were released). In an astonishingly short time, with only these four musicians as models, House developed to a professional standard a blues style based on his religious singing and simple bottleneck guitar style.[10]Around 1927 or 1928, he had been playing in a juke joint when a man went on a shooting spree, wounding House in the leg, and he allegedly shot the man dead. House received a 15-year sentence at the Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman Farm), of which he served two years between 1928 and 1929.[11] He credited his re-examination and release to an appeal by his family, but also spoke of the intervention by the influential white planter for whom they worked.[12] The date of the killing and the duration of his sentence are unclear; House gave different accounts to different interviewers, and searches by his biographer Daniel Beaumont found no details in the court records of Coahoma County or in the archive of the Mississippi Department of Corrections.[13]
Upon his release in 1929 or early 1930, House was strongly advised to leave Clarksdale and stay away. He walked to Jonestown and caught a train to the small town of Lula, Mississippi, sixteen miles north of Clarksdale and eight miles from the blues hub of Helena, Arkansas. Coincidentally, the great star of Delta blues, Charley Patton, was also in virtual exile in Lula, having been expelled from his base on the Dockery Plantation. With his partner Willie Brown, Patton dominated the local market for professional blues performance. Patton watched House busking when he arrived penniless at Lula station, but did not approach him. He observed House's showmanship attracting a crowd to the café and bootleg whiskey business of a woman called Sara Knight. Patton invited House to be a regular musical partner with him and Brown. House formed a liaison with Knight, and both musicians profited from association with her bootlegging activities.[14] The musical partnership is disputed by Patton's biographers Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow. They consider that House's musicianship was too limited to play with Patton and Brown, who were also rumoured to be estranged at the time. They also cite one statement by House that he did not play for dances in Lula.[15] Beaumont concluded that House became a friend of Patton's, traveling with him to gigs but playing separately.[16]
Recording
In 1930, Art Laibly of Paramount Records traveled to Lula to persuade Patton to record several more sides in Grafton, Wisconsin. Along with Patton came House, Brown, and the pianist Louise Johnson, all of whom recorded sides for the label. House recorded nine songs during that session, eight of which were released, but they were commercial failures. He did not record again commercially for 35 years, but he continued to play with Patton and Brown, and with Brown after Patton's death in 1934. During this time, House worked as a tractor driver for various plantations in the Lake Cormorant area.Alan Lomax recorded House for the Library of Congress in 1941. Willie Brown, the mandolin player Fiddlin' Joe Martin, and the harmonica player Leroy Williams played with House on these recordings. Lomax returned to the area in 1942, where he recorded House once more.
House then faded from the public view, moving to Rochester, New York, in 1943, and working as a railroad porter for the New York Central Railroad and as a chef.[11]
Rediscovery
In 1964, after a long search of the Mississippi Delta region by Nick Perls, Dick Waterman and Phil Spiro, House was "rediscovered" in Rochester, New York. He had been retired from the music business for many years and was unaware of the 1960s folk blues revival and international enthusiasm for his early recordings.He subsequently toured extensively in the United States and Europe and recorded for CBS Records. Like Mississippi John Hurt, he was welcomed into the music scene of the 1960s and played at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, the New York Folk Festival in July 1965,[17] and the October 1967 European tour of the American Folk Festival, along with Skip James and Bukka White.
The young guitarist Alan Wilson (later of Canned Heat) was a fan of House's. The producer John Hammond asked Wilson, who was just 22 years old, to teach "Son House how to play like Son House," because Wilson had such a good knowledge of blues styles. House subsequently recorded the album Father of Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions.[18] House performed with Wilson live, as can be heard on the album John the Revelator: The 1970 London Sessions.
In the summer of 1970, House toured Europe once again, including an appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival; a recording of his London concerts was released by Liberty Records. He also played at the two Days of Blues Festival in Toronto in 1974. On an appearance on the TV arts show Camera Three, he was accompanied by the blues guitarist Buddy Guy.
Ill health plagued House in his later years, and in 1974 he retired once again. He later moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he remained until his death from cancer of the larynx. He had been married five times. He was buried at the Mt. Hazel Cemetery. Members of the Detroit Blues Society raised money through benefit concerts to put a monument on his grave.
Discography
78-RPM recordingsRecorded May 28, 1930, in Grafton, Wisconsin, for Paramount Records
- "Walking Blues" (unissued and lost until 1985)
- "My Black Mama – Part I"
- "My Black Mama – Part II"
- "Preachin' the Blues – Part I"
- "Preachin' the Blues – Part II"
- "Dry Spell Blues – Part I"
- "Dry Spell Blues – Part II"
- "Clarksdale Moan" (unissued and lost until 2006)
- "Mississippi County Farm Blues" (unissued and lost until 2006)
Recorded August 1941, at Klack's Store, Lake Cormorant, Mississippi. There are some railway noises in the background on some titles, as the store (which had electricity necessary for the recording) was close to a branch line between Lake Cormorant and Robinsonville.
- "Levee Camp Blues", with Willie Brown, Fiddlin' Joe Martin, Leroy Williams
- "Government Fleet Blues", with Brown, Martin, Williams
- "Walking Blues", with Brown, Martin, Williams
- "Shetland Pony Blues", with Brown
- "Fo' Clock Blues", with Brown, Martin
- "Camp Hollers", with Brown, Martin, Williams
- "Delta Blues", with Williams
- "Special Rider Blues" [test]
- "Special Rider Blues"
- "Low Down Dirty Dog Blues"
- "Depot Blues"
- "Key of Minor" (Interviews: Demonstration of concert guitar tuning)
- "American Defense"
- "Am I Right or Wrong"
- "Walking Blues"
- "County Farm Blues"
- "The Pony Blues"
- "The Jinx Blues (No. 1)"
- "The Jinx Blues (No. 2)"
Singles
- "The Pony Blues" / "The Jinx Blues", Part 1 (1967)
- "Make Me a Pallet on the Floor" (Willie Brown) / "Shetland Pony Blues" (1967)
- "Death Letter" (1985)
This list is incomplete. For a complete list, see external links.
- The Complete Library of Congress Sessions (1964), Travelin' Man CD 02
- Blues from the Mississippi Delta, with J. D. Short (1964), Folkways Records
- The Legendary Son House: Father of Folk Blues (1965), Columbia 2417
- In Concert (Oberlin College, 1965), Stack-O-Hits 9004
- Delta Blues (1941–1942), Smithsonian 31028
- Son House & Blind Lemon Jefferson (1926–1941), Biograph 12040
- The Real Delta Blues (1964–1965 recordings), Blue Goose Records 2016
- Son House & the Great Delta Blues Singers, with Willie Brown and others, Document CD 5002
- Son House at Home: Complete 1969, Document 5148
- Son House (Library of Congress), Folk Lyric 9002
- John the Revelator, Liberty 83391
- American Folk Blues Festival '67 (1 cut), Optimism CD 2070
- Son House (1965-1969), Private Record PR 1
- Son House – Vol. 2 (1964–1974), Private Record PR 2 (1987)
- Father of the Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions, Sony/Legacy CD 48867
- Living Legends (1 cut, 1966), Verve/Folkways 3010
- Real Blues (1 cut, University of Chicago, 1964), Takoma 7081
- John the Revelator: The 1970 London Sessions, Sequel CD 207
- Son House (1964–1970), Document (limited edition of 20 copies)
- Great Bluesmen/Newport, (2 cuts, 1965), Vanguard CD 77/78
- Blues with a Feeling (3 cuts, 1965), Vanguard CD 77005
- Masters of the Country Blues, House and Bukka White, Yazoo Video 500
- Delta Blues and Spirituals (1995)
- In Concert (Live) (1996)
- "Live" at Gaslight Cafe, N.Y.C., January 3, 1965 (2000)
- New York Central Live (2003)
- Delta Blues (1941–1942) (2003), Biograph CD 118
- Classic Blues from Smithsonian Folkways (2003), Smithsonian Folkways 40134
- Classic Blues from Smithsonian Folkways, vol. 2 (2003), Smithsonian Folkways 40148
- The Very Best of Son House: Heroes of the Blues (2003), Shout! Factory 30251
- Proper Introduction to Son House (2004), Proper
References
- His date of birth is a matter of some debate. House alleged that he was middle-aged during World War I and that he was 79 in 1965, which would make his date of birth around 1886. However, all legal records give his date of birth as March 21, 1902.
- House said that he was born in Lyon. According to some accounts he was born in Riverton. Lyon and Riverton were hamlets close to Clarksdale, both of which have since been abosrbed into the city of Clarksdale.
- Beaumont, Daniel (2011). Preachin' the Blues; The Life and Times of Son House. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-539557-0.
- Beaumont, p. 27.
- Beaumont, pp. 28–29.
- Beaumont, pp. 30–35.
- Beaumont, pp. 33–34.
- Beaumont, pp. 34–36.
- Beaumont, pp. 36–38.
- Beaumont, pp. 39–45.
- Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues: The Roots, the Music, the People from Charlie Patton to Robert Cray. pp. 106–109.
- Beaumont, p. 49.
- Beaumont, p. 47.
- Beaumont, pp. 49–52.
- Calt, Stephen, and Wardlow, Gayle (1988). King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton. Rock Chapel Press. p. 211. ISBN 0-9618610-0-2.
- Beaumont, p. 54.
- Du Noyer, Paul (2003). The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music. Fulham, London: Flame Tree Publishing. p. 160. ISBN 1-904041-96-5.
- Davis, Rebecca (1998). "Child Is Father to the Man: How Al Wilson Taught Son House to Play Son House". Blues Access 35 (Fall 1998), pp. 40–43 (with photos by Dick Waterman).
- Memphis Beale Street Brass Note Submission Biography
- Illustrated Son House discography
- Son House at Find a Grave
- Inaugural (1980) inductee to Blues Foundation Hall of Fame (bio by Jim O'Neal)
- Tampa Red and Son House at the Wayback Machine (archived April 11, 2008), History of National Reso-Phonic Guitars, Part 3
- House Discography at Smithsonian Folkways
- Son House at AllMusic (biography by Cub Koda)
