SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2020
VOLUME EIGHT NUMBER ONE
HERBIE HANCOCK
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
MELBA LISTON
(November 30-December 6)
KENNY CLARKE
(December 7-13)
LEONTYNE PRICE
(December 14-20)
JIMMY LYONS
(December 21-27)
PATRICE RUSHEN
(December 28-January 3)
ELVIN JONES
(January 4-10)
GARY BARTZ
(January 11-17)
HALE SMITH
(January 18-24)
BENNY CARTER
(January 25-31)
BENNY GOLSON
(February 1-7)
BENNY BAILEY
(February 8-14)
SKIP JAMES
(February 15-21)
The music of Skip James and fellow Bentonia guitarists such as Henry Stuckey (1897-1966) and Jack Owens (1904-1997) is often characterized as a genre unto itself. The distinctive approach is notable for its ethereal sounds, open minor guitar tunings, gloomy themes, falsetto vocals, and songs that bemoan the work of the devil. Stuckey learned one of the tunings from Caribbean soldiers while serving in France during World War I, and said that he taught it to James, who went on to become the most famous of Bentonia's musicians.
James was born on June 9, 1902, on the Woodbine Plantation where his mother Phyllis worked as a cook; his father, Edward, a guitarist, left the family when James was around five. Inspired by Stuckey, James began playing guitar as a child, and later learned to play organ. In his teens James began working on construction and logging projects across the mid-South, and sharpened his piano skills playing at work camp “barrelhouses.” In 1924 James returned to Bentonia, where he earned his living as a sharecropper, gambler and bootlegger, in addition to performing locally with Stuckey.
James traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin, for his historic 1931 session for Paramount Records, which included thirteen songs on guitar and five on piano. “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” alluded to the Great Depression, while the gun-themed “22-20 Blues” provided the model for Robert Johnson's “32-20 Blues,” and the haunting “Devil Got My Woman” was the likely inspiration for Johnson's “Hell Hound on My Trail.” James’s records sold poorly, and later in 1931 he moved to Dallas, where he served as a minister and led a gospel group. He later stayed in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Hattiesburg and Meridian, Mississippi, occasionally returning to Bentonia. When he applied for a Social Security card in 1937, he was employed locally by the Cage Brothers (probably the Cage family who had a farm north of town). He returned in 1948 and sometimes played for locals at the newly opened Blue Front Cafe, although he did not earn his living as a musician. He later lived in Memphis and Tunica County, where he was located in 1964 by blues enthusiasts who persuaded him to begin performing again.
James relocated to Washington, D. C., and then to Philadelphia to play folk and blues festivals and clubs. He recorded several albums and gained new renown from the rock group Cream’s 1966 cover of his song “I'm So Glad,” but the somber quality of much of his music and his insistence on artistic integrity over entertainment value limited his popular appeal. James died in Philadelphia on October 3, 1969. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1992.
Born Nehemiah Curtis ("Skip") James, June 21, 1902, Yazoo City,
Mississippi; died October 3, 1969; married three times: Oscella
Robinson, Mabel James, Lorenzo Meeks.
Skip James was unique among blues players. He was accomplished on two instruments, guitar and piano. While many lesser musicians made pests of themselves in their attempts to be recorded, James refused his offer to be recorded and embraced his rediscovery in the 1960s only halfheartedly. Rather than the deep, rough shouts associated with many early male blues singers, James sang in a high thin wail. But his otherworldly voice, haunting guitar, and staccato piano bursts contributed to some of the gratest blues sides ever recorded.
Nehemiah Curtis James was born on June 21, 1902, in an African American hospital in Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was raised on the Woodbine plantation just outside Betonia, Mississippi. He was drawn to music from an early age. As a child he heard musicians Henry Stuckey and Rich Griffin play a frolic-a Saturday night dance party-in Betonia. Afterwards, he sang the songs he had heard constantly until his mother finally bought him a $2.50 guitar. As a teenager, he played his aunt's organ, and his mother encouraged his interest by sending him to a couple of piano lessons. However, James was a natural musician, his talent far outstripped the educational resources available to a young African American growing up on a southern plantation. He taught himself piano after watching a rural pianist in a barrelhouse, and he developed his guitar style on his own after Henry Stuckey showed him how to tune his guitar to an open E minor chord. Both James' guitar and piano sound are totally unique in blues.
James left Betonia around 1919 and led the life of an itinerant worker for the next few years. He worked a series of jobs, both legitimate and illegitimate, including lumberman, rail splitter, minister, sharecropper, gambler, bootlegger, and pimp. James was the product of a violent, lawless milieu where practically anything was permitted-as long as it did not erupt into the surrounding white society. He carried a gun from an early age and did not hesitate to use it. He had once emptied his weapon into a romantic rival, he told biographer Stephen Calt proudly. Calt speculated that James' nickname may have had its roots in his criminal activities not his dancing abilities as he often claimed-James often had to "skip" town in a hurry.
Young Skip James gave little thought to becoming a professional musician. At first he was interested only in playing for himself and his friends. Throughout most of the 1920s he lacked the financial incentive to play for money; he was a successful bootlegger under the protection of a white plantation owner. He earned far more from making illegal whiskey than he could hope to earn in the dangerous world of the Southern jukehouse. In 1927, Okeh Records approached him about making some records. James refused. Calt believes James' shadowy criminal side may have been the reason-records would simply have brought him too much unwanted publicity. James was finally persuaded to see H.C. Spier in February of 1931.
Spier was a furniture and record dealer, and a master scout who had single-handedly discovered most of the great Mississippi bluesmen of the 1920s and early 1930s, including Tommy Johnson, Ishmon Bracey, Bo Carter, and the legendary Charlie Patton. James played a little bit of "Devil Got My Woman," and Spier was convinced. The next day he presented the singer with a contract and a train ticket to Wisconsin, where Paramount Records had a studio. In Grafton, Wisconsin, James apparently recorded 18 tunes-he would later remember doing 26. Either way, it was a sign of how he had impressed Spier and Paramount-he recorded more sides in his session than any other Paramount artist, except Charlie Patton.
Records Classic Blues, Finds God
Accompanying himself, James laid down pieces that were later acknowledged as classics in recorded blues: "Devil Got My Woman," "I'm So Glad," "Hard Time Killin' Floor," "Special Rider Blues" on his weird modal guitar, and "If you Haven't Any Hay, Get On Down The Road" and "22-20 Blues" on piano that utilized abrupt pauses and explosive fills. The first record released by Paramount in the spring of 1931 was "Hard Time Killin Floor Blues" backed with "Cherry Ball Blues." Only 650 copies were issued. No more than 300 copies of James' other records were put out by Paramount, however, including his fifth 78 "I'm So Glad" backed with "Special Rider Blues," which Calt has called "probably the greatest double-sided blues 78 ever issued." But it was the height of the Depression, and the audience for blues had been hit harder than any, and Paramount was about to go out of business.
Not long after his recording session, James met his father again for the first time since his childhood. The senior James was a Baptist minister. He asked Skip to go to Dallas, to attend his divinity school, and study for the ministry. James accepted the invitation. The most serious implication of his new-found religion was relinquishing blues, which was considered "the Devil's music." Spier approached James in 1932 about recording for Victor Records, but James refused. For the next fifteen years, the only music Skip James would play would be spirituals.
However obscure his music was it did not go forgotten. Other blues artists recorded his music during the 1930s. Charlie and Joe McCoy recorded "Devil Got My Woman" for Decca in 1934, for instance. In 1943, two white jazz collectors obtained a test pressing of "Little Cow And Calf is Gonna Die Blues" and subsequently re-released it on their own label. It was the first re-issue of a blues song for the white collectors market and sold about 300 copies-as many as Paramount had pressed of its version.
In 1948 James quit a job with a mining company in Birmingham and returned to Betonia, planning to resume his blues career. But the African American population in Mississippi was dwindling. Tastes in blues had changed, as well. Electric blues, so-called "Chicago blues," were in vogue. Time had passed Skip James and his acoustic guitar by. He was only able to play an occasional party in town. Eventually James vanished from Betonia. He apparently skipped town again after cashing in a cotton crop raised with $500 his cousin had lent him and headed to Memphis where he tried to open his own honky-tonk.
Rediscovered in Hospital
By the 1950s collectors had made Skip James records valuable commodities; by the early 1960s a blues revival was underway and three of his songs had been reissued on anthologies of early blues. Young blues aficionados set out to track down James and the other men who had made the old, exotic, scratchy records. James proved difficult to find. It was not until 1964 that guitarist John Fahey and two friends located him in Tunica, Arkansas, where he lay in a hospital suffering from cancer. Finally coaxed back to performing, his first public appearance was the Newport Folk Festival that year. He played a mere nine minute set, four songs in all, but his performance according to Calt in I'd Rather be the Devil, was "to many blues devotees, the most dramatic moment of the festival."
In constant pain from the as yet untreated cancer, James was unable to record at first, despite interest from various record companies. In July of 1965, he received $200 for a session for Melodeon Records, which later that year resulted in an album entitled Skip James: Greatest of the Delta Blues Singers. He would later record two LPs for Vanguard, Skip James Today! and Devil Got My Woman. During the last four years of his life he occasionally played gigs at coffeehouses up and down the northeast coast. But his unrelentingly depressing music made the clubs loathe to book him. His records were not particularly successful either.
Another factor contributing to his lack of success late in life was his decline in musical quality. He had forsaken blues music at the time of his religious conversion. Calt wrote in I'd Rather be the Devil: "Before his death, James was to tell the author that he had considered blues sinful to perform. As a compromise, he had played with his 'thinkin' faculties' but had deliberately refused to 'put my heart in it.' What James feared above all was becoming the mesmeric blues performer he had been in 1931 and thus infecting others with the sin that blues represented. "Feelin' in music is electrifyin," he said, "it'll infect people." Star-struck audiences were satisfied with whatever he did, hearing more what he represented than what he was actually playing.
Living in Philadelphia with his third wife, James was chronically broke during his last years. Until the group Cream recorded "I'm So Glad" and gave James the songwriter's credit, that is. As a result, he received a royalty check for nearly $10,000.Skip James died of cancer on October 3, 1969, in Philadelphia. He was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1992.
At first, as the car barreled north toward Washington, D.C., the old blues singer pestered the driver with questions, demanding to know the name of every river, creek, and lake they crossed. “What is that body of water there?” he would ask as the car raced over a rickety bridge. He received each answer with a nod of recognition. The driver soon realized that this was how the old man was accustomed to traveling, that Nehemiah “Skip” James gauged his location using bodies of water, just as sailors navigate by the stars.
It was the summer of 1964, and three California college students—led by Washington-born John Fahey—had ventured into the Deep South not as civil rights activists, but as blues fanatics in search of their hero. They'd found Skip James in a Mississippi hospital, long forgotten by his own community. The bedridden James seemed to expect the sudden appearance of these fans; in fact, he seemed perturbed that they hadn't come sooner to pay him homage.
The students worshiped the “lost” bluesman—among their idols, the 62-year-old James ranked as the most mysterious and most revered. His legendary 1931 recordings were some of the rarest of all the classic blues 78s, and their sublime artistry made them priceless. James' intricate guitar work was rivaled only by his near-surreal piano playing, and no other major bluesman had mastered two instruments. And then there was James' eerie voice, sliding back and forth between a keening falsetto and heart-slain soprano. He sounded like someone possessed, a one-man Southern Gothic drama.
In the hospital, one of the young admirers offered him a guitar; James no longer owned one. Doctors forbade any commotion for the ailing man, but James nevertheless began working out a brand-new song. He softly rasped the lyrics to “Sick Bed Blues,” in which he envisioned a “thousand people standing by my bedside.”
A few days later, the hospital discharged him, after the pilgrims had paid not only James' medical bills, but also the money he owed his landlord. At his sharecropper's shack, James picked up the borrowed guitar and began playing his old songs, which he hadn't performed in years. He was rusty, but he still clearly retained his talent.
The students assured James that if he accompanied them back to Washington, D.C., capital of the so-called “blues revival,” he'd soon be as famous as Mississippi John Hurt, who'd been rediscovered the summer before and now ruled the local coffeehouse scene. James didn't need much prodding. He packed a shabby old suitcase, and donned a dark suit and preacher's hat. And then the old man left Mississippi behind forever, crossing so many bodies of water that he eventually stopped asking.
Night had fallen by the time the car reached Virginia, and the riders lapsed into silence. James stared out the car window. He had gone north to seek fame once before. On a winter night in 1931, he'd boarded a segregated train to Grafton, Wis. There, the 28-year-old recorded the songs that made him a legend and eventually spurred these young strangers to search him out—music so haunting and hallucinatory that a critic would later compare him to Poe and Van Gogh. But James earned little money from those records. Soon after making them, he quit music for good, thinking himself a failure.
Now he had a second chance at the acclaim that had eluded him. In Washington, he would finally make a livelihood from his art. If a mere party picker like John Hurt could find fortune in the big city, how could a genius like Skip James be denied his proper deserts?
Furthermore, James saw D.C. as a place where he could be healed. He believed that a jealous woman's hex had caused his horrifying illness, a tumor on his penis. Distrustful of the diagnosis back in the Mississippi hospital—the word “cancer” was whispered in a hushed tone—James had his own ideas about the bad mojo that was ailing him. He'd heard about the “International Man,” a root doctor in Washington who could break the evil spell. James figured that after he regained his health, he could focus on his new career and become a blues star.
But just now, another matter seemed more pressing. James needed to empty his bladder, and he demanded a rest stop. The driver asked James to wait until they escaped the Jim Crow South. (The students had already been mistaken once that summer for civil rights workers, and had spent a night in jail.) The old man waited, then asked again—but too late. “He pissed all over me trying to get out of the car,” remembers Fahey. Such was James' life: a mixture of humiliation, high drama, and bad timing.
In 1994, 25 years after his death, Skip James achieved a measure of the stardom he considered was his rightful due. The Yazoo label released a CD of his 1931 classics, Complete Early Recordings; distributor Shanachie reports that it's already sold several thousand copies. Genes, a Silver Spring label, issued the first in a series of James' previously unreleased sessions from the '60s, the decade when the bluesman was rediscovered. And I'd Rather Be the Devil, a new full-length biography by blues researcher Stephen Calt, recounts the bluesman's harrowing life and times.
James is, of course, overshadowed by the most famous bluesman of them all: Robert Johnson. In 1990, a box set of Johnson's records charted on the Billboard Top 100; that same set won a Grammy and sold more than 350,000 copies. Director Martin Scorsese—who's already depicted Jesus on celluloid—plans a biographical film about Johnson. And this summer, the bluesman's bad attitude dogged the U.S. Postal Service, which airbrushed the stamp portrait of Johnson to eradicate the cigarette that hung defiantly from his mouth.
Johnson's appeal owes as much to his myth as to his music. Few can resist the legend that he sold his soul to the devil, was poisoned by a jealous lover, and died a young genius's death. Johnson embodied a kind of Delta Dr. Faustus, and his celebrated iniquities earned him rock 'n' roll street credibility with an entirely new generation of listeners. Esquire headlined an Oct. 1990 article on the Johnson cult “SATAN, NOW ON CD.”
Skip James' mythos is less compact than Johnson's. James survived his misspent youth, and the story of his later years provides plenty more of the kind of misery that fueled his music. Where Johnson supposedly cut a single, grand deal with the devil—trading his soul for mastery of his form—Skip James seems to have struck deal after deal and never come out ahead. In a way, James' story is the truest story of the blues: He led an open wound of a life, and all he got for it was minor-league, post-mortem stardom.
In 1952, a high-school student named Dick Spottswood flipped through a stack of jazz records at an Adams Morgan music store. Intrigued by a macabre title—Hard Time Killing Floor Blues—he asked the shop's owner to play a nearly pristine 78 with a Paramount label. The slow, mournful dirge hooked Spottswood. He bought that record for $1 (its only blemishes were crayon marks on the label), and then nabbed another, more worn-out record by the same singer for only 60 cents. Thus began Skip James' second shot at stardom.
In the '50s and early '60s, Spottswood was one of the very few people who'd ever heard of James, or even of the genre called “country blues.” To most, “blues” meant the elec tric bands of Chicago and other Northern cit ies. Spottswood, though, favored the older acoustic music made strictly by and for rural Southern blacks.
Now an author, researcher, and musicologist, Spottswood is best known for his WAMU-FM show of music made before World War II. Like many scholars, he skirts obsession: If somebody blew a kazoo in the early 20th century somewhere in the United States—and somebody else bothered to record it—Spottswood can probably provide details of the session.
Back in the early '60s, Spottswood concentrated on the blues, and he inspired an entire generation of Washington blues fanatics. His record collection attracted fellow students, aspiring musicians, and budding beatniks, all of whom hung out at Spottswood's house in Takoma Park, analyzing the guitar playing on obscure 78s and arguing about who was the best bluesman.
A handful of these white suburban oddballs organized their lives around country blues. They yearned for something strange, something exotic, and most of all, something that gave 'em goosebumps, sounds that scared 'em—something akin to a nightmare captured on a record: a cry in the dark, a lone voice and a guitar engaged in the dialogue of the damned.
Only primal country blues satisfied their craving. “The rawer, the better” became their motto, and the rawest of all was the Mississippi Delta blues by such masters as Charley Patton, Son House, Tommy and Robert Johnson, Bukka White, John Hurt, and of course, Skip James.
Spottswood's coterie began to reach beyond his collection. Like rabid jazz collectors before them, some of the younger blues converts road-tripped throughout the South, canvassing black neighborhoods for old 78s. The young men would knock on doors, ready with their pitch: “Buying up old gramophone records, paying a dime apiece for 'em, cash money!” An elderly voice might shout back, “We used to have 'em, but the children took 'em out in the cornfield and made flying saucers out of 'em.” But sometimes the searchers would strike gold. The householders would rummage about excitedly, then announce, “We got a gang of 'em.”
Soon the fanatics began to wonder about the ghosts singing on those scratchy 78s. Spottswood and company knew that Patton and both Johnsons had died decades before. But what about the other masters of the genre? What if they were still alive down in the Delta? And what if they could still play?
Skip James, like most of the bluesmen, had left behind few traces.
Calt's exhaustive biography sheds light on James' little-known early life, previously documented in only a few paragraphs of obscure anthologies' liner notes. Born in 1902, James was raised on a plantation on the edge of the Mississippi Delta, near a town called Bentonia. When he was 5, his father—a musician and bootlegger—fled town after agents raided his whiskey still.
“Skippy,” a precocious child, was versed on guitar and piano well before his teens. James would eventually follow his father's wayward lead, spending the '20s rambling the South. Never a full-time musician, he found other ways to survive: as a laborer, dynamite blaster, gambler, pimp, and bootlegger. A small but brawny man, he didn't back down from confrontations; guns (like the Colt revolver he often carried) figured as prominently in his life as guitars. He saw music as a hobby, whether performing on a street corner or in a barroom. In fact, he admired his first musical mentor, a whorehouse pianist, as much for his fancy clothes and stable of prostitutes as for his keyboard mastery.
But in the state capital of Jackson, James found his real musical education. He hung out with the musicians who congregated there from all over Mississippi, and came to see himself as more than a mere entertainer. The blues standards of the day struck him as frivolous party music; he saw his own songs, and his idiosyncratic style, as something much darker. He once told Calt that he played his songs “to deaden the mind” of female listeners. To James, the blues were an incantation, a way to cast a spell.
In 1931, he got to test his powers. Throughout the '20s, business boomed for “race records” produced for a black audience, and companies scoured the South for blues singers. After auditioning in a Jackson record store, James earned a recording session with Paramount Records in Grafton, Wis.
There, the first song he performed was “Devil Got My Woman,” partly inspired by a girlfriend who'd deserted James for his best friend.
I would rather be the devil than to be that woman's man
'Cause nothing but the devil changed my baby's mind.
When most blues singers wailed about a scheming woman, they either cursed her or begged her to come back. But instead of groveling or complaining, James cast himself as Satan, as a figure of darkness and power.
A piano song, “22-20 Blues,” combined murderous lyrics with masterful musicianship. Calt describes the song: “No blues pianist has ever displayed the arresting variety of instrumental phrases he uncorks after every vocal line of "22-20,' which is probably the most impromptu, improvised effort found in blues recording.” In fact, Calt notes that the artsy Kronos Quartet covered it in the '80s, but the classically trained musicians “could not capture the nuances” of the original.
Other commentators have groped to describe James' music. One, struck by the “lovely contrapuntal lines and eccentric phrasing,” went so far as to claim that James' melodies were “more like Elizabethan music than the blues.”
If the instrumental part of “22-20” was Elizabethan, the violent, homicidal lyrics hewed closer to the Jacobean period. James improvised the words on the spot after the engineer requested a “gun song.” Those lyrics still pack a wallop, even by the standards of gangsta rappers:
If I send for my baby and she won't come
All the doctors in Wisconsin sure won't help her none.
And if she gets unruly and gets so she won't do
I'll take my 22-20—I'll cut her half in two.
During the two-day session, James would record two dozen other songs, including the salacious “Special Rider Blues,” the morbid “Little Cow and Calf Is Gonna Die Blues,” and the apocalyptic “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” which were eventually issued as Paramount 78s.
But “Devil” and “22-20” were his most popular. They sold in the hundreds, a respectable showing during the Depression, and were heard by black record buyers throughout the South—including a young guitarist named Robert Johnson. In the late '30s, Johnson bestowed on James the sincerest form of flattery: He covered both songs, re-casting them as “32-20 Blues” and “Hellhound on My Trail.” The latter eventually became Johnson's most famous recording.
James' music was as raw and as evil as it comes, and his songs exerted a kind of gravitational pull—first on Johnson, and later on Spottswood's young suburbanites.
Tom Hoskins was the first of Spottswood's followers to find one of the group's disappeared idols—but that idol was not Skip James. Hoskins, a novice guitar player, preferred sweeter, more polished music than that of James and Johnson. Hoskins tried to strum along to the records of Mississippi John Hurt, a laid-back, melodic, finger picker. But the wanna-be guitarist hungered for more than the record: He wanted to see Hurt play. He wanted to learn the technique from the master.
Hoskins vowed to locate Hurt.
He gleaned a clue from a bootleg tape that Spottswood had acquired from an Australian enthusiast. “Avalon's my hometown, always on my mind,” sang Hurt. “Pretty women in Avalon, want me there all the time.” Maps of the Mississippi Delta failed to show the town, but in February 1963, Hoskins found it on an antiquated road atlas.
Hoskins was ready to go; his American University classes would be there when he returned. But he faced one problem. “At the time, I didn't have a very good car,” he remembers. That obstacle seemed to melt away: “I ran into this girl, and she had a brand-new little Dodge Slant 6, and she really wanted to go to Mardi Gras. I said, "I'd be happy to take you to Mardi Gras, and after that, I want to go up to Mississippi and see if I can find somebody.' ”
After the pair made it to New Orleans, Hoskins phoned a friend back east and discovered that police had posted a 26-state alarm for him on charges of kidnapping, grand theft auto, and violating the Mann Act: His companion, he found out, was only 17, and the Dodge belonged to her father. “There wasn't much I could do about it then,” says Hoskins. “If I got caught, I'd just have to depend on her to explain that I was deceived.” (She later did.)
After Mardi Gras, the fugitives drove to Mississippi, arriving in Avalon one Friday at dusk. Not even a crossroads, Avalon boasted a lone grocery store that also served as the post office. There, Hoskins asked a pair of elderly men if they knew a blues singer named John Hurt. They provided directions down a gravel road that led to a shack.
As the girl waited in the car, Hoskins knocked on the front door. An elfin old man answered, and his wide, good-natured grin turned sour when he saw the white stranger. Undaunted, Hoskins stuck out his hand and said, “Hey, John, my name's Tom, and I'm from Washington, D.C., and I've been looking for you for a long time.”
Hoskin's reference to the nation's capital clinched it: Mississippi John Hurt believed that the FBI had come to take him away.
By then, Hurt's wife Jessie had bolted out the back door to find their landlord, a white man who quickly appeared on the scene. Hoskins convinced them all that he was no G-man, or civil rights worker, either—just a fan who'd come seeking his favorite musician.
The 72-year-old Hurt had quit playing music years ago and didn't even own a guitar; he spent his days tending cattle on his landlord's farm. But he was delighted to hear that Hoskins admired his old records. Hoskins fetched his guitar from the car and presented it to his hero. He asked Hurt to practice so they could record his music over the weekend.
Returning on Sunday, Hoskins was amazed that Hurt had retained much of his finger picking ability. The old musician eased into his repertoire as though it were a comfortable pair of overalls.
“Looking at his hands play, it was absolute magic,” recalls Hoskins. “I know how Howard Carter felt when he opened Tutankhamen's tomb and looked in. [Hurt] was alive and he still had it. He was bright, bubbly, and full of life. I knew I had something special.”
In a few weeks, Hurt had moved to D.C., where he stayed at Spottswood's house in Arlington. Hurt's floppy fedora and foot-tapping music won over people who'd never even heard of the Mississippi Delta, and who would have gasped to know that the Hurt lyric “lovin' spoonful” referred to semen. That summer, he charmed the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival. In the District, he held court at the Ontario Place, a folkie coffeehouse in Adams Morgan. Newsweek and Time paid their respects. Even journalist Edward R. Murrow took time off from the Cold War to nod his approval.
The blues revival was launched. Hoskins' fairy-tale triumph—a dramatic journey into the past! a happy ending!—sparked other rediscoveries. Sleepy John Estes turned up in Brownsville, Tenn. Bukka White was alive and well in Memphis.
But Skip James remained an enigma, the last of the great lost bluesmen.
According to Calt, James received only $40 for his 1931 recordings, and he soon quit the music business, bitterly declaring it a “barrel of crabs.” The next year found him in a Dallas bread line.
Calt's book traces the next three decades of James' “lost years,” an extraordinary odyssey throughout the Deep South. At one point, he even joined his long-lost father, who'd become a Baptist minister. His father disapproved of James' blues-singing past. But James' attempts at reform—being ordained in his father's church, even singing in a traveling gospel quartet—didn't last.
In the mid-'40s, odd-job wanderings brought James to an Alabama mining camp, where he married the camp cook, Mable. The couple moved to Bentonia, near James' birthplace, where he cut timber and eked out a living. By 1964, the childless couple had settled in northwest Mississippi, where James drove a tractor.
That summer, Berkeley student John Fahey embarked on his cross-country car trip to find James. Fahey had grown up in Takoma Park; after Spottswood played him a Blind Willie Johnson 78, he was converted to country blues. The summer before, Fahey had located Bukka White simply by mailing a postcard to the bluesman's hometown.
James would not be as easy to track down; besides, there was competition—other blues fanatics were on his trail. James remained the last great prize to be found. Fahey and two companions chased a lead turned up by a Southerner: that James' hometown was Bentonia. But residents, if they remembered James at all, said he'd left years ago.
After that dead end, Fahey's blues posse combed the upper Delta, coming up empty-handed at country shacks and deserted towns. But in July, the trio got a break.
“We stopped off to get some gas,” remembers Fahey, “and I saw this black teen-ager sitting around, and I asked him—I used to ask everybody, everywhere we went—if they'd heard of Skip James. He said, "No, but one night I was over at Benny Simmons' barbershop, and this crazy old man came in drunk and claimed he used to make records with piano and guitar up North'....That had to be him.”
At the barbershop, Fahey received directions to a nearby shack where an old woman—after feigning ignorance—told them that her husband, Skip James, was in the hospital.
The rest is history, or at least a footnote. Delta bluesman Son House had just been found up in Rochester, N.Y. On July 13, 1964, Newsweek covered both rediscoveries in one story, rhapsodizing, “These two were the only great country blues singers still lost. No one knew whether they were alive or dead....The search for these old-time bluesmen has always had a note of urgency about it. Theirs was our finest and oldest native-born music, the blues, country-style, pure and personal, always one Negro and a guitar lamenting misery, injustice, but still saying yes to life.”
The accompanying photo showed a haggard, grim James in his hospital bed, solemnly reading a pamphlet from his father's collection of theology tracts. James looked more like a man contemplating death than one saying yes to life.
Except for Fahey, the pilgrims worshiped James; the young discoverer's relationship to James stood in stark contrast to that of Hoskins and Hurt. “I didn't like him,” says Fahey bluntly, “and he didn't like me.” Their animosity was perhaps a collision of artists: Fahey was an accomplished guitarist, and had already released several albums on his own Takoma label.
“They both had big egos,” remembers one member of Spottswood's blues cult. “Skippy expected hero worship, which he pretty much got from most everybody, but Fahey was a pretty arrogant person.”
Fahey laughs sarcastically, remembering that James couldn't pay his hospital or rent bills. He says, in a mock brag, “I bought Skip James for $200.”
Strangely, Fahey's own career would echo James'. After decades of critical acclaim but low sales, Fahey's work disintegrated as he battled alcoholism and the Epstein-Barr virus. This year, Spin magazine rediscovered Fahey in an article called “The Persecutions and Resurrections of Blind Joe Death,” a reference to Fahey's nom de guitar. And recently, Rhino Records released Return of the Repressed, a compilation of his work. He currently resides in a gospel mission shelter in Oregon, and spends his time—what else?—record-hunting. He now seeks used classical albums, which he trades for cash.
James left behind no rosy memories of the South, and except for his wife (who would soon join him up North), no family to speak of. Friends? Well, no one came to visit him in his sickbed—no one except the strangers who'd driven 3,000 miles to worship him.
In Washington, though, James acquired plenty of friends, and strangers called him a genius. Like Hurt, James stayed for a few weeks at the Spottswood home until he could find an apartment of his own. Spottswood found James fascinating and enigmatic, and judged that his very presence was historic: “It was like the second coming having Skip here.”
James was more than an atypical bluesman; he was atypical, period. “He really stood out from the mass of humanity,” says Spottswood. “If he had been raised in different circumstances and had some level of academic training, he could have been an original thinker in any number of fields. He had that brooding, inquisitive intellect that was never content to leave things unchallenged. I could have easily seen him teaching physics or philosophy.”
According to Spottswood, the preacher's son harbored “some contempt for religion, but he certainly believed in God. The Lord and Satan were constantly at battle within that complicated psyche.”
James drew his baroque vocabulary from the Old Testament, and peppered his speech with jargon from his father's collection of theological books. It was clear to Spottswood that James had read those texts more avidly than the Bible.
James had recorded a pair of gospel numbers in '31, and had learned a few spirituals during his stint with the gospel quartet. Spottswood believes that James felt no qualms about returning to the blues, unlike the Rev. Robert Wilkins, another rediscovered bluesman who now sang his old tunes with Christian lyrics. (Fahey disagrees with Spottswood on this matter; Fahey says that James cynically “crooned” the blues in the '60s, fearful that a heartfelt commitment to the “devil's music” would damn him to hell.)
Where racial matters were concerned, James was too misanthropic to choose sides. “I don't think he had a lot more use for git-along Southern blacks than he did for the white oppressors,” says Spottswood. “He didn't suffer fools or take no kind of shit.”
James stood in stark contrast to Hurt, Washington's—and the nation's—most famous rediscovered bluesman. When Spottswood asked the newly enfranchised Hurt who he'd support in the '64 election, the affable 72-year-old meekly replied that he didn't want to anger anyone: “If I vote for Mr. Johnson, then Mr. Goldwater gonna be unhappy. And if I vote for Mr. Goldwater, then Mr. Johnson's gonna be unhappy.” When someone asked James the same question, he snapped, “I'm voting for Skip.”
Dick Spottswood's wife, Louisa, became James' fast friend. “Skip was kind of an appealing rascal,” she remembers. “Very likable at times, very difficult at times—full of surprises.” Louisa, the daughter of a prominent Delaware family, especially liked to watch the bluesman play with her pet whippet.
While ensconced in all-white, well-to-do Arlington, James didn't much ramble around the neighborhood. He mostly practiced the guitar, and often spent time in the kitchen, hunched over a small antique piano handed down by Spottswood's grandmother.
A few days after arriving in Washington, James went further north, this time to the Newport Folk Festival, for his first major performance since his rediscovery. His guitar playing couldn't match his youthful mastery, but his autumnal voice more than retained its power, now with an added edge of age and sadness.
Writer Peter Guralnick, transfixed by the dramatic comeback, described the scene in his book Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock 'n' Roll:
Skip James appeared, looking gaunt and a little hesitant, his eyes unfocused and wearing a black suit and a wide-brimmed flat-topped preacher's hat that gave him as unearthly an appearance as his records had led us to suspect he had....As the first notes floated across the field, as the voice soared over us, the piercing falsetto set against the harsh cross-tuning of the guitar, there was a note of almost breathless expectation in the air. It seemed inappropriate somehow that this strange haunting sound which had existed 'til now only as a barely audible dub from a scratched 78 should be reclaimed so casually on an overcast summer's day at Newport....As the song came to an end, the field exploded with cheers and whistles.
But James' next song, his disheartening chronicle of the Depression, “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” stunned the hushed audience, composed mostly of folkies more used to grooving to the warm sounds of songsters like Hurt. Spottswood saw the artistry in James' performance, but was also realistic about the bluesman's potential commercial appeal: “I'm sure many in the audience found Skip James eminently ignorable.”
After James returned to D.C., he began gigging at the Ontario Place. A former grocery store in Adams Morgan, the Ontario attracted a nearly all-white crowd of college students, professionals, and beatniks. Here John Hurt had launched his second career. James, buoyed by the enthusiastic reception at Newport, now tried to accomplish the same.
The Ontario audience had adopted Hurt as its “patriarchal hippie,” and he responded with enthusiasm, playfully bantering with his new white audience. Hurt—who'd never considered himself a bluesman to begin with—presented material already familiar to the crowd, which knew his 1928 tunes from a popular Folkways compilation, Anthology of American Folk Music. His signature songs, including “Candyman,” were light party numbers. He'd even rehash standards such as “Chicken,” and lead the audience in asingalong.
The taciturn James exuded no such showman's charm. He didn't tell feel-good stories between feel-good songs; instead, James performed without patter, distilling his life's miseries into his music. He sang of death and betrayal to a crowd weaned on Cub Scout campfire stories.
The Ontario audience was unprepared for James' spectral presence, for his falsetto wailing and intricate, jazzlike instrumental breaks. “It was like the difference between tragic opera and some frivolous comedy,” recalls Lee Talbot, who managed the Ontario Place. “Everybody became quiet and thoughtful—just the words of some of Skip's songs send a shiver up your spine, and when he sang it, it was guaranteed to.”
James' music spooked spectators. “It put you in mind of sitting in a corner on the backs of your heels, rocking back and forth, moaning,” says Talbot. “It made me think of some dark bayou with Spanish moss hanging off the trees, an eerie voodoo atmosphere....Skip's music evoked thoughts in people that maybe they didn't want to be thinking when they were out on the town trying to have a good time. It made people uncomfortable, but the blues is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable.”
Dark, dense, and downright scary, James' music would prove too difficult for fairy-tale success. “We had expected that we had another John Hurt on our hands,” recalls Ed Denson, another member of the Washington blues cult. “And in terms of public acceptance, that was not true, and that was too bad.”
James didn't hide his jealousy. Backstage, he criticized Hurt's technique and offered him guitar lessons. Claiming that Hurt crammed too many notes into his finger picking, James lectured on “wasted motion,” a phrase he'd picked up from his father's books.
During jam sessions, James spiked his playing with complicated riffs and chord changes in an attempt to sabotage Hurt, who dutifully tried to keep up. An unreleased session tape reveals James angrily pounding the piano to drown out Hurt's earnest—if ludicrously out-of-sync—accompaniment.
Hurt met such spiteful behavior with an almost Christlike acceptance. “Skip would play harder music to show that he was a better artist than John, or to try to show John up,” recalls Talbot. “Of course, ol' John would just have that gentle sort of smile and say, "Boy, that Skippy sure can finger pick.' ”
To James, music meant ruthless, if not bloody, competition. After all, he'd won his train trip to blues glory in Wisconsin by beating out other musicians at an audition. Robert Johnson was dead, but John Hurt was still alive to beat up on.
Whiskey helped James ease the pain of his cancer and settle into his new surroundings. Spottswood began to see the many sides of his houseguest. “He had a mercurial personality,” remembers Spottswood. “Unlike Hurt, he wasn't a happy person, and when he drank he would become vicious.”
During the late summer, James logged his first recording session since the '30s. Gene Rosenthal, a young latecomer to the blues cult, hosted the session in his parents' basement. (Genes, Rosenthal's label, has just released this session on a new CD, She Lyin'.) Those casual sessions in the Maryland suburbs would prove the final time James' health would allow him to focus fully on his music.
That fall, James moved into an apartment on 19th Street NW, near Dupont Circle, and his wife, Mable, left Mississippi to care for him. But before moving into their new abode, the couple spent an idyllic week at the Maryland farm—more a commune, really—where Talbot lived.
Mable's stories fascinated Talbot; he especially remembers a confession she made as her husband napped on the porch. “She told me there was a fella on the plantation who wanted to screw her, and she didn't want anything to do with him. And she was selling whiskey on the side or something, so he threatened to get her thrown off the plantation. So she got him alone with her and put an ice pick in him....She said, "You know, Mr. Lee, when you stick somebody with an ice pick, the hole close up and it bleed on the inside.'...They never did figure out that there was foul play.” James himself rarely broached the subject of his murky past in the Deep South; his admirers soon stopped asking.
Not long afterward, James' illness worsened. In a chilling couplet from his new song, “Sick Bed Blues,” he showed that he was only too aware that modern medicine had already made its final diagnosis:
The doctor walked away, mumbling very low
Saying, “He may get better, but he'll never be well no mo'.”
Louisa Spottswood, now divorced and living in Philadelphia, recalls the almost Victorian manner in which James explained his problem.
“He was suffering from pain, but he was very vague about the location and the nature of it. I gathered that it was related to the illness that he had when he was found in [Mississippi]. When it began to bother him again and he was in considerable pain, he went to a man he called a "witch doctor' in Washington. Skip told me the witch doctor diagnosed the case and said [Skip] had been hexed by a jealous woman in the area of the navel, and the poison had sort of drained downward.”
James once asked Louisa to pick up the witch doctor's medicine. She followed directions to a row house near Union Station, where the man lived in a second-floor apartment. “He was a middle-aged man with a rather unfriendly appearance, quite stern, and on the wall was a chart which had a map with astrological symbols,” she remembers. “He gave me a jar with a dark brown liquid in it.”
Even that remedy didn't work enough magic. The tumor grew, and that winter, James checked into D.C. General Hospital, which treated indigent patients. Once there, he chafed at medical opinion. Doctors told him bluntly that if he wanted to live, he had no choice: His penis would have to be amputated.
James at first refused, vowing to endure the agony though the doctors told him he couldn't imagine the torment ahead if he postponed the procedure. But in early 1965, James surrendered. “The pain just got too bad,” explains Louisa.
As a young man, James had written songs full of swaggering machismo, songs about women and violence. Now he'd lost the ultimate proof of his manliness in the most ignominious way. Once, he'd “deadened the mind” of his female fans with his music. Now those conjuring powers could do him little good.
During James' previous convalescence, young worshipers had surrounded his previous sickbed, and Newsweek had come calling. But this time, his only visitors were Mable and Louisa Spottswood.
Humbled, James composed a new song, “Washington D.C. Hospital Blues.” The bluesman who'd once embraced damnation in “Devil Got My Woman” now sang as a lowly supplicant, grateful for the life-saving medical care he received.
They came and asked me,
“Who in the world are you?”
I said, “I'm a good man,
But I'm a poor man.
You can understand.”
Louisa remembers that when she first visited James in the hospital, she found him lying on his bed, the white sheet pulled over his head like a funeral shroud. Even as James' depression lifted, the ritual continued. “The first time, it was a shock, but after that it got to be kind of comical, and I'd say, "Hello Skip. It's Louisa.' And he'd pull off the sheet and be friendly and chat.”
James slowly came to accept his condition, and even began to joke about it. Once he yanked up the sheet to reveal his mutilated member to a flabbergasted Louisa. She remembers “a mauve flower with scalloped edges.”
“Then he said to me rather proudly, "I say to these young doctors, This would be really sad for someone your age.' Basically he was saying he'd done it all. He was acting pretty devil-may-care about it.”
Later that winter, he was finally discharged and continued his convalescence at home. For a while, he rarely left the apartment. But that spring, James seemed to become a new man. He believed that he'd whipped his cancer, and put weight on his emaciated frame. In the apartment, he often played the piano the Spottswoods had loaned him. The bluesman was now a man of leisure—strolling around Dupont Circle, feeding pigeons in the park, and generally taking it easy.
Gone were the dark suit and preacher's hat. James now sported Bermuda shorts and casual shirts. Remembers Louisa, “He was sort of swaggering around in those shorts, which was in the old way of thinking—remember when this was back in the '60s—an uppity thing to do.” James was feeling strong again, strong enough to show the devil in himself.
Now it was Mable who was ill and depressed. In summer '65, biographer Calt visited the couple's apartment. “[I] found Mable alone, sitting in a darkened room,” Calt writes. “ "I'm sick,' she blubbered. Her jaw quivering, she said that James had disappeared. No one would tell her where he was. "Skip's always thinkin',' she added ominously. "Skip's got mean things on his mind.' ” Then she asked Calt to buy her a bottle of Scotch, which he did.
As it turned out, Mable was right to worry. James had skipped out of Washington, leaving her for another woman.
James had often been curt with his rough, “country” wife. One night at the Ontario, he caused a scene when he saw her dancing with one of the beatniks, Ed Denson. James angrily broke up the “foolishness,” as he dubbed it, and pulled Mable back to her chair.
James had courted his new girlfriend, a Philadelphia widow named Lorenzo Meeks, during his frequent stopovers in that city. Meeks was no younger than Mable (like James, in her 60s), but James thought Meeks was uptown and high-class, a notch above his former wife.
Naturally, the Washington blues coterie wondered what Meeks saw in the emasculated blues singer. “When we found out he'd run off with a new woman, we were just dumbfounded,” said Louisa. “I mean, we were young, and we thought, "Wow, mind over matter.' ”
That winter, Mable was evicted from the Dupont Circle apartment, and the furniture was piled outside the building. Among the abandoned belongings stood the piano. Washington—the site of James' supposed comeback—turned out to be just like any other town: a place for Skippy James to leave behind.
He never made it out of Philadelphia. His cancer continued to spread, and in late '68, doctors removed his testicles and the remains of his penis.
James could barely afford medical treatment. After leaving Washington, he put out three more records. All three met with critical acclaim, and all three logged disappointing sales. James would have preferred commercial success: “I can't live on air puddings,” he told Calt.
But just as James was on the brink of destitution, he began receiving royalties from his song “I'm So Glad,” covered by the British rock trio Cream on its debut album, Fresh Cream. Guitarist Eric Clapton made sure that the dying blues singer got his payments, which mostly went to pay his hospital bills. (Ironically, James' song was itself a cover of sorts: He had transformed a tepid Tin Pan Alley tune, “I'm So Tired,” into a delirious guitar-picking tour de force.)
Louisa Spottswood and her whippet often visited the ailing bluesman. He married Lorenzo Meeks on his deathbed. (“I think it was really a love match after all,” says Louisa.) Meeks died in 1977, and the couple are buried under a single tombstone in Philadelphia.
One October afternoon in 1969, Spottswood had just returned from visiting James in Philadelphia. Their last meeting had been at the '67 Folk Life Festival in Washington, when the singer's healthy plumpness had surprised Spottswood: “I still had this vision of him as a gaunt, gray-haired guy with a little bit of a stoop and really intense glare.”
Now, though, he found himself listening to one of James' '60s gospel songs—one of the few spirituals James had recorded.
Haunted by a verse, Spottswood played the record again and again. Back at James' Mississippi sick bed, when pilgrims came to pay him homage, the bluesman had envisioned “a thousand people standing by my bedside.”
But in this song, he sang of himself, humbled, on a pilgrimage of his own. This time, James pictured himself as part of the nameless, mortal multitude, among “many a thousand trying to get home.”
Spottswood later found out that James died that afternoon. “I thought, you bastard, you really touched my life once more, didn't you?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_James
Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James (June 9, 1902 – October 3, 1969)[1] was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter.
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Out of Rhythm: Infinitely Rich Subject Matter Suffers from a Lack of a
Thematic Line in the Hands of Seven Directors – Though Wim Wenders Gets
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Russell, Tony (1997). The Blues: From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray. Dubai: Carlton Books. p. 123. ISBN 1-85868-255-X.
Calt, Stephen (1994). I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues. Da Capo Press. p. 88. ISBN 978-0-306-80579-0.
Palmer, Robert (1982). Deep Blues. Penguin Books. p. 116. ISBN 978-0-14-006223-6.
"Nehemiah Skip James: Mississippi Blues Musician". Mississippi Writers, Musicians, Actors, and Artists. June 9, 1902. Retrieved September 10, 2019.
"Skip James Biography". Retrieved September 10, 2019.
Roberts, David (2006). British Hit Singles & Albums (19th ed.). London: Guinness World Records. p. 259. ISBN 1-904994-10-5.
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Skip James in the late 1960s
The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:
Skip James
(1902-1969)
Artist Biography by Cub Koda
Among the earliest and most influential Delta bluesmen to record, Skip James
was the best-known proponent of the so-called Bentonia school of blues
players, a genre strain invested with as much fanciful scholarly
"research" as any. Coupling an oddball guitar tuning set against eerie,
falsetto vocals, James'
early recordings could make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
Even more surprising was when blues scholars rediscovered him in the
'60s and found his singing and playing skills intact. Influencing
everyone from a young Robert Johnson (Skip's "Devil Got My Woman" became the basis of Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail") to Eric Clapton (who recorded James' "I'm So Glad" on the first Cream album), Skip James' music, while from a commonly shared regional tradition, remains infused with his own unique personal spirit.
The Mississippi Blues Trail
Skip James - Bentonia
The haunting quality of Nehemiah “Skip” James’s music earned him a reputation as one
of the great early Mississippi bluesmen.
James (1902-1969) grew up at the Woodbine Plantation and as a youth learned to play
both guitar and piano. At his 1931 session
for Paramount he recorded eighteen songs, including the dark-themed “Devil Got
My Woman” and “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.” He later became a minister, but
returned to performing blues during the
1960s “blues revival.”
The music of Skip James and fellow Bentonia guitarists such as Henry Stuckey (1897-1966) and Jack Owens (1904-1997) is often characterized as a genre unto itself. The distinctive approach is notable for its ethereal sounds, open minor guitar tunings, gloomy themes, falsetto vocals, and songs that bemoan the work of the devil. Stuckey learned one of the tunings from Caribbean soldiers while serving in France during World War I, and said that he taught it to James, who went on to become the most famous of Bentonia's musicians.
James was born on June 9, 1902, on the Woodbine Plantation where his mother Phyllis worked as a cook; his father, Edward, a guitarist, left the family when James was around five. Inspired by Stuckey, James began playing guitar as a child, and later learned to play organ. In his teens James began working on construction and logging projects across the mid-South, and sharpened his piano skills playing at work camp “barrelhouses.” In 1924 James returned to Bentonia, where he earned his living as a sharecropper, gambler and bootlegger, in addition to performing locally with Stuckey.
James traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin, for his historic 1931 session for Paramount Records, which included thirteen songs on guitar and five on piano. “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” alluded to the Great Depression, while the gun-themed “22-20 Blues” provided the model for Robert Johnson's “32-20 Blues,” and the haunting “Devil Got My Woman” was the likely inspiration for Johnson's “Hell Hound on My Trail.” James’s records sold poorly, and later in 1931 he moved to Dallas, where he served as a minister and led a gospel group. He later stayed in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Hattiesburg and Meridian, Mississippi, occasionally returning to Bentonia. When he applied for a Social Security card in 1937, he was employed locally by the Cage Brothers (probably the Cage family who had a farm north of town). He returned in 1948 and sometimes played for locals at the newly opened Blue Front Cafe, although he did not earn his living as a musician. He later lived in Memphis and Tunica County, where he was located in 1964 by blues enthusiasts who persuaded him to begin performing again.
James relocated to Washington, D. C., and then to Philadelphia to play folk and blues festivals and clubs. He recorded several albums and gained new renown from the rock group Cream’s 1966 cover of his song “I'm So Glad,” but the somber quality of much of his music and his insistence on artistic integrity over entertainment value limited his popular appeal. James died in Philadelphia on October 3, 1969. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1992.
content © Mississippi Blues Commission
SKIP JAMES
Skip James was one of the most influential early Bluesmen, but his importance as a stylist remained undiscovered until he was brought out of a long retirement by the Folk/Blues revival of the early 60’s. His performance was characterised by eerie falsetto vocals and delicate guitar picking in the minor keys. These features, along with the ‘melismatic’ style of singing that stretched a single syllable over several notes, gave rise to this strand of Blues played in the South of the Delta being named the ‘Bentonia School’ as opposed to the darker shades found further North around Clarksdale.
Born in 1902 and raised in Bentonia, Nehemiah Curtis James was brought up in a religious family: his father was a Baptist minister. Skip learned piano in school but picked up guitar from his friend Henry Stuckey. The pair were a popular act in the area, playing fish-frys and parties, while working as labourers building up the levees along the Mississippi. In 1930 Skip was picked up by a scout for Paramount Records, and he cut some tracks in a two day session at their Grafton, Wisconsin studios, but the records did not sell well as the Depression began to bite. The music made a big impression on the young Robert Johnson who adapted Skip’s ‘Devil Got My Woman’ and ’22/20 Blues’ as his own ‘Hellhound on My Trail’ and’ 32/20 Blues’. The funky piano playing and rippling guitar riffs on these early recordings show a musician in confident mood, but poor sales popped his bubble and led to Skip giving up the Blues altogether.
Beautiful version of ‘Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues’:
By 1932 Skip was ordained as a Baptist minister and he had moved to Dallas where he formed the Dallas Texas Jubilee Singers to back his father’s preaching. After much travelling around the South on religious business, Skip moved back to Mississippi in the mid-40’s and was ordained as a Methodist minister in 1946.
After over 30 years retirement from the Blues, Skip was rediscovered by Blues enthusiast Bill Barth, guitarist John Fahey and future Canned Heat member Henry Vestine . They persuaded Skip to appear at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, where his renditions of his old songs were still powerful and moving. The growing interest in the men who originated the Blues meant there was suddenly a market for his music that Skip could never have dreamed of. He cut his ‘Skip James Today’ album in 1964, and a few years later followed it with ‘Devil Got My Woman’. He was a fixture on the Festival circuit, including European tours, and sometimes toured with another ‘old school’ player, Mississippi John Hurt.
Skip James Discography
Skip had a massive influence on Delta Blues which did not become apparent until his re-discovery when he was already an old man. His unusual vocals and choice of tunings gives a different take on the Blues.
When British ‘supergroup’ Cream recorded a version of Skip’s tune ‘I’m So Glad’ on their second album in 1966, it must have brought in more money in royalties than Skip had earned in his entire career. Unfortunately he had little time to spend it as his life was taken by cancer in 1969. He is buried with his wife and life-long partner Lorenzo near Philadelphia.
Skip James Biography
Skip James was unique among blues players. He was accomplished on two instruments, guitar and piano. While many lesser musicians made pests of themselves in their attempts to be recorded, James refused his offer to be recorded and embraced his rediscovery in the 1960s only halfheartedly. Rather than the deep, rough shouts associated with many early male blues singers, James sang in a high thin wail. But his otherworldly voice, haunting guitar, and staccato piano bursts contributed to some of the gratest blues sides ever recorded.
Nehemiah Curtis James was born on June 21, 1902, in an African American hospital in Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was raised on the Woodbine plantation just outside Betonia, Mississippi. He was drawn to music from an early age. As a child he heard musicians Henry Stuckey and Rich Griffin play a frolic-a Saturday night dance party-in Betonia. Afterwards, he sang the songs he had heard constantly until his mother finally bought him a $2.50 guitar. As a teenager, he played his aunt's organ, and his mother encouraged his interest by sending him to a couple of piano lessons. However, James was a natural musician, his talent far outstripped the educational resources available to a young African American growing up on a southern plantation. He taught himself piano after watching a rural pianist in a barrelhouse, and he developed his guitar style on his own after Henry Stuckey showed him how to tune his guitar to an open E minor chord. Both James' guitar and piano sound are totally unique in blues.
James left Betonia around 1919 and led the life of an itinerant worker for the next few years. He worked a series of jobs, both legitimate and illegitimate, including lumberman, rail splitter, minister, sharecropper, gambler, bootlegger, and pimp. James was the product of a violent, lawless milieu where practically anything was permitted-as long as it did not erupt into the surrounding white society. He carried a gun from an early age and did not hesitate to use it. He had once emptied his weapon into a romantic rival, he told biographer Stephen Calt proudly. Calt speculated that James' nickname may have had its roots in his criminal activities not his dancing abilities as he often claimed-James often had to "skip" town in a hurry.
Young Skip James gave little thought to becoming a professional musician. At first he was interested only in playing for himself and his friends. Throughout most of the 1920s he lacked the financial incentive to play for money; he was a successful bootlegger under the protection of a white plantation owner. He earned far more from making illegal whiskey than he could hope to earn in the dangerous world of the Southern jukehouse. In 1927, Okeh Records approached him about making some records. James refused. Calt believes James' shadowy criminal side may have been the reason-records would simply have brought him too much unwanted publicity. James was finally persuaded to see H.C. Spier in February of 1931.
Spier was a furniture and record dealer, and a master scout who had single-handedly discovered most of the great Mississippi bluesmen of the 1920s and early 1930s, including Tommy Johnson, Ishmon Bracey, Bo Carter, and the legendary Charlie Patton. James played a little bit of "Devil Got My Woman," and Spier was convinced. The next day he presented the singer with a contract and a train ticket to Wisconsin, where Paramount Records had a studio. In Grafton, Wisconsin, James apparently recorded 18 tunes-he would later remember doing 26. Either way, it was a sign of how he had impressed Spier and Paramount-he recorded more sides in his session than any other Paramount artist, except Charlie Patton.
Records Classic Blues, Finds God
Accompanying himself, James laid down pieces that were later acknowledged as classics in recorded blues: "Devil Got My Woman," "I'm So Glad," "Hard Time Killin' Floor," "Special Rider Blues" on his weird modal guitar, and "If you Haven't Any Hay, Get On Down The Road" and "22-20 Blues" on piano that utilized abrupt pauses and explosive fills. The first record released by Paramount in the spring of 1931 was "Hard Time Killin Floor Blues" backed with "Cherry Ball Blues." Only 650 copies were issued. No more than 300 copies of James' other records were put out by Paramount, however, including his fifth 78 "I'm So Glad" backed with "Special Rider Blues," which Calt has called "probably the greatest double-sided blues 78 ever issued." But it was the height of the Depression, and the audience for blues had been hit harder than any, and Paramount was about to go out of business.
Not long after his recording session, James met his father again for the first time since his childhood. The senior James was a Baptist minister. He asked Skip to go to Dallas, to attend his divinity school, and study for the ministry. James accepted the invitation. The most serious implication of his new-found religion was relinquishing blues, which was considered "the Devil's music." Spier approached James in 1932 about recording for Victor Records, but James refused. For the next fifteen years, the only music Skip James would play would be spirituals.
However obscure his music was it did not go forgotten. Other blues artists recorded his music during the 1930s. Charlie and Joe McCoy recorded "Devil Got My Woman" for Decca in 1934, for instance. In 1943, two white jazz collectors obtained a test pressing of "Little Cow And Calf is Gonna Die Blues" and subsequently re-released it on their own label. It was the first re-issue of a blues song for the white collectors market and sold about 300 copies-as many as Paramount had pressed of its version.
In 1948 James quit a job with a mining company in Birmingham and returned to Betonia, planning to resume his blues career. But the African American population in Mississippi was dwindling. Tastes in blues had changed, as well. Electric blues, so-called "Chicago blues," were in vogue. Time had passed Skip James and his acoustic guitar by. He was only able to play an occasional party in town. Eventually James vanished from Betonia. He apparently skipped town again after cashing in a cotton crop raised with $500 his cousin had lent him and headed to Memphis where he tried to open his own honky-tonk.
Rediscovered in Hospital
By the 1950s collectors had made Skip James records valuable commodities; by the early 1960s a blues revival was underway and three of his songs had been reissued on anthologies of early blues. Young blues aficionados set out to track down James and the other men who had made the old, exotic, scratchy records. James proved difficult to find. It was not until 1964 that guitarist John Fahey and two friends located him in Tunica, Arkansas, where he lay in a hospital suffering from cancer. Finally coaxed back to performing, his first public appearance was the Newport Folk Festival that year. He played a mere nine minute set, four songs in all, but his performance according to Calt in I'd Rather be the Devil, was "to many blues devotees, the most dramatic moment of the festival."
In constant pain from the as yet untreated cancer, James was unable to record at first, despite interest from various record companies. In July of 1965, he received $200 for a session for Melodeon Records, which later that year resulted in an album entitled Skip James: Greatest of the Delta Blues Singers. He would later record two LPs for Vanguard, Skip James Today! and Devil Got My Woman. During the last four years of his life he occasionally played gigs at coffeehouses up and down the northeast coast. But his unrelentingly depressing music made the clubs loathe to book him. His records were not particularly successful either.
Another factor contributing to his lack of success late in life was his decline in musical quality. He had forsaken blues music at the time of his religious conversion. Calt wrote in I'd Rather be the Devil: "Before his death, James was to tell the author that he had considered blues sinful to perform. As a compromise, he had played with his 'thinkin' faculties' but had deliberately refused to 'put my heart in it.' What James feared above all was becoming the mesmeric blues performer he had been in 1931 and thus infecting others with the sin that blues represented. "Feelin' in music is electrifyin," he said, "it'll infect people." Star-struck audiences were satisfied with whatever he did, hearing more what he represented than what he was actually playing.
Living in Philadelphia with his third wife, James was chronically broke during his last years. Until the group Cream recorded "I'm So Glad" and gave James the songwriter's credit, that is. As a result, he received a royalty check for nearly $10,000.Skip James died of cancer on October 3, 1969, in Philadelphia. He was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1992.
by Gerald E. Brennan
Skip James's Career
Learned guitar and piano as a child; recorded for Paramount Records February 1931; rediscovered by blues enthusiasts Bill Barth, John Fahey, and Henry Vestine and played Newport Folk Festival, 1964; recorded first post-discovery record, the album Skip James: Greatest of the Delta Blues Singers in July 1965.
Skip James's Awards
Voted into Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1992.Famous Works
- Selected discography
- 78s
- "Hard Time Killin Floor Blues," Paramount.
- "22-20 Blues," Paramount.
- "Illinois Blues," Paramount.
- "How Long 'Buck," Paramount.
- "Devil Got My Woman," Paramount.
- "I'm So Glad," Paramount.
- "Four O'Clock Blues," Paramount.
- "Jesus is a Mighty Good Leader,"Paramount.
- "Drunken Spree," Paramount.
- Albums
- Skip James Today! , Vanguard, 1966.
- The Devil Got my Woman , Vanguard, 1968.
- The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James-1930 , Yazoo 2009.
- Video
- Devil Got My Woman: Blues At Newport 1966 Vestapol 13049.
Further Reading
Books- Calt, Stephen, I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues , Da Capo, 1994.
- Guralinick, Peter, The Listener's Guide to the Blues , Facts on File, 1982.
- http://www.hub.org/bluesnet/artists/skip.james.html
- http://www.biograph.com
- http://www.eyeneer.com/America/Genre/Blues/Profiles/skip.james.html
- members.xoom.com/sardine/skipbio.html
https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/13009741/skip-james-hard-time-killing-floor-blues
Skip James' Hard Time Killing Floor Blues
Robert Johnson died young and became a blues legend. Skip James lived to a ripe old age. It was a bad career move.
November 25, 1994
Washington City Paper
At first, as the car barreled north toward Washington, D.C., the old blues singer pestered the driver with questions, demanding to know the name of every river, creek, and lake they crossed. “What is that body of water there?” he would ask as the car raced over a rickety bridge. He received each answer with a nod of recognition. The driver soon realized that this was how the old man was accustomed to traveling, that Nehemiah “Skip” James gauged his location using bodies of water, just as sailors navigate by the stars.
It was the summer of 1964, and three California college students—led by Washington-born John Fahey—had ventured into the Deep South not as civil rights activists, but as blues fanatics in search of their hero. They'd found Skip James in a Mississippi hospital, long forgotten by his own community. The bedridden James seemed to expect the sudden appearance of these fans; in fact, he seemed perturbed that they hadn't come sooner to pay him homage.
The students worshiped the “lost” bluesman—among their idols, the 62-year-old James ranked as the most mysterious and most revered. His legendary 1931 recordings were some of the rarest of all the classic blues 78s, and their sublime artistry made them priceless. James' intricate guitar work was rivaled only by his near-surreal piano playing, and no other major bluesman had mastered two instruments. And then there was James' eerie voice, sliding back and forth between a keening falsetto and heart-slain soprano. He sounded like someone possessed, a one-man Southern Gothic drama.
In the hospital, one of the young admirers offered him a guitar; James no longer owned one. Doctors forbade any commotion for the ailing man, but James nevertheless began working out a brand-new song. He softly rasped the lyrics to “Sick Bed Blues,” in which he envisioned a “thousand people standing by my bedside.”
A few days later, the hospital discharged him, after the pilgrims had paid not only James' medical bills, but also the money he owed his landlord. At his sharecropper's shack, James picked up the borrowed guitar and began playing his old songs, which he hadn't performed in years. He was rusty, but he still clearly retained his talent.
The students assured James that if he accompanied them back to Washington, D.C., capital of the so-called “blues revival,” he'd soon be as famous as Mississippi John Hurt, who'd been rediscovered the summer before and now ruled the local coffeehouse scene. James didn't need much prodding. He packed a shabby old suitcase, and donned a dark suit and preacher's hat. And then the old man left Mississippi behind forever, crossing so many bodies of water that he eventually stopped asking.
Night had fallen by the time the car reached Virginia, and the riders lapsed into silence. James stared out the car window. He had gone north to seek fame once before. On a winter night in 1931, he'd boarded a segregated train to Grafton, Wis. There, the 28-year-old recorded the songs that made him a legend and eventually spurred these young strangers to search him out—music so haunting and hallucinatory that a critic would later compare him to Poe and Van Gogh. But James earned little money from those records. Soon after making them, he quit music for good, thinking himself a failure.
Now he had a second chance at the acclaim that had eluded him. In Washington, he would finally make a livelihood from his art. If a mere party picker like John Hurt could find fortune in the big city, how could a genius like Skip James be denied his proper deserts?
Furthermore, James saw D.C. as a place where he could be healed. He believed that a jealous woman's hex had caused his horrifying illness, a tumor on his penis. Distrustful of the diagnosis back in the Mississippi hospital—the word “cancer” was whispered in a hushed tone—James had his own ideas about the bad mojo that was ailing him. He'd heard about the “International Man,” a root doctor in Washington who could break the evil spell. James figured that after he regained his health, he could focus on his new career and become a blues star.
But just now, another matter seemed more pressing. James needed to empty his bladder, and he demanded a rest stop. The driver asked James to wait until they escaped the Jim Crow South. (The students had already been mistaken once that summer for civil rights workers, and had spent a night in jail.) The old man waited, then asked again—but too late. “He pissed all over me trying to get out of the car,” remembers Fahey. Such was James' life: a mixture of humiliation, high drama, and bad timing.
In 1994, 25 years after his death, Skip James achieved a measure of the stardom he considered was his rightful due. The Yazoo label released a CD of his 1931 classics, Complete Early Recordings; distributor Shanachie reports that it's already sold several thousand copies. Genes, a Silver Spring label, issued the first in a series of James' previously unreleased sessions from the '60s, the decade when the bluesman was rediscovered. And I'd Rather Be the Devil, a new full-length biography by blues researcher Stephen Calt, recounts the bluesman's harrowing life and times.
James is, of course, overshadowed by the most famous bluesman of them all: Robert Johnson. In 1990, a box set of Johnson's records charted on the Billboard Top 100; that same set won a Grammy and sold more than 350,000 copies. Director Martin Scorsese—who's already depicted Jesus on celluloid—plans a biographical film about Johnson. And this summer, the bluesman's bad attitude dogged the U.S. Postal Service, which airbrushed the stamp portrait of Johnson to eradicate the cigarette that hung defiantly from his mouth.
Johnson's appeal owes as much to his myth as to his music. Few can resist the legend that he sold his soul to the devil, was poisoned by a jealous lover, and died a young genius's death. Johnson embodied a kind of Delta Dr. Faustus, and his celebrated iniquities earned him rock 'n' roll street credibility with an entirely new generation of listeners. Esquire headlined an Oct. 1990 article on the Johnson cult “SATAN, NOW ON CD.”
Skip James' mythos is less compact than Johnson's. James survived his misspent youth, and the story of his later years provides plenty more of the kind of misery that fueled his music. Where Johnson supposedly cut a single, grand deal with the devil—trading his soul for mastery of his form—Skip James seems to have struck deal after deal and never come out ahead. In a way, James' story is the truest story of the blues: He led an open wound of a life, and all he got for it was minor-league, post-mortem stardom.
In 1952, a high-school student named Dick Spottswood flipped through a stack of jazz records at an Adams Morgan music store. Intrigued by a macabre title—Hard Time Killing Floor Blues—he asked the shop's owner to play a nearly pristine 78 with a Paramount label. The slow, mournful dirge hooked Spottswood. He bought that record for $1 (its only blemishes were crayon marks on the label), and then nabbed another, more worn-out record by the same singer for only 60 cents. Thus began Skip James' second shot at stardom.
In the '50s and early '60s, Spottswood was one of the very few people who'd ever heard of James, or even of the genre called “country blues.” To most, “blues” meant the elec tric bands of Chicago and other Northern cit ies. Spottswood, though, favored the older acoustic music made strictly by and for rural Southern blacks.
Now an author, researcher, and musicologist, Spottswood is best known for his WAMU-FM show of music made before World War II. Like many scholars, he skirts obsession: If somebody blew a kazoo in the early 20th century somewhere in the United States—and somebody else bothered to record it—Spottswood can probably provide details of the session.
Back in the early '60s, Spottswood concentrated on the blues, and he inspired an entire generation of Washington blues fanatics. His record collection attracted fellow students, aspiring musicians, and budding beatniks, all of whom hung out at Spottswood's house in Takoma Park, analyzing the guitar playing on obscure 78s and arguing about who was the best bluesman.
A handful of these white suburban oddballs organized their lives around country blues. They yearned for something strange, something exotic, and most of all, something that gave 'em goosebumps, sounds that scared 'em—something akin to a nightmare captured on a record: a cry in the dark, a lone voice and a guitar engaged in the dialogue of the damned.
Only primal country blues satisfied their craving. “The rawer, the better” became their motto, and the rawest of all was the Mississippi Delta blues by such masters as Charley Patton, Son House, Tommy and Robert Johnson, Bukka White, John Hurt, and of course, Skip James.
Spottswood's coterie began to reach beyond his collection. Like rabid jazz collectors before them, some of the younger blues converts road-tripped throughout the South, canvassing black neighborhoods for old 78s. The young men would knock on doors, ready with their pitch: “Buying up old gramophone records, paying a dime apiece for 'em, cash money!” An elderly voice might shout back, “We used to have 'em, but the children took 'em out in the cornfield and made flying saucers out of 'em.” But sometimes the searchers would strike gold. The householders would rummage about excitedly, then announce, “We got a gang of 'em.”
Soon the fanatics began to wonder about the ghosts singing on those scratchy 78s. Spottswood and company knew that Patton and both Johnsons had died decades before. But what about the other masters of the genre? What if they were still alive down in the Delta? And what if they could still play?
Skip James, like most of the bluesmen, had left behind few traces.
Calt's exhaustive biography sheds light on James' little-known early life, previously documented in only a few paragraphs of obscure anthologies' liner notes. Born in 1902, James was raised on a plantation on the edge of the Mississippi Delta, near a town called Bentonia. When he was 5, his father—a musician and bootlegger—fled town after agents raided his whiskey still.
“Skippy,” a precocious child, was versed on guitar and piano well before his teens. James would eventually follow his father's wayward lead, spending the '20s rambling the South. Never a full-time musician, he found other ways to survive: as a laborer, dynamite blaster, gambler, pimp, and bootlegger. A small but brawny man, he didn't back down from confrontations; guns (like the Colt revolver he often carried) figured as prominently in his life as guitars. He saw music as a hobby, whether performing on a street corner or in a barroom. In fact, he admired his first musical mentor, a whorehouse pianist, as much for his fancy clothes and stable of prostitutes as for his keyboard mastery.
But in the state capital of Jackson, James found his real musical education. He hung out with the musicians who congregated there from all over Mississippi, and came to see himself as more than a mere entertainer. The blues standards of the day struck him as frivolous party music; he saw his own songs, and his idiosyncratic style, as something much darker. He once told Calt that he played his songs “to deaden the mind” of female listeners. To James, the blues were an incantation, a way to cast a spell.
In 1931, he got to test his powers. Throughout the '20s, business boomed for “race records” produced for a black audience, and companies scoured the South for blues singers. After auditioning in a Jackson record store, James earned a recording session with Paramount Records in Grafton, Wis.
There, the first song he performed was “Devil Got My Woman,” partly inspired by a girlfriend who'd deserted James for his best friend.
I would rather be the devil than to be that woman's man
'Cause nothing but the devil changed my baby's mind.
When most blues singers wailed about a scheming woman, they either cursed her or begged her to come back. But instead of groveling or complaining, James cast himself as Satan, as a figure of darkness and power.
A piano song, “22-20 Blues,” combined murderous lyrics with masterful musicianship. Calt describes the song: “No blues pianist has ever displayed the arresting variety of instrumental phrases he uncorks after every vocal line of "22-20,' which is probably the most impromptu, improvised effort found in blues recording.” In fact, Calt notes that the artsy Kronos Quartet covered it in the '80s, but the classically trained musicians “could not capture the nuances” of the original.
Other commentators have groped to describe James' music. One, struck by the “lovely contrapuntal lines and eccentric phrasing,” went so far as to claim that James' melodies were “more like Elizabethan music than the blues.”
If the instrumental part of “22-20” was Elizabethan, the violent, homicidal lyrics hewed closer to the Jacobean period. James improvised the words on the spot after the engineer requested a “gun song.” Those lyrics still pack a wallop, even by the standards of gangsta rappers:
If I send for my baby and she won't come
All the doctors in Wisconsin sure won't help her none.
And if she gets unruly and gets so she won't do
I'll take my 22-20—I'll cut her half in two.
During the two-day session, James would record two dozen other songs, including the salacious “Special Rider Blues,” the morbid “Little Cow and Calf Is Gonna Die Blues,” and the apocalyptic “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” which were eventually issued as Paramount 78s.
But “Devil” and “22-20” were his most popular. They sold in the hundreds, a respectable showing during the Depression, and were heard by black record buyers throughout the South—including a young guitarist named Robert Johnson. In the late '30s, Johnson bestowed on James the sincerest form of flattery: He covered both songs, re-casting them as “32-20 Blues” and “Hellhound on My Trail.” The latter eventually became Johnson's most famous recording.
James' music was as raw and as evil as it comes, and his songs exerted a kind of gravitational pull—first on Johnson, and later on Spottswood's young suburbanites.
Tom Hoskins was the first of Spottswood's followers to find one of the group's disappeared idols—but that idol was not Skip James. Hoskins, a novice guitar player, preferred sweeter, more polished music than that of James and Johnson. Hoskins tried to strum along to the records of Mississippi John Hurt, a laid-back, melodic, finger picker. But the wanna-be guitarist hungered for more than the record: He wanted to see Hurt play. He wanted to learn the technique from the master.
Hoskins vowed to locate Hurt.
He gleaned a clue from a bootleg tape that Spottswood had acquired from an Australian enthusiast. “Avalon's my hometown, always on my mind,” sang Hurt. “Pretty women in Avalon, want me there all the time.” Maps of the Mississippi Delta failed to show the town, but in February 1963, Hoskins found it on an antiquated road atlas.
Hoskins was ready to go; his American University classes would be there when he returned. But he faced one problem. “At the time, I didn't have a very good car,” he remembers. That obstacle seemed to melt away: “I ran into this girl, and she had a brand-new little Dodge Slant 6, and she really wanted to go to Mardi Gras. I said, "I'd be happy to take you to Mardi Gras, and after that, I want to go up to Mississippi and see if I can find somebody.' ”
After the pair made it to New Orleans, Hoskins phoned a friend back east and discovered that police had posted a 26-state alarm for him on charges of kidnapping, grand theft auto, and violating the Mann Act: His companion, he found out, was only 17, and the Dodge belonged to her father. “There wasn't much I could do about it then,” says Hoskins. “If I got caught, I'd just have to depend on her to explain that I was deceived.” (She later did.)
After Mardi Gras, the fugitives drove to Mississippi, arriving in Avalon one Friday at dusk. Not even a crossroads, Avalon boasted a lone grocery store that also served as the post office. There, Hoskins asked a pair of elderly men if they knew a blues singer named John Hurt. They provided directions down a gravel road that led to a shack.
As the girl waited in the car, Hoskins knocked on the front door. An elfin old man answered, and his wide, good-natured grin turned sour when he saw the white stranger. Undaunted, Hoskins stuck out his hand and said, “Hey, John, my name's Tom, and I'm from Washington, D.C., and I've been looking for you for a long time.”
Hoskin's reference to the nation's capital clinched it: Mississippi John Hurt believed that the FBI had come to take him away.
By then, Hurt's wife Jessie had bolted out the back door to find their landlord, a white man who quickly appeared on the scene. Hoskins convinced them all that he was no G-man, or civil rights worker, either—just a fan who'd come seeking his favorite musician.
The 72-year-old Hurt had quit playing music years ago and didn't even own a guitar; he spent his days tending cattle on his landlord's farm. But he was delighted to hear that Hoskins admired his old records. Hoskins fetched his guitar from the car and presented it to his hero. He asked Hurt to practice so they could record his music over the weekend.
Returning on Sunday, Hoskins was amazed that Hurt had retained much of his finger picking ability. The old musician eased into his repertoire as though it were a comfortable pair of overalls.
“Looking at his hands play, it was absolute magic,” recalls Hoskins. “I know how Howard Carter felt when he opened Tutankhamen's tomb and looked in. [Hurt] was alive and he still had it. He was bright, bubbly, and full of life. I knew I had something special.”
In a few weeks, Hurt had moved to D.C., where he stayed at Spottswood's house in Arlington. Hurt's floppy fedora and foot-tapping music won over people who'd never even heard of the Mississippi Delta, and who would have gasped to know that the Hurt lyric “lovin' spoonful” referred to semen. That summer, he charmed the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival. In the District, he held court at the Ontario Place, a folkie coffeehouse in Adams Morgan. Newsweek and Time paid their respects. Even journalist Edward R. Murrow took time off from the Cold War to nod his approval.
The blues revival was launched. Hoskins' fairy-tale triumph—a dramatic journey into the past! a happy ending!—sparked other rediscoveries. Sleepy John Estes turned up in Brownsville, Tenn. Bukka White was alive and well in Memphis.
But Skip James remained an enigma, the last of the great lost bluesmen.
According to Calt, James received only $40 for his 1931 recordings, and he soon quit the music business, bitterly declaring it a “barrel of crabs.” The next year found him in a Dallas bread line.
Calt's book traces the next three decades of James' “lost years,” an extraordinary odyssey throughout the Deep South. At one point, he even joined his long-lost father, who'd become a Baptist minister. His father disapproved of James' blues-singing past. But James' attempts at reform—being ordained in his father's church, even singing in a traveling gospel quartet—didn't last.
In the mid-'40s, odd-job wanderings brought James to an Alabama mining camp, where he married the camp cook, Mable. The couple moved to Bentonia, near James' birthplace, where he cut timber and eked out a living. By 1964, the childless couple had settled in northwest Mississippi, where James drove a tractor.
That summer, Berkeley student John Fahey embarked on his cross-country car trip to find James. Fahey had grown up in Takoma Park; after Spottswood played him a Blind Willie Johnson 78, he was converted to country blues. The summer before, Fahey had located Bukka White simply by mailing a postcard to the bluesman's hometown.
James would not be as easy to track down; besides, there was competition—other blues fanatics were on his trail. James remained the last great prize to be found. Fahey and two companions chased a lead turned up by a Southerner: that James' hometown was Bentonia. But residents, if they remembered James at all, said he'd left years ago.
After that dead end, Fahey's blues posse combed the upper Delta, coming up empty-handed at country shacks and deserted towns. But in July, the trio got a break.
“We stopped off to get some gas,” remembers Fahey, “and I saw this black teen-ager sitting around, and I asked him—I used to ask everybody, everywhere we went—if they'd heard of Skip James. He said, "No, but one night I was over at Benny Simmons' barbershop, and this crazy old man came in drunk and claimed he used to make records with piano and guitar up North'....That had to be him.”
At the barbershop, Fahey received directions to a nearby shack where an old woman—after feigning ignorance—told them that her husband, Skip James, was in the hospital.
The rest is history, or at least a footnote. Delta bluesman Son House had just been found up in Rochester, N.Y. On July 13, 1964, Newsweek covered both rediscoveries in one story, rhapsodizing, “These two were the only great country blues singers still lost. No one knew whether they were alive or dead....The search for these old-time bluesmen has always had a note of urgency about it. Theirs was our finest and oldest native-born music, the blues, country-style, pure and personal, always one Negro and a guitar lamenting misery, injustice, but still saying yes to life.”
The accompanying photo showed a haggard, grim James in his hospital bed, solemnly reading a pamphlet from his father's collection of theology tracts. James looked more like a man contemplating death than one saying yes to life.
Except for Fahey, the pilgrims worshiped James; the young discoverer's relationship to James stood in stark contrast to that of Hoskins and Hurt. “I didn't like him,” says Fahey bluntly, “and he didn't like me.” Their animosity was perhaps a collision of artists: Fahey was an accomplished guitarist, and had already released several albums on his own Takoma label.
“They both had big egos,” remembers one member of Spottswood's blues cult. “Skippy expected hero worship, which he pretty much got from most everybody, but Fahey was a pretty arrogant person.”
Fahey laughs sarcastically, remembering that James couldn't pay his hospital or rent bills. He says, in a mock brag, “I bought Skip James for $200.”
Strangely, Fahey's own career would echo James'. After decades of critical acclaim but low sales, Fahey's work disintegrated as he battled alcoholism and the Epstein-Barr virus. This year, Spin magazine rediscovered Fahey in an article called “The Persecutions and Resurrections of Blind Joe Death,” a reference to Fahey's nom de guitar. And recently, Rhino Records released Return of the Repressed, a compilation of his work. He currently resides in a gospel mission shelter in Oregon, and spends his time—what else?—record-hunting. He now seeks used classical albums, which he trades for cash.
James left behind no rosy memories of the South, and except for his wife (who would soon join him up North), no family to speak of. Friends? Well, no one came to visit him in his sickbed—no one except the strangers who'd driven 3,000 miles to worship him.
In Washington, though, James acquired plenty of friends, and strangers called him a genius. Like Hurt, James stayed for a few weeks at the Spottswood home until he could find an apartment of his own. Spottswood found James fascinating and enigmatic, and judged that his very presence was historic: “It was like the second coming having Skip here.”
James was more than an atypical bluesman; he was atypical, period. “He really stood out from the mass of humanity,” says Spottswood. “If he had been raised in different circumstances and had some level of academic training, he could have been an original thinker in any number of fields. He had that brooding, inquisitive intellect that was never content to leave things unchallenged. I could have easily seen him teaching physics or philosophy.”
According to Spottswood, the preacher's son harbored “some contempt for religion, but he certainly believed in God. The Lord and Satan were constantly at battle within that complicated psyche.”
James drew his baroque vocabulary from the Old Testament, and peppered his speech with jargon from his father's collection of theological books. It was clear to Spottswood that James had read those texts more avidly than the Bible.
James had recorded a pair of gospel numbers in '31, and had learned a few spirituals during his stint with the gospel quartet. Spottswood believes that James felt no qualms about returning to the blues, unlike the Rev. Robert Wilkins, another rediscovered bluesman who now sang his old tunes with Christian lyrics. (Fahey disagrees with Spottswood on this matter; Fahey says that James cynically “crooned” the blues in the '60s, fearful that a heartfelt commitment to the “devil's music” would damn him to hell.)
Where racial matters were concerned, James was too misanthropic to choose sides. “I don't think he had a lot more use for git-along Southern blacks than he did for the white oppressors,” says Spottswood. “He didn't suffer fools or take no kind of shit.”
James stood in stark contrast to Hurt, Washington's—and the nation's—most famous rediscovered bluesman. When Spottswood asked the newly enfranchised Hurt who he'd support in the '64 election, the affable 72-year-old meekly replied that he didn't want to anger anyone: “If I vote for Mr. Johnson, then Mr. Goldwater gonna be unhappy. And if I vote for Mr. Goldwater, then Mr. Johnson's gonna be unhappy.” When someone asked James the same question, he snapped, “I'm voting for Skip.”
Dick Spottswood's wife, Louisa, became James' fast friend. “Skip was kind of an appealing rascal,” she remembers. “Very likable at times, very difficult at times—full of surprises.” Louisa, the daughter of a prominent Delaware family, especially liked to watch the bluesman play with her pet whippet.
While ensconced in all-white, well-to-do Arlington, James didn't much ramble around the neighborhood. He mostly practiced the guitar, and often spent time in the kitchen, hunched over a small antique piano handed down by Spottswood's grandmother.
A few days after arriving in Washington, James went further north, this time to the Newport Folk Festival, for his first major performance since his rediscovery. His guitar playing couldn't match his youthful mastery, but his autumnal voice more than retained its power, now with an added edge of age and sadness.
Writer Peter Guralnick, transfixed by the dramatic comeback, described the scene in his book Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock 'n' Roll:
Skip James appeared, looking gaunt and a little hesitant, his eyes unfocused and wearing a black suit and a wide-brimmed flat-topped preacher's hat that gave him as unearthly an appearance as his records had led us to suspect he had....As the first notes floated across the field, as the voice soared over us, the piercing falsetto set against the harsh cross-tuning of the guitar, there was a note of almost breathless expectation in the air. It seemed inappropriate somehow that this strange haunting sound which had existed 'til now only as a barely audible dub from a scratched 78 should be reclaimed so casually on an overcast summer's day at Newport....As the song came to an end, the field exploded with cheers and whistles.
But James' next song, his disheartening chronicle of the Depression, “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” stunned the hushed audience, composed mostly of folkies more used to grooving to the warm sounds of songsters like Hurt. Spottswood saw the artistry in James' performance, but was also realistic about the bluesman's potential commercial appeal: “I'm sure many in the audience found Skip James eminently ignorable.”
After James returned to D.C., he began gigging at the Ontario Place. A former grocery store in Adams Morgan, the Ontario attracted a nearly all-white crowd of college students, professionals, and beatniks. Here John Hurt had launched his second career. James, buoyed by the enthusiastic reception at Newport, now tried to accomplish the same.
The Ontario audience had adopted Hurt as its “patriarchal hippie,” and he responded with enthusiasm, playfully bantering with his new white audience. Hurt—who'd never considered himself a bluesman to begin with—presented material already familiar to the crowd, which knew his 1928 tunes from a popular Folkways compilation, Anthology of American Folk Music. His signature songs, including “Candyman,” were light party numbers. He'd even rehash standards such as “Chicken,” and lead the audience in asingalong.
The taciturn James exuded no such showman's charm. He didn't tell feel-good stories between feel-good songs; instead, James performed without patter, distilling his life's miseries into his music. He sang of death and betrayal to a crowd weaned on Cub Scout campfire stories.
The Ontario audience was unprepared for James' spectral presence, for his falsetto wailing and intricate, jazzlike instrumental breaks. “It was like the difference between tragic opera and some frivolous comedy,” recalls Lee Talbot, who managed the Ontario Place. “Everybody became quiet and thoughtful—just the words of some of Skip's songs send a shiver up your spine, and when he sang it, it was guaranteed to.”
James' music spooked spectators. “It put you in mind of sitting in a corner on the backs of your heels, rocking back and forth, moaning,” says Talbot. “It made me think of some dark bayou with Spanish moss hanging off the trees, an eerie voodoo atmosphere....Skip's music evoked thoughts in people that maybe they didn't want to be thinking when they were out on the town trying to have a good time. It made people uncomfortable, but the blues is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable.”
Dark, dense, and downright scary, James' music would prove too difficult for fairy-tale success. “We had expected that we had another John Hurt on our hands,” recalls Ed Denson, another member of the Washington blues cult. “And in terms of public acceptance, that was not true, and that was too bad.”
James didn't hide his jealousy. Backstage, he criticized Hurt's technique and offered him guitar lessons. Claiming that Hurt crammed too many notes into his finger picking, James lectured on “wasted motion,” a phrase he'd picked up from his father's books.
During jam sessions, James spiked his playing with complicated riffs and chord changes in an attempt to sabotage Hurt, who dutifully tried to keep up. An unreleased session tape reveals James angrily pounding the piano to drown out Hurt's earnest—if ludicrously out-of-sync—accompaniment.
Hurt met such spiteful behavior with an almost Christlike acceptance. “Skip would play harder music to show that he was a better artist than John, or to try to show John up,” recalls Talbot. “Of course, ol' John would just have that gentle sort of smile and say, "Boy, that Skippy sure can finger pick.' ”
To James, music meant ruthless, if not bloody, competition. After all, he'd won his train trip to blues glory in Wisconsin by beating out other musicians at an audition. Robert Johnson was dead, but John Hurt was still alive to beat up on.
Whiskey helped James ease the pain of his cancer and settle into his new surroundings. Spottswood began to see the many sides of his houseguest. “He had a mercurial personality,” remembers Spottswood. “Unlike Hurt, he wasn't a happy person, and when he drank he would become vicious.”
During the late summer, James logged his first recording session since the '30s. Gene Rosenthal, a young latecomer to the blues cult, hosted the session in his parents' basement. (Genes, Rosenthal's label, has just released this session on a new CD, She Lyin'.) Those casual sessions in the Maryland suburbs would prove the final time James' health would allow him to focus fully on his music.
That fall, James moved into an apartment on 19th Street NW, near Dupont Circle, and his wife, Mable, left Mississippi to care for him. But before moving into their new abode, the couple spent an idyllic week at the Maryland farm—more a commune, really—where Talbot lived.
Mable's stories fascinated Talbot; he especially remembers a confession she made as her husband napped on the porch. “She told me there was a fella on the plantation who wanted to screw her, and she didn't want anything to do with him. And she was selling whiskey on the side or something, so he threatened to get her thrown off the plantation. So she got him alone with her and put an ice pick in him....She said, "You know, Mr. Lee, when you stick somebody with an ice pick, the hole close up and it bleed on the inside.'...They never did figure out that there was foul play.” James himself rarely broached the subject of his murky past in the Deep South; his admirers soon stopped asking.
Not long afterward, James' illness worsened. In a chilling couplet from his new song, “Sick Bed Blues,” he showed that he was only too aware that modern medicine had already made its final diagnosis:
The doctor walked away, mumbling very low
Saying, “He may get better, but he'll never be well no mo'.”
Louisa Spottswood, now divorced and living in Philadelphia, recalls the almost Victorian manner in which James explained his problem.
“He was suffering from pain, but he was very vague about the location and the nature of it. I gathered that it was related to the illness that he had when he was found in [Mississippi]. When it began to bother him again and he was in considerable pain, he went to a man he called a "witch doctor' in Washington. Skip told me the witch doctor diagnosed the case and said [Skip] had been hexed by a jealous woman in the area of the navel, and the poison had sort of drained downward.”
James once asked Louisa to pick up the witch doctor's medicine. She followed directions to a row house near Union Station, where the man lived in a second-floor apartment. “He was a middle-aged man with a rather unfriendly appearance, quite stern, and on the wall was a chart which had a map with astrological symbols,” she remembers. “He gave me a jar with a dark brown liquid in it.”
Even that remedy didn't work enough magic. The tumor grew, and that winter, James checked into D.C. General Hospital, which treated indigent patients. Once there, he chafed at medical opinion. Doctors told him bluntly that if he wanted to live, he had no choice: His penis would have to be amputated.
James at first refused, vowing to endure the agony though the doctors told him he couldn't imagine the torment ahead if he postponed the procedure. But in early 1965, James surrendered. “The pain just got too bad,” explains Louisa.
As a young man, James had written songs full of swaggering machismo, songs about women and violence. Now he'd lost the ultimate proof of his manliness in the most ignominious way. Once, he'd “deadened the mind” of his female fans with his music. Now those conjuring powers could do him little good.
During James' previous convalescence, young worshipers had surrounded his previous sickbed, and Newsweek had come calling. But this time, his only visitors were Mable and Louisa Spottswood.
Humbled, James composed a new song, “Washington D.C. Hospital Blues.” The bluesman who'd once embraced damnation in “Devil Got My Woman” now sang as a lowly supplicant, grateful for the life-saving medical care he received.
They came and asked me,
“Who in the world are you?”
I said, “I'm a good man,
But I'm a poor man.
You can understand.”
Louisa remembers that when she first visited James in the hospital, she found him lying on his bed, the white sheet pulled over his head like a funeral shroud. Even as James' depression lifted, the ritual continued. “The first time, it was a shock, but after that it got to be kind of comical, and I'd say, "Hello Skip. It's Louisa.' And he'd pull off the sheet and be friendly and chat.”
James slowly came to accept his condition, and even began to joke about it. Once he yanked up the sheet to reveal his mutilated member to a flabbergasted Louisa. She remembers “a mauve flower with scalloped edges.”
“Then he said to me rather proudly, "I say to these young doctors, This would be really sad for someone your age.' Basically he was saying he'd done it all. He was acting pretty devil-may-care about it.”
Later that winter, he was finally discharged and continued his convalescence at home. For a while, he rarely left the apartment. But that spring, James seemed to become a new man. He believed that he'd whipped his cancer, and put weight on his emaciated frame. In the apartment, he often played the piano the Spottswoods had loaned him. The bluesman was now a man of leisure—strolling around Dupont Circle, feeding pigeons in the park, and generally taking it easy.
Gone were the dark suit and preacher's hat. James now sported Bermuda shorts and casual shirts. Remembers Louisa, “He was sort of swaggering around in those shorts, which was in the old way of thinking—remember when this was back in the '60s—an uppity thing to do.” James was feeling strong again, strong enough to show the devil in himself.
Now it was Mable who was ill and depressed. In summer '65, biographer Calt visited the couple's apartment. “[I] found Mable alone, sitting in a darkened room,” Calt writes. “ "I'm sick,' she blubbered. Her jaw quivering, she said that James had disappeared. No one would tell her where he was. "Skip's always thinkin',' she added ominously. "Skip's got mean things on his mind.' ” Then she asked Calt to buy her a bottle of Scotch, which he did.
As it turned out, Mable was right to worry. James had skipped out of Washington, leaving her for another woman.
James had often been curt with his rough, “country” wife. One night at the Ontario, he caused a scene when he saw her dancing with one of the beatniks, Ed Denson. James angrily broke up the “foolishness,” as he dubbed it, and pulled Mable back to her chair.
James had courted his new girlfriend, a Philadelphia widow named Lorenzo Meeks, during his frequent stopovers in that city. Meeks was no younger than Mable (like James, in her 60s), but James thought Meeks was uptown and high-class, a notch above his former wife.
Naturally, the Washington blues coterie wondered what Meeks saw in the emasculated blues singer. “When we found out he'd run off with a new woman, we were just dumbfounded,” said Louisa. “I mean, we were young, and we thought, "Wow, mind over matter.' ”
That winter, Mable was evicted from the Dupont Circle apartment, and the furniture was piled outside the building. Among the abandoned belongings stood the piano. Washington—the site of James' supposed comeback—turned out to be just like any other town: a place for Skippy James to leave behind.
He never made it out of Philadelphia. His cancer continued to spread, and in late '68, doctors removed his testicles and the remains of his penis.
James could barely afford medical treatment. After leaving Washington, he put out three more records. All three met with critical acclaim, and all three logged disappointing sales. James would have preferred commercial success: “I can't live on air puddings,” he told Calt.
But just as James was on the brink of destitution, he began receiving royalties from his song “I'm So Glad,” covered by the British rock trio Cream on its debut album, Fresh Cream. Guitarist Eric Clapton made sure that the dying blues singer got his payments, which mostly went to pay his hospital bills. (Ironically, James' song was itself a cover of sorts: He had transformed a tepid Tin Pan Alley tune, “I'm So Tired,” into a delirious guitar-picking tour de force.)
Louisa Spottswood and her whippet often visited the ailing bluesman. He married Lorenzo Meeks on his deathbed. (“I think it was really a love match after all,” says Louisa.) Meeks died in 1977, and the couple are buried under a single tombstone in Philadelphia.
One October afternoon in 1969, Spottswood had just returned from visiting James in Philadelphia. Their last meeting had been at the '67 Folk Life Festival in Washington, when the singer's healthy plumpness had surprised Spottswood: “I still had this vision of him as a gaunt, gray-haired guy with a little bit of a stoop and really intense glare.”
Now, though, he found himself listening to one of James' '60s gospel songs—one of the few spirituals James had recorded.
Haunted by a verse, Spottswood played the record again and again. Back at James' Mississippi sick bed, when pilgrims came to pay him homage, the bluesman had envisioned “a thousand people standing by my bedside.”
But in this song, he sang of himself, humbled, on a pilgrimage of his own. This time, James pictured himself as part of the nameless, mortal multitude, among “many a thousand trying to get home.”
Spottswood later found out that James died that afternoon. “I thought, you bastard, you really touched my life once more, didn't you?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_James
Skip James
Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James (June 9, 1902 – October 3, 1969)[1] was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter.
His guitar playing is noted for its dark, minor-key sound, played in an open D-minor tuning with an intricate fingerpicking technique. James first recorded for Paramount Records in 1931, but these recordings sold poorly, having been released during the Great Depression, and he drifted into obscurity.
After a long absence from the public eye, James was rediscovered in 1964 by blues enthusiasts, helping further the blues and folk music revival
of the 1950s and early 1960s. During this period, James appeared at
folk and blues festivals, gave concerts around the country and recorded
several albums for various record labels. His songs have influenced
generations of musicians and have been adapted by numerous artists. He
has been hailed as "one of the seminal figures of the blues."[2]
Biography
Early years
James was born near Bentonia, Mississippi.[1] His father was a bootlegger who reformed and became a preacher.[3]
As a youth, James heard local musicians, such as Henry Stuckey, from
whom he learned to play the guitar, and the brothers Charlie and Jesse
Sims. James began playing the organ in his teens. He worked on road
construction and levee-building
crews in Mississippi in the early 1920s and wrote what is perhaps his
earliest song, "Illinois Blues", about his experiences as a laborer. He
began playing the guitar in open D-minor tuning.[4]
1920s and 1930s
In early 1931, James auditioned for the record shop owner and talent scout H. C. Speir in Jackson, Mississippi. Speir placed blues performers with various record labels, including Paramount Records.[3] On the strength of this audition, James traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin, to record for Paramount.[3] His 1931 records are considered idiosyncratic among prewar blues recordings and formed the basis of his reputation as a musician.
As was typical of his era, James recorded various styles of music – blues, spirituals, cover versions and original compositions – frequently blurring the lines between genres and sources. For example, "I'm So Glad" was derived from a 1927 song, "So Tired", by Art Sizemore and George A. Little, recorded in 1928 by Gene Austin and by Lonnie Johnson (Johnson's version was entitled "I'm So Tired of Livin' All Alone"). James's biographer Stephen Calt, echoing the opinion of several music critics,
considered the finished product totally original, "one of the most
extraordinary examples of fingerpicking found in guitar music".[4]
Several other recordings from the Grafton session, such as "Hard Time
Killing Floor Blues", "Devil Got My Woman", "Jesus Is a Mighty Good
Leader", and "22-20 Blues" (the basis of Robert Johnson's better-known "32-20 Blues"),[5] have been similarly influential. Very few original copies of James's Paramount 78 rpm records have survived.
The Great Depression struck just as James's recordings were
hitting the market. Sales were poor as a result, and he gave up
performing the blues to become the choir director in his father's
church.[3] James was later an ordained minister in Baptist and Methodist churches, but the extent of his involvement in religious activities is unknown.[3]
Rediscovery and legacy
For
the next thirty years, James recorded nothing and performed
sporadically. He was virtually unknown to listeners until about 1960. In
1964, blues enthusiasts John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. According to Calt, the "rediscovery" of both James and Son House at virtually the same time was the start of the blues revival in the United States.[4] In July 1964 James and other rediscovered musicians appeared at the Newport Folk Festival.[3] Several photographs by the blues promoter Dick Waterman captured this performance, James's first in over 30 years. After that James recorded for Takoma Records, Melodeon Records, and Vanguard Records and performed at various engagements until his death from cancer in 1969.[3][6]
More of James's recordings have been available since his death
than were available during his lifetime. His 1931 recordings and several
of his recordings and concerts from the 1960s have been reissued on
numerous compact discs, in and out of print. His songs were not
initially recorded as frequently as those of other rediscovered blues
musicians. However, the British rock band Cream recorded "I'm So Glad",[2] providing James with $10,000 in royalties, the only windfall of his career.[1][7] Subsequently, Cream's adaptation was recorded by other groups. James' "22-20" inspired for the name for the English group 22-20s and the British post-rock band Hope of the States released a song partially about the life of James, entitled "Nehemiah", which reached number 30 on the UK Singles Chart.[8]
Only 15 copies of James' original shellac 78 recordings are still in
existence, and have become extremely sought after by collectors like
John Tefteller.
In 2004, Wim Wenders directed the film The Soul of a Man (the second part of The Blues, a series produced by Martin Scorsese), focusing on the music of Blind Willie Johnson, J.B. Lenoir and James.[9]
Because James had not been filmed before the 1960s, Keith B. Brown
played the part of the young James in the documentary. James' song
"Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" was featured in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and included on the soundtrack album.[10]
Personality
James was described as aloof and moody.[11] The musicologist Dick Spottswood commented, "Skip James, you never knew. Skip could be sunshine, or thunder and lightning depending on his whim of the moment".[11]
Musical style
James as guitarist
James
often played guitar with an open D-minor tuning (D–A–D–F–A–D),
resulting in the "deep" sound of the 1931 recordings. He reportedly
learned this tuning from his musical mentor, the unrecorded bluesman
Henry Stuckey,[citation needed] who in turn was said to have acquired it from Bahamian soldiers during the First World War,[citation needed]
despite the fact that his service card shows he did not serve overseas.
Robert Johnson also recorded in this tuning, his "Hell Hound on My
Trail" being based on James's "Devil Got My Woman."[1]
James's classically informed fingerpicking style was fast and clean,
using the entire register of the guitar, with heavy, hypnotic bass
lines.[citation needed] His style of playing had more in common with the Piedmont blues of the East Coast than with the Delta blues of his native Mississippi.[citation needed]
The "Bentonia School"
James is sometimes associated with the Bentonia School, which is either a subgenre of blues music or a style of playing it.[1] Calt, in his 1994 biography of James, I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues,
maintained that no style of blues originated in Bentonia and that the
"Bentonia School" is simply a notion of later blues writers who
overestimated the provinciality of Mississippi during the early 20th
century, when railways linked small towns, and who failed to see that in
the case of Jack Owens,
"the 'tradition' he bore primarily consisted of musical scraps from
James' table". Owens and other musicians who may have been
contemporaries of James were not recorded until the revival of interest
in blues music in the 1960s. Whether the work of these musicians
constituted a "school" and whether James originated it or was a member
of it remain open questions.[1] One of the last living links to the original Bentonia school is Jimmy "Duck" Holmes, the owner of the famous Blue Front Cafe
in Bentonia, Mississippi. Holmes learned to play in this particular
style directly from Henry Stuckey, who reportedly taught Skip James and Jack Owens himself. Accordingly, Duck is called the "last of the Bentonia Bluesmen."[12]
Later recordings, 1964–1969
Despite
poor health, James recorded several LPs from 1964 to 1969, mostly
revisiting his 1931 sides, traditional music, and spirituals, but also
including a handful of newly written blues meditating on his illness and
convalescence. These five prolific years have not been thoroughly
documented: recordings, outtakes, and interviews not released on James's
LPs (which have been repeatedly cannibalized and reissued) are
scattered among many compilations released by small labels. Previously
unreleased performances continue to be found and released but have been
left largely unexplained—sometimes hours' worth at a time. Original
recordings and reissues are listed below.
- Greatest of the Delta Blues Singers (Melodeon, Biograph, 1964)
- She Lyin' (Adelphi, 1964; first released by Genes, 1996)
- Today! (Vanguard, 1966)
- Devil Got My Woman (Vanguard, 1968)
- I'm So Glad (Vanguard, 1978)
- Live: Boston, 1964 & Philadelphia, 1966 (Document, 1994)
- Skip's Piano Blues, 1964 (Genes, 1998)
- Blues from the Delta, with two previously unreleased recordings (Vanguard, 1998)
- The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James – 1930 (Yazoo, 1994)
- The Complete Bloomington, Indiana Concert, March 30, 1968 (Document, 1999)
- Skip's Guitar Blues, 1964(?), (Genes, 1999)
- Studio Sessions: Rare and Unreleased, 1967 (Vanguard, 2003)
- Hard Time Killing Floor Blues (Biograph, 2003†)
- Heroes of the Blues: The Very Best of Skip James (Shout!, 2003)
- Hard Time (Universe, 2003†)
- Cypress Grove Blues (2004)
- Hard Time Killin' Floor (Yazoo 2075, 2005)
References
- Nash, J. D. (June 16, 2016). "Jimmy "Duck" Holmes - Treats Us to "It Is What It Is"". Americanbluesscene.com. Retrieved January 11, 2019.
External links
- Interview with Skip James' surviving cousin
- Works by or about Skip James in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Skip_James
Skip James
Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James (June 21, 1902 – October 3, 1969) was an American blues singer, guitarist, pianist, and songwriter. Born near Bentonia, Mississippi,
he developed a unique singing and guitar playing style, featuring his
high-pitched voice and virtuoso finger-picking technique. Few could
imitate James' eerie vocalizations and adept playing, one of them being
the young Robert Johnson, who went on to become legendary.
James recorded for Paramount Records in 1931, but, like several other
bluesmen of his era, he dropped out of the music business for 30 years
until his rediscovery in the early 1960s. He burst onto the
blues-revival scene at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 and became a
popular performer at folk venues until his death in 1969. The rock group
Cream covered his song "I'm So Glad" in the late 1960s, providing him
with his one hit record.
James was known to be an aloof and idiosyncratic artist. Though the
lyrical content of some of his songs led some to the characterization of
him as a misogynist, he remained with his wife Lorenzo until his death.
He seldom socialized with other bluesmen or fans and reportedly
disliked the folk scene of the 1960s. James epitomized the complicated
personality typical of many bluesmen, living a hard and sometimes
reckless life while holding austere religious beliefs. His work remains
more popular and influential today than in either of his two brief
recording careers.
Biography
Early years
James was born near Bentonia, Mississippi.
His father was a converted bootlegger turned preacher. As a youth,
James heard local musicians such as Henry Stuckey and brothers Charlie
and Jesse Sims and began playing the organ in his teens. He worked on
road construction and levee-building crews in his native Mississippi in
the early 1920s, and wrote what is perhaps his earliest song, "Illinois
Blues," about his experiences as a laborer. Later, he sharecropped and
made bootleg whiskey in the Bentonia area. He began playing guitar
in open D-minor tuning and developed a three-finger picking technique
that he would use to great effect on his recordings. In addition, he
began to practice piano-playing, drawing inspiration from the
Mississippi blues pianist Little Brother Montgomery.
1920s and 1930s
In early 1931, James auditioned for Jackson, Mississippi record shop
owner and talent scout H. C. Speir, who placed blues performers with a
variety of record labels, including Paramount Records. On the strength
of this audition, James traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin
to record for Paramount. James' 1931 work is considered unique among
pre-war blues recordings, and forms the basis of his reputation as a
musician.
As is typical of his era, James recorded a variety of material: blues
and spirituals, cover versions and original compositions, frequently
blurring the lines between genres and sources. For example, "I'm So
Glad" was derived from a 1927 song by Art Sizemore and George A. Little
entitled "So Tired," which had been recorded in 1928 by both Gene Austin
and Lonnie Johnson (the latter under the title "I'm So Tired of Livin'
All Alone"). James changed the song's lyrics and transformed it with his
virtuoso technique, moaning delivery, and keen sense of tone.
Biographer Stephen Calt considered the finished product to be "one of
the most extraordinary examples of fingerpicking found in guitar music."
In the 1960s, "I'm So Glad" became a hit record for the rock group
Cream, featuring Eric Clapton on guitar.
Several of the Paramount recordings, such as "Hard Time Killing Floor
Blues," "Devil Got My Woman," "Jesus Is A Mighty Good Leader," and
"22-20 Blues" (the basis for Robert Johnson's better-known "32-20
Blues"), have proven similarly influential. Very few original copies of
James' Paramount 78s have survived.
The Great Depression struck just as James' recordings were hitting
the market. Sales were poor as a result, and James gave up performing
the blues to become the choir director in his father's church. James
himself was later ordained as a minister in both the Baptist and Methodist denominations, but his involvement in religious activities was inconsistent.
Disappearance and rediscovery
Like
several other early
bluesmen, James recorded nothing for the next 30 years and drifted in and out of music. He was virtually unknown to listeners until about 1960. In 1964, however, blues enthusiasts John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine found him in a Tunica, Mississippi hospital. According to Calt, the "rediscovery" of both Skip James and Son House at virtually the same moment was the start of the "blues revival" in America. In July 1964, James, along with other rediscovered performers, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. Throughout the remainder of the decade, he recorded for the Takoma, Melodeon, and Vanguard labels and played various engagements until his death in 1969.
bluesmen, James recorded nothing for the next 30 years and drifted in and out of music. He was virtually unknown to listeners until about 1960. In 1964, however, blues enthusiasts John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine found him in a Tunica, Mississippi hospital. According to Calt, the "rediscovery" of both Skip James and Son House at virtually the same moment was the start of the "blues revival" in America. In July 1964, James, along with other rediscovered performers, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. Throughout the remainder of the decade, he recorded for the Takoma, Melodeon, and Vanguard labels and played various engagements until his death in 1969.
Musical style
Skip James' sound was unique to the blues genre and although he
influenced other blues musicians, such as Robert Johnson, few have been
able to recreate his style. His high pitched voice seems otherworldly
and frail, even in his early recordings. He is said to have had a
"preaching" style of singing and was known to also sing spirituals.
James is regarded as a gifted and distinctive guitarist. He often
used an open D-minor tuning (D-A-D-F-A-D) which gave his instrument a
dark and desolate tone. James reportedly learned this tuning from his
musical mentor, the unrecorded bluesmen Henry Stucky. Stuckey in turn
was said to have acquired it from Bahamanian soldiers during the first world war.
The famed Robert Johnson also recorded in this "Bentonia" tuning, his
"Hell Hound on my Trail" being based on the James' "Devil got my woman."
James' finger-picking style features an economical grace in its
technique, resembled classical guitar technique. It was fast and clean,
using the entire register of the guitar with heavy, hypnotic bass lines.
James' style of playing is considered to have shared as much in common
with the Piedmont blues of the East Coast as the Delta blues of his
native Mississippi.
Legacy
Although not initially covered as frequently as other rediscovered musicians, British rock band Cream recorded two versions of "I'm So Glad" (a studio version and a live version), providing James the only financial windfall of his career. Cream based their version on James' simplified 1960s recording, instead of the faster, more intricate 1931 original.
Since his death, James' music has become more available and prevalent
than during his lifetime. His 1931 recordings, along with several
rediscovered recordings and concerts, have found their way on to
numerous compact discs, drifting in and out of print. His influence is
still felt among contemporary bluesmen, as well as more mainstream
performers such as Beck, who sings a partially-secularized, Skip
James-inspired version of "Jesus Is A Mighty Good Leader" on his 1994
"anti-folk" record, One Foot in the Grave.
James also left a mark on twenty-first century Hollywood, with Chris Thomas King's cover of "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the 1931 "Devil Got My Woman Blues" featured prominently in the plot and soundtrack of Ghost World.
In recent times, British post-rock band Hope of the States released a
song partially focused on the life of Skip James entitled "Nehemiah,"
which charted at number 30 in the UK charts.
Partial discography
Paramount 78s: 1931 Of the speculated 26 Skip James recordings
waxed in 1931, only 18 sides have survived. Although several
compilations of these have since been released, all come from the same
sources and share identical hisses, pops, and vocal distortion.
Competing reissues of these differ primarily in track order and the
presence or absence of various noise-cancellation efforts.
- Complete 1931 Session Yazoo, 1986
- Complete Recorded Works (1931) Document, 1990
- The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James - 1930 Yazoo, 1994
- Cypress Grove Blues Snapper Music Group, 2004
- Illinois Blues Universe, 2004
- The Complete 1931 Recordings Body & Soul, 2005
- Hard Time Killin' Floor Yazoo, 2005
Rediscovery: 1964-1969 Despite poor health, James recorded several LPs of music, mostly revisiting his 1931 sides, traditional music, and spirituals; but along with these, he sang a handful of newly-penned blues, meditating on his illness and convalescence. Unfortunately, these five prolific years have not been thoroughly documented: recordings, outtakes, and interviews not released on James' few proper LPs (which, themselves, have been endlessly cannibalized and reissued) are scattered among many small label compilations. Previously unreleased performances continue to be found, released, and left largely unexplained—sometimes hours' worth at a time.
- Greatest of the Delta Blues Singers Biograph, 1964
- She Lyin Adelphi, 1964 (first released: Genes, 1996)
- Skip James Today! (Vanguard, 1965)
- Devil Got My Woman (Vanguard, 1968)
- I'm So Glad (Vanguard, 1978)
- Live: Boston, 1964 & Philadelphia, 1966 (Document, 1994)
- Skip's Piano Blues, 1964 (Genes, 1998)
- Blues From the Delta (Vanguard, 1998) (two previously unreleased recordings)
- The Complete Bloomington, Indiana Concert - March 30, 1968 (Document, 1999)
- Skip's Guitar Blues, 1964(?) (Genes, 1999)
- Studio Sessions: Rare and Unreleased, 1967 (Vanguard, 2003)
- Hard Time Killing Floor Blues (Biograph, 2003)
- Heroes of the Blues: The Very Best of Skip James (Shout!, 2003)
- Hard Time (Universe, 2003)
References
- Calt, Stephen. I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. ISBN 9780306805790
- Obrecht, Jas. Blues Guitar The Men Who Made the Music: from the Pages of Guitar Player Magazine. San Francisco: GPI Books, 1993. ISBN 9780879302924
- Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. New York: Amistad, 2004. ISBN 0060524235
- Wilds, Mary. Raggin' the Blues: Legendary Country Blues and Ragtime Musicians. Avisson young adult series. Greensboro, NC: Avisson Press, 2001. ISBN 9781888105476
External links
All links retrieved November 16, 2019.
- Illustrated Skip James discography – wirz.de.
Credits
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https://mixolydianblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/skip-james-the-power-of-a-man-with-his-guitar/
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Skip James: The Power of a Man with His Guitar
When people think of the blues, what sort of concepts come to mind? The expression of pain born out of racial oppression and everyday life? Stripped down instrumental arrangements? What always comes to certain minds is the indelible mark that the guitar, and more importantly its players, had (and continues to have) on the genre. These influences would eventually to the inception of another groundbreaking music form, the music of jazz. Oftentimes, when speaking of blues guitarists, names such as Lightnin’ Hopkins and Robert Johnson will arise. One name that is sometimes forgotten in this list is Skip James. This paper intends to focus on Skip’s influence on Delta Blues (arguably the most important blues form that was a precursor to jazz) through his playing and songwriting, and also analyze his works Devil Got My Woman and Crow Jane. The hope is that, through these analyses, it will be shown that Skip James is one of the most important figures in blues and for the development of jazz.
Central to the guitar playing of Skip James, or really any guitarist, is the tuning of the instrument. Skip James, in his words, “just fished around until” he “started finding” the open E tuning (E-B-G-E-B-E) used in nearly all of his tracks (Calt 88). The tuning is responsible in many ways for James’ sound, as Skip states “when you mix it you got your ‘cross’,” meaning he saw that certain chords and tonalities were unique to this tuning that did not exist in standard E-A-D-G-B-E (Calt 89). These tonalities and lead lines fit Skip’s voice well, and were willing to go wherever he wanted to with them. As such, it is difficult to find a piece recorded by James that is not in this tuning (there are even transpositions to Open E with songs such as Four O’clock Blues which was originally in standard tuning) (Calt 89). One interesting result of this tuning besides the tonality is the approach to double-stop thirds (a common figure for guitarists). To achieve the third parallel motion in Open E, James (or any guitarist) must utilize the first and fourth strings in what would normally be an octave motion with the first and fourth fingers (Calt 90). What is useful about this finger position of an octave used for tertian harmony is that, in between the first and fourth strings, are two more strings (second and third). What the guitarist can do with these extra strings is create drone harmonies, or use the strings for easy melody lines via fretting one or two of them.
“Interview with Skip James’ Cousin.” Paramounthomes. N.p., 6/17/2005. Web. 11/5/13.
Experimentation is a characteristic of both jazz and its predecessor the Delta blues. While Skip James was not the only blues guitarist to leave behind standard tuning, his pursuit of being different was a core value that transferred onto the styles he belonged to and influenced. Most important of those influenced by James’ style was Robert Johnson. Johnson most likely first heard Skip James’ playing through records, and then adopted various Bentonia techniques (such as melismas and unique, complex harmonies) (Palmer 116). Robert Johnson would go on to become one of, if not the most famous performers to come out of the Delta blues style. It is this style that had a direct impact on W.C. Handy, who would be the first published composer of blues. These compositions would eventually become a part of early jazz. Undoubtedly Handy heard music influenced by James, as he influenced the most famous guitarist (and many others) of the Delta blues scene. The Delta blues was the sound of James in many senses, and would have been very different if he had never existed. If that were the case, Handy would have heard a music that may have not appealed to him, and may have caused him to never publish music that sowed the seeds for early jazz standards.
Of course guitar technique is one component to the blues, but not the only component. The songwriting, namely the lyrical content, of a blues song can often be the defining factor in the overall feel of the track. Skip James always felt that the blues should be written about something that one has authentically experienced. Now, someone might say, “well, all blues singers wrote about their experiences, so what makes Skip James unique?” The difference with James was that some, if not many, of these experiences were either indirect or simply mental. Skip James biographer Stephen Calt describes these experiences as “random collections of fleeting happenstances, or expressions of attitude (Calt 116-117).” Most blues experiences are written about actual events, but Skip James introduced in many ways the usage of imagination to enhance the experience. Most would not actually shoot a cheating lover, but writing about it makes a person seem hard, an outlaw of sorts. James said that his lyrics expounded on the idea that he wanted criminals like Mister Cress to know that he “was just as ‘bad’ as he was (Calt 117).” Now with this in mind, compare such thematic ideas presented by Robert Johnson (who has already been established as both an important figure in Delta Blues who was influenced by Skip James). In the song Me and the Devil Blues, “You may bury my body down by the highway side spoken: Baby, I don’t care where you bury my body when I’m dead and gone You may bury my body, ooh down by the highway side So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride (“Robert Johnson- Me and the Devil Blues lyrics”).”
This, in a more implicit way, demonstrates an extension of the outlaw mentality that James wanted to project. Outlaws have a certain psychological profile, and this includes not having concern for their death. They live a life of extreme danger, stealing whatever they wish, but understand the consequences of doing so. Such a life inevitably leads to shootouts with law enforcements or rival gangsters, all the while knowing that they could be killed. Even in death, the outlaw believes they will live on in an infamous existence. Johnson declaring “You may bury my body, ooh down by the highway side So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride” reflects this dynamic of the outlaw experience. Now, consider that numerous songs of Johnson’s do not contain this theme, instead focusing largely on elements of relationships (namely romantic ones or lack thereof). Take, for instance, the section in Love in Vain that states “When the train rolled up to the station I looked her in the eye When the train rolled up to the station and I looked her in the eye Well, I was lonesome, I felt so lonesome and I could not help but cry All my love’s in vain (“Robert Johnson-Love In Vain lyrics”).” These are not words of a hard man, as a hard man would not cry or feel such heartbreak at the hands of a lover. In
fact, this sensitivity is present in one way oranother in numerous tracks of Robert Johnson, leading one to ask where the sparse outlaw references originate from. Based on the previous evidence, it is clear that Johnson took great influence from Skip James. Since this paper established James’ goal to show toughness through song, it is logical to conclude that his lyrics had an affect occasionally on Johnson (causing him to write lyrics that reflect an outlaw attitude). This lyrical content would come to be associated in some shape or form with the blues in general, as themes of being tough or breaking the law would work sometimes alongside heartbreak and general hardships of life.
Integral to understanding Skip James’ musical contribution is an intricate analysis of his music. In this paper there will be two song excerpts analyzed, the first one taken from Devil Got My Woman and the other from Crow Jane. The time signature of Devil Got My Woman is the simple duple meter of 4/4. This is an interesting choice, and one would think an obvious choice considering the great deal of songs that have been written in this meter (it is called common time after all). Think, however, of how early on this was in the development of the blues. Devil Got My Women was written long before a full piece band had been introduced to the blues (hence a rhythm section that could keep time efficiently). Pulse in this early era of blues was variable, stretched and sometimes non-existent. Now admittedly Skip most likely used this meter without a second thought, but its significance is still pronounced. Since Devil Got My Women is the most associated song with James, chances are it (more than other songs) influenced Delta blues musicians (in turn W.C. Handy and jazz). Did Skip James use other meters? Of course, but the point is that the most known song by Skip was in fact written in 4/4. Some may say, “jazz had other influences,” and this is true, however the meters of these influences were not 4/4. Ragtime predominantly used 2/4, so where could have jazz musicians gotten the idea for 4/4 meter? Indeed the blues has its roots in field hollers which were at times in 4/4, but nevertheless when jazz musicians were hearing the time signature it was in blues songs, not field hollers.
With this in mind, the excerpt used here of Devil Got My Woman contains an accompaniment line in the steel guitar that is rather intriguing. The rhythm consists of combinations of quarter notes, eighth notes, and sixteenth notes (including triplet figures). The melodic result of these combinations is a diverse mixture of complex double stops with intervals ranging from thirds to compound 15ths. The accompaniment is without a pronounced harmonic progression in the manner that a European composer such as Beethoven may understand (i.e. triads and sevenths in a homophonic manner), but there is a harmony. The excerpt fluctuates harmonically in the guitar line with the following scale degrees (assuming D Dorian is the scale); 2, 1, 5, 1, 7, 5, 7 (x5 (played five times)), 3, 1, 5 (x7), 3, 5, 1, 3 (x2), 5, 7 (x2), 5, 3, 4, 5, 7 (x2), 5 (x2), 6, 1, 2, 1, 2, 6, 1, 2, 7, 1, 5, 1. This harmony is significant to the development of jazz in numerous ways (once again based on the syllogism: Skip James influenced Delta Blues; Delta Blues influenced jazz; therefore Skip James influenced jazz). Firstly there is the modal movement harmonically (in the guitar) and melodically (in both the vocals and guitar). Modes became a staple in jazz beginning with Miles Davis’ work on albums such as 1958’s Milestones and 1959’s Kind of Blue. Specifically with Kind of Blue Davis wanted to “draw closer to African and Gospel music as well as the blues, but admitted that he had failed in this intention (“Kind of Blue”).” Despite Miles “failing” to represent the music he wanted to, he undoubtedly was influenced by it (i.e. the blues) when recording the album. Influence is present in musicians whether they know it or not, as the music they listen to invariably will appear in their playing. In 1959 and prior, there were a plethora of blues genres available, but no matter what genre Davis listened to for inspiration, Skip James’ influence was no doubt present. As has been established throughout the paper, Skip James was the jumping off point for numerous stylistic innovations for blues artists, which would eventually influence jazz. Taking this into account, is it possible that Miles Davis was subconsciously moved towards the modes through the blues recordings he listened to for writing Kind of Blue? Think about this, the other music he wanted to draw from used scales that were not modes like Dorian (they most likely were in scales such as major and minor, and possibly pentatonic). Furthermore, blues is not known for using modes per se, but rather scales that reflect a combination of Western and African influences, and yet Devil Got My Woman blatantly contains a modal element. Prior to his modal jazz work, Miles Davis was heavily involved in bebop. Supposedly he changed to modal because it gave freedom from complex chord changes, but his love of blues may have given him the rough plan for modal jazz (namely the song Devil Got My Woman) (“Kind of Blue”). One may say this is speculative, but there really are few examples of songs as influential to blues as Devil Got My Woman that contain modal elements, and as such the conclusion seems to have clout.
Crow Jane is the other excerpt this paper will analyze. What is intriguing about the guitar part is the walking bass motion carried essentially throughout the song. The way that the bass section of the guitar moves could be indicative of ragtime influence, however this is impossible to prove with hard evidence. Theoretically though, considering Skip James was born in 1902 at the height of ragtime (Calt 23), it is likely that he heard it and was possibly influenced by it. What is fascinating about the guitar accompaniment are the improvisational fills that Skip plays. Notice the steady quarter note pattern in the bass/pedal note and the sixteenth/eighth mixture in the upper register pattern. Skip used finger picking, like many of his contemporaries, which requires a mixture of usually the thumb, index finger, and the middle finger (an exception being the Carter scratch method one also utilizes the ring finger and pinky). It is unusual, maybe unheard of, for a guitarist to play continuous bass tones in the thumb while simultaneously playing subdivisions and cross-rhythms with the other fingers. Skip probably did not have any idea how technically skilled he was as a guitarist, but it would be difficult to find guitarists who finger pick like he did nowadays, not even master finger pickers such as Jeff Beck or Lindsey Buckingham could have originated the technique James had in Crow Jane.
In terms of the vocal melody in Crow Jane, the rhythm is interesting in that there is syncopation. Drawing back to the idea that Skip James influenced jazz through his influence on blues, the syncopation (while he is not the only influencer to include it) shows where possibly some jazz musicians (indirectly) came up with the concept of syncopation in their music. At the very least, the vocal rhythm is a flowing motion, leading the listener to wonder which part drives the other. The parts being referenced are the vocals and guitar, and usually it is obvious that the accompaniment or the lead push the song forward. In the case of Crow Jane, however, this distinction is not so obvious. Listening to the audio recording it seems that, given a choice, the guitar part is the driving force. The reasoning behind this statement is that the rhythm, more specifically the meter, is solidly held by the walking bass.
Skip James lived a life of pain. He battled illness at seemingly every turn, not to mention went unnoticed by the world for his music until the very end of his life (Russell 123). Upon “rediscovery” by blues enthusiasts when Skip was in a hospital, the world soon came to know what music this spirited man from Bentonia created. Eventually blues scholars would speak, to a certain degree, about James’ paramount influence on the blues. Often times, however, Skip would be grouped with his contemporaries rather than separated as a unique catalyst in blues’ development. This was one aspect of this paper, in that, a goal was set to showcase James’ unique technical and musical approaches to blues. A link that has been missed in conversations about Skip and the blues, however, is its indirect and direct influence on jazz’s development. This was the second aim of this paper, as there are virtually no academic resources that make this important (and possibly disputed) connection. In conclusion, Skip James’ influence will be felt for many eons, as his unique approach to music was so monumental, he did not know his own power. Any musician that has ever played blues or jazz has Skip to thank, and ought to remember that.
Works Cited
Calt, Stephen. I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues. Chicago: Chicago Review Press Incorporated, 1994. Print.
“Kind of Blue.” Miles Davis Official. 1997. Web. 12/1/2013.
Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta. New York: Penguin, 1982. Print.
“Robert Johnson-Love In Vain lyrics.” Lyricsmode. 2012. Web. 12/2/2013.
“Robert Johnson- Me and the Devil Blues lyrics.” Lyricsmode. 2012. Web. 12/2/2013.
Russell, Tony. The Blues: From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray. New York: Schirmer Books, 1997. Print.
Skip James
Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James possessed one of the most hauntingly
distinctive styles in the blues, and, according to some who knew him,
one of the most disturbed and complex personalities as well. His vocals,
guitar work, and song constructions raise the blues to a level of high
art and rare beauty, yet his subject matter and presentation were of
such a heavy, cheerless nature that Mississippi bluesman Johnnie Temple,
a contemporary of Skip’s, told an interviewer that James’ music was so
sad that people would pay him not to perform. Listeners can be
entranced and fascinated by Skip James’ music, but they are not likely
to find in it the entertainment value and uplifting power to soothe a
troubled mind that is characteristic of other blues greats.
James was born on June 9, 1902, on the Woodbine Plantation in Bentonia, Mississippi, and counted local guitarist Henry Stuckey as his greatest influence. Over the years several other Bentonia guitarists have played the same type of songs in a style similar to James’, giving rise to controversial discussions about the existence of a “Bentonia school” of blues. Some historians dismiss the notion of a folk style based on local elements and assert that the other guitarists, such as Jack Owens, were simply following the lead of Skip James – or was it Henry Stuckey? The music is often eerie, somber, and played in a minor key, and the repertoire always includes a song or two about the devil and the trouble he has caused. Guitarist Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, owner of the Blue Front Cafe in Bentonia, is the current torch carrier of the tradition. The Holmes family remembers James playing piano on the front porch of the Blue Front, probably not long after it opened in 1948. James’ percussive piano style was equally conventional, but completely different from his approach to guitar.
James made a lasting mark – but one that brought him very little money due to poor sales during the Depression – at a historic session for Paramount Records in 1931. Devil Got My Woman, Cherry Ball Blues, 22-20 Blues, Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, and I’m So Glad were among his most influential works, inspiring covers or reworkings not only from prewar blues artists such as Robert Johnson, Joe McCoy, and Johnnie Temple but also in the rock era from Eric Clapton and Cream, who transformed I’m So Glad into a blues-rock anthem in 1966. After spending a lifetime working as a laborer, minister and off and on as a blues player or gospel singer, settling here and there around the South in between returns to Bentonia, James was enticed (on the strength of his 1931 recordings) to start performing again during the blues revival of the 1960s. He made some important appearances and added to his recorded legacy with several albums after relocating to Washington, D.C., and then to Philadelphia, where he spent his final days. He died on Oct. 3, 1969. During his lifetime, James achieved only limited fame, and no fortune, from his music, but his stature as one of the great blues artists in history only grows as the years go by.
Jim O’Neal
November 10th, 2016James was born on June 9, 1902, on the Woodbine Plantation in Bentonia, Mississippi, and counted local guitarist Henry Stuckey as his greatest influence. Over the years several other Bentonia guitarists have played the same type of songs in a style similar to James’, giving rise to controversial discussions about the existence of a “Bentonia school” of blues. Some historians dismiss the notion of a folk style based on local elements and assert that the other guitarists, such as Jack Owens, were simply following the lead of Skip James – or was it Henry Stuckey? The music is often eerie, somber, and played in a minor key, and the repertoire always includes a song or two about the devil and the trouble he has caused. Guitarist Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, owner of the Blue Front Cafe in Bentonia, is the current torch carrier of the tradition. The Holmes family remembers James playing piano on the front porch of the Blue Front, probably not long after it opened in 1948. James’ percussive piano style was equally conventional, but completely different from his approach to guitar.
James made a lasting mark – but one that brought him very little money due to poor sales during the Depression – at a historic session for Paramount Records in 1931. Devil Got My Woman, Cherry Ball Blues, 22-20 Blues, Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, and I’m So Glad were among his most influential works, inspiring covers or reworkings not only from prewar blues artists such as Robert Johnson, Joe McCoy, and Johnnie Temple but also in the rock era from Eric Clapton and Cream, who transformed I’m So Glad into a blues-rock anthem in 1966. After spending a lifetime working as a laborer, minister and off and on as a blues player or gospel singer, settling here and there around the South in between returns to Bentonia, James was enticed (on the strength of his 1931 recordings) to start performing again during the blues revival of the 1960s. He made some important appearances and added to his recorded legacy with several albums after relocating to Washington, D.C., and then to Philadelphia, where he spent his final days. He died on Oct. 3, 1969. During his lifetime, James achieved only limited fame, and no fortune, from his music, but his stature as one of the great blues artists in history only grows as the years go by.
Jim O’Neal
THE MUSIC OF SKIP JAMES: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH SKIP JAMES:
