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He was the last great voice of the original Delta blues musicians. Son House’s importance in blues music is enormous. He was there from the birth of the Delta blues, playing side by side with the legendary Charley Patton and serving as mentor for Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Forty years later his presence was just as potent, redefining his art with a conviction and passion for new audiences. Had he been recorded as extensively in his prime as men like Patton and Johnson his stature would undoubtedly rival theirs today. Son House possessed a truly commanding presence, casting an intense spell with the slash and burn of his bottleneck slide on National steel guitar matched by anguished bellow and moan vocals that resounded from the very pit of his soul. His trance-like performances evoked a very personal battle between spiritual and secular. It seemed to come from a place hardly any of us experience. Hitting that “monkey nerve” as Son liked to call it. Listening to Son House sing “Death Letter” is the closest thing to religion without going to church. Though legal sources list his birth date as March 21, 1902, even Eddie James “Son” House, Jr. himself contradicted his age in various reports, often times citing 1886 as his real year of birth. At any rate, his birthplace of Riverton, Mississippi was a mere two miles from Clarksdale, creative hotbed of the Delta blues. His parents separated when he was seven and he moved with his mother to Tallulah, Louisiana. By his late teens he was bound for a life as a Baptist preacher, but was also discovering the attraction of the blues. The two worlds would eventually collide with House choosing the less sanctimonious road. With the draw of blues music came an appetite for women and whiskey and a loathing for plantation work. Originally deploring the sound of guitar, he didn’t begin playing one until he was twenty five. Returning to the Delta in 1926, an unknown local musician named Willie Wilson introduced him to bottleneck guitar basics. Within a year he was assimilating the slide style of another local musician, Rube Lacy. Soon House was landing gigs at house parties and juke joints. It was at one of those Saturday night house parties in 1928 that he met an ugly fate. A man reportedly started firing a gun, hitting House in the leg. House fired back and killed the man. He pleaded self-defense, but was sentenced to fifteen years at the infamous Parchman Farm penitentiary . Fortunately a judge reviewed his case and released House after serving less than two years. Upon release he caught a train to Lula, Mississippi where he met up with Charley Patton and Willie Brown. The three men became drinking and performing partners livening juke joints with their raw and rowdy repertoire. In 1930 all three men recorded sides at a session for Paramount. Son contributed three tracks like a man possessed, including his powerful composition on how the blues stole his soul from the church, “Preachin’ Blues.” Following Patton’s death in 1934, House continued performing the juke circuit with Brown and as a solo act. In 1941 Alan Lomax discovered him driving a tractor on a cotton plantation and recorded him for a Library of Congress collection. House moved to Rochester, New York in 1943 and abandoned music for odd jobs as a grill cook and train porter. Yet with the folk and blues explosion of the 1960s musicologists were hunting down the surviving greats, people like Skip James, Booker White and Son House. In 1964 a team of researchers headed by Dick Waterman located House in Rochester and coaxed him into performing again. His guitar work had slowed, not having picked up a guitar in years, but the bone-chilling voice still pealed and within weeks he was playing to a new generation of folk and blues fans at coffeehouses and festivals. He also returned to the recording studio for the first time in thirty five years and re-created superb and uncompromising versions of “Death Letter,” “Pearline,” “John the Revelator,” and “Grinnin In Your Face,” among others. This fascinating set of songs for Columbia Records confirmed the emotional spirit of House’s legacy and became a cherished and essential link to a past that had never been properly documented. And this from a man apparently nearing eighty years old! Son House recorded for a handful of labels in the late 60s and toured for several more years, but hard living and subsequent deteriorating health forced him to retire in 1974. He died in obscurity in 1988. By Tim Kirker |
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