| Warp + Weft: Son House :: Father of the Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Wednesday, November 21, 2007 at 12:09 AM | |
 Son HouseFather of the Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions Sony 1992 Myth and legend swirl around the early history of the blues with such vehemence that separating fact from fiction becomes impossible. The supernatural is hardly less fantastical than the concrete here: Robert Johnson and Tommy Johnson may not have actually sold their souls to the Devil at the crossroads, but Blind Lemon Jefferson really did die after a car accident during a snowstorm when the ambulance that arrived refused to take him to the nearby white hospital, instead driving him across town to the "colored" one. Or maybe it's the more far-fetched version of the story, the one where he becomes disoriented while walking in a snowstorm and suffers a heart attack. When Blind Willie Johnson's house caught on fire, he ran down to the river in his pajamas with a bucket. When the fire was out, he fell asleep in the charred remains of his house, wrapped in wet clothing, caught pneumonia, and died. By contrast, Eddie James "Son" House avoided a gruesome and untimely end, but that doesn't mean he didn't have his share of harrowing experiences. According to Boston bluesman Paul Rishell (who tutored House in re-learning his songs for his final tour in the early '70s), Son awoke one morning to find the woman he was living with gone from his bed. Perhaps this wasn't a reason for undue concern (House was married five times), but when he went out to the outhouse, he found her there, dead of unknown causes. As a young man in Mississippi, House had killed a man with a pistol during a bar fight and done two years at Parchman Farm before a judge commuted his sentence upon reviewing the evidence of the case. Unwilling to get himself caught up in any more trouble, he simply gathered his belongings and left. And so Son House slipped the noose, as he no doubt had to time and again, to outlive his contemporaries, his proteges (including Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson), and many of the blues and rock players he influenced (Freddie King, Jimi Hendrix). Born in 1902, he was there at the headwaters of the blues along with Charley Patton, but unlike so many of the early Delta blues players, he survived, along with Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, and Mississippi Fred McDowell to be rediscovered in the '60s by a new generation that had fallen in love with the sound of early blues. House recorded a handful of songs for Paramount Records in 1930 and for Alan Lomax in 1941 and 1942, but in 1943, following the death of his musical partner Willie Brown, House moved to upstate New York where he was still living when he was found by some enthusiastic fans in 1964 and coaxed out of retirement to tour and, best of all, cut some new records for CBS. The Alan Lomax recordings are in stunningly good condition, with little of the pop and hiss that dogs early recordings by Skip James, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and even the 1930 recordings of House. They've been issued on a CD called Delta Blues, and it's definitely worth tracking down. Joined by Fiddlin' Joe Martin on mandolin, Leroy Williams on harmonica, and Willie Brown on guitar, House is in full voice and complete command of his guitar. It's a jovial session full of background chatter from the musicians and a far cry from the more haunted recordings of Blind Willie Johnson and Robert Johnson. When a train passes by the store they're playing in, its whistle and chug can be heard in the background, and it's hard not to marvel at whatever bit of kismet led Lomax and his crew to be there right on time to capture not just the music, but the acoustic environment of Clack's Store near Lake Cormorant in Mississippi. I, however, did not begin with those recordings. I started with the CBS recordings, done by producer John Hammond with the help of Canned Heat guitarist Al Wilson on a couple of tracks, when House was already 63 years old. He had to relearn many of his own songs for the session, and while his talents are not exactly diminished, his playing and singing is unmistakably weathered and aged. Where his voice before sounded in tune with the freight train rumbling by in 1941, it now cracks on high notes and flutters when he clears his throat. His slashing slide guitar playing still sounds more like he's hacking off chunks of music from his National Steel guitar, although now it's perhaps harder to get the knife through. Where Robert Johnson coaxed eerie and quicksilver phrases with his bottleneck, House wrestles them from the steel of the guitar, the floorboards, the very air.  Son House at the Newport Folk Festival In the bulk of his songs, that's the story he's telling, and so stock verses are dropped in but changed by the context, in much the same way that epic poems like Homer's Odyssey contain multiple instances of phrases like, "When young dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more." They provide cues but also points of turning, where the narrative flow can pivot and take off in a new direction. As House's fingers stumble over the giant gaps of "Louise McGhee," he sings of a girl named Louise McGhee, the lyrics not flowing a direct narrative so much as a set of images or scenes. And so when he drops in a verse he uses elsewhere which goes, in essence, "If I don't go crazy, I'm gonna lose my mind," it takes on a shade of desperation. His relationship with Louise is not entirely clear; it's clearly a troubled one, but when he wraps his cracked voice around the word "mind," he imbues it with such desperation that it's clear whatever the trouble is with Louise, she's worth it. By the time he winds the song to a close with the lovely internal rhyme of the final verse ("If I don't ever no more see you / I said you'll forever be on my mind," with House again curling a cracking falsetto around "mind"), the song has wound through fondness to frustration to despair to regret and back to fondness, much of it conveyed by nothing more than the way House delivers some of the very same lines he's used for the past fifty-odd years. By way of contrast, "John the Revelator" is a traditional gospel song performed here by House unaccompanied by anything other than his own handclaps. The performance owes much to the feel of field hollers and chain gang songs, with House answering himself in kind on each chorus when he asks, "Tell me: who's that writing?" with "John the Revelator." I've heard full chorus arrangements of this song that can't even hold a candle to the intensity with which House delivers his version. Like so much of what's good here, and what sets this apart as a recording from the field recordings from 1941 and 1942 and the Paramount recordings from 1930, the clarity of the recording does wonders for the subtle beauty of House's voice. When he gets to the second verse, singing, "Christ had twelve apostles," he lets the word "apostles" die and turn inward, suddenly turning the song soft for an instant before coming back hard on the next line: "Three he laid away / He said, 'Watch with me one hour / 'til I go yonder and pray.'" His voice throughout has such authority to it without seeming to force it that the only person I can really compare him with here is Jay-Z. It's swagger, but swagger without the idea of bling. When he hammers home the word "me" there, it's like he almost turns slightly evil for a moment, drunk on the power of speaking Christ's words, and knowing his conflicted past with the church only makes it all the more frighteningly powerful. Few would debate that the session's highwater mark and the centerpiece of the album is "Death Letter." It seems the adjective most often associated with it is "harrowing," and it's a hard one to better, especially for a song that begins, "I got a letter this morning / How do you reckon it read? / It said, 'Hurry: the gal you love is dead." As the story unfolds, the narrator arrives to find his girl "laying on the cooling board" (the place where they would keep the body until it was ready for burial) and the image of his final moments with her is nothing short of stunning: "I walked up right close / Looked down in her face / I said, "Little good old girl, / You got to lay hear 'till Judgment Day." The truly poetic aspects of the song rise in the next section along with laying the table for the song's most interesting twist. "Looked like there was ten thousand people," he sings, "standing 'round the burying ground / I didn't know I loved her / 'till they let her down." A couple verse later, one of those stock verses makes an appearance when he sings, "You know it's so hard to love someone that don't love you / Ain't satisfaction I don't care what you do." But what's entirely brilliant about its insertion here, though, is that it can be read as being about the woman, not the narrator here, since he didn't know she loved her until they put her in the ground. It's a fairly rare moment in the blues canon of an outside viewpoint being given weight within the traditionally first person perspective of the blues. Taken as a whole, "Death Letter" is fraught with equal parts emotion and resignation, and while House's powers had no doubt declined by 1965, his age makes the perspective of the song work. This was, after all, a man who'd been married five times and lived with and loved who knows how many women, and that note of despair blended with the understanding of life's cruel fate is more than just a blues song. Purists will almost always argue that his Library of Congress recordings are his best, his technique in full flower and his voice resonant and powerful. But Son House in 1965 is a man defying the legends and the myths. In the film "Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson," director Martin Scorcese says, "The thing about Robert Johnson was that he only existed on his records. He was pure legend." Before anyone could ask him about his deal with the devil, he was gone, but House was a survivor, and that's why Father of the Delta Blues is a great record. It's the sound of a man roaring back to life to re-enact, re-work and set fire to the image of the mystical bluesman, instead leaving the indelible mark of human frailty on an artform that had its origins in oppression and heartbreak. This, then, is not the blues as genre or as marketing ploy or as multimillion dollar chain of venues—this is blues as destiny and birthright, as inevitable as the good old sun or what happens between a man and a woman. Download "Death Letter" or stream below: Download "John the Revelator" or stream below: Video of Son House performing "Death Letter" in 1967 |
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| Last Updated: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 at 10:03 AM |
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