Son House
Wiki Bio
The middle of seventeen brothers, House was born in Riverton, two miles from Clarksdale, Mississippi. Around age seven or eight, he was brought by his mother to Tallulah, Louisiana after his parents separated. The young Son House was determined to become a Baptist preacher, and at age 15 began his preaching career. Despite the church's firm stand against blues music and the sinful world which revolved around it, House became attracted to it and taught himself guitar in his mid-20s, after moving back to the Clarksdale area, inspired by the work of Willie Wilson. He began playing alongside Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Robert Johnson, Fiddlin' Joe Martin, and Leroy Williams, around Robinsonville, Mississippi and north to Memphis, Tennessee until 1942.
After killing a man, allegedly in self-defense, he spent time at Parchman Farm in 1928 and 1929. The official story on the killing is that sometime around 1927 or 28, he was playing in a juke joint when a man went on a shooting spree. Son was wounded in the leg, and shot the man dead. He received a 15-year sentence at Parchman Farm prison.
Son House - Death Letter, From: scmm42
Son House recorded for Paramount Records in 1930 and for Alan Lomax from the Library of Congress in 1941 and 1942. He then faded from public view until the country blues revival in the 1960s when, after a long search of the Mississippi Delta region by Nick Perls, Dick Waterman and Phil Spiro, he was "re-discovered" in June 1964 in Rochester, New York where he had lived since 1943; House had been retired from the music business for many years, working for the New York Central Railroad, and was completely unaware of the international revival of enthusiasm for his early recordings. He subsequently toured extensively in the US and Europe and recorded for CBS records. Like Mississippi John Hurt he was welcomed into the music scene of the 1960s and played at Newport Folk Festival in 1964, the New York Folk Festival in July 1965, and the October 1967 European tour of the American Folk Festival along with Skip James and Bukka White. In the summer of 1970, House toured Europe once again, including an appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival; a recording of his London concerts was released by Liberty Records.
Ill health plagued his later years and in 1974 he retired once again, and later moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he remained until his death from cancer of the larynx. He was buried at Mt. Hazel Cemetery on Lahser south of Seven Mile. Members of the Detroit Blues Society raised money through benefit concerts to put a fitting monument on his grave. He had been married five times.
House's innovative style featured very strong, repetitive rhythms, often played with the aid of a bottleneck, coupled with singing that owed more than a nod to the hollers of the chain gangs. The music of Son House, in contrast to that of, say, Blind Lemon Jefferson, was emphatically a dance music, meant to be heard in the noisy atmosphere of a barrelhouse or other dance hall. House was the primary influence on Muddy Waters and also an important influence on Robert Johnson, who would later take his music to new levels. It was House who, speaking to awe-struck young blues fans in the 1960s, spread the legend that Johnson had sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his musical powers.
More recently, House's music has influenced rock groups such as the White Stripes, who covered his song Death Letter (also reworked by Skip James and Robert Johnson) on their album De Stijl, and later performed it at the 2004 Grammy Awards. The White Stripes also incorporated sections of a traditional song Son House recorded, John the Revelator, into the song Cannon from their eponymous debut album The White Stripes.
Another musician deeply influenced by Son House is the slide player John Mooney, who in his teens learned slide guitar from Son House while Son was living in Rochester, New York. Several of House's songs were recently figured in the motion picture soundtrack of "Black Snake Moan" (2006).
Describing House's 1967 appearance at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester, England, Bob Groom wrote in Blues World magazine:
It is difficult to describe the transformation that took place as this smiling, friendly man hunched over his guitar and launched himself, bodily it seemed, into his music. The blues possessed him like a 'lowdown shaking chill' and the spellbound audience saw the very incarnation of the blues as, head thrown back, he hollered and groaned the disturbing lyrics and flailed the guitar, snapping the strings back against the fingerboard to accentuate the agonized rhythm. Son's music is the centre of the blues experience and when he performs it is a corporeal thing, audience and singer become as one.
AllMusic
Son House's place, not only in the history of Delta blues, but in the overall history of the music, is a very high one indeed. He was a major innovator of the Delta style, along with his playing partners Charley Patton and Willie Brown. Few listening experiences in the blues are as intense as hearing one of Son House's original 1930s recordings for the Paramount label. Entombed in a hailstorm of surface noise and scratches, one can still be awestruck by the emotional fervor House puts into his singing and slide playing. Little wonder then that the man became more than just an influence on some white English kid with a big amp; he was the main source of inspiration to both Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, and it doesn't get much more pivotal than that. Even after his rediscovery in the mid-'60s, House was such a potent musical force that what would have been a normally genteel performance by any other bluesmen in a "folk" setting turned into a night in the nastiest juke joint you could imagine, scaring the daylights out of young white enthusiasts expecting something far more prosaic and comfortable. Not out of Son House, no sir. When the man hit the downbeat on his National steel-bodied guitar and you saw his eyes disappear into the back of his head, you knew you were going to hear some blues. And when he wasn't shouting the blues, he was singing spirituals, a cappella. Right up to the end, no bluesman was torn between the sacred and the profane more than Son House.
He was born Eddie James House, Jr., on March 21, 1902, in Riverton, MS. By the age of 15, he was preaching the gospel in various Baptist churches as the family seemingly wandered from one plantation to the next. He didn't even bother picking up a guitar until he turned 25; to quote House, "I didn't like no guitar when I first heard it; oh gee, I couldn't stand a guy playin' a guitar. I didn't like none of it." But if his ambivalence to the instrument was obvious, even more obvious was the simple fact that Son hated plantation labor even more and had developed a taste for corn whiskey. After drunkenly launching into a blues at a house frolic in Lyon, MS, one night and picking up some coin for doing it, the die seemed to be cast; Son House may have been a preacher, but he was part of the blues world now.
Son House - John the Revelator, From: bigbassmaster666
If the romantic notion that the blues life is said to be a life full of trouble is true, then Son found a barrel of it one night at another house frolic in Lyon. He shot a man dead that night and was immediately sentenced to imprisonment at Parchman Farm. He ended up only serving two years of his sentence, with his parents both lobbying hard for his release, claiming self defense. Upon his release — after a Clarksdale judge told him never to set foot in town again — he started a new life in the Delta as a full-time man of the blues.
After hitchhiking and hoboing the rails, he made it down to Lula, MS, and ran into the most legendary character the blues had to offer at that point, the one and only Charley Patton. The two men couldn't have been less similar in disposition, stature, and in musical and performance outlook if they had purposely planned it that way. Patton was described as a funny, loud-mouthed little guy who was a noisy, passionate showman, using every trick in the book to win over a crowd. The tall and skinny House was by nature a gloomy man with a saturnine disposition who still felt extremely guilt-ridden about playing the blues and working in juke joints. Yet when he ripped into one, Son imbued it with so much raw feeling that the performance became the show itself, sans gimmicks. The two of them argued and bickered constantly, and the only thing these two men seemed to have in common was a penchant for imbibing whatever alcoholic potable came their way. Though House would later refer in interviews to Patton as a "jerk" and other unprintables, it was Patton's success as a bluesman — both live and especially on record — that got Son's foot in the door as a recording artist. He followed Patton up to Grafton, WI, and recorded a handful of sides for the Paramount label. These records today (selling scant few copies in their time, the few that did survived a life of huge steel needles, even bigger scratches, and generally lousy care) are some of the most highly prized collectors' items of Delta blues recordings, much tougher to find than, say, a Robert Johnson or even a Charley Patton 78. Paramount used a pressing compound for their 78 singles that was so noisy and inferior sounding that should someone actually come across a clean copy of any of Son's original recordings, it's a pretty safe bet that the listener would still be greeted with a blizzard of surface noise once the needle made contact with the disc.
But audio concerns aside, the absolutely demonic performances House laid down on these three two-part 78s ("My Black Mama," "Preachin' the Blues," and "Dry Spell Blues," with an unreleased test acetate of "Walkin' Blues" showing up decades later) cut through the hisses and pops like a brick through a stained glass window.
It was those recordings that led Alan Lomax to his door in 1941 to record him for the Library of Congress. Lomax was cutting acetates on a "portable" recording machine weighing over 300 pounds. Son was still playing (actually at the peak of his powers, some would say), but had backed off of it a bit since Charley Patton died in 1934. House did some tunes solo, as Lomax asked him to do, but also cut a session backed by a rocking little string band. As the band laid down long and loose (some tracks went on for over six minutes) versions of their favorite numbers, all that was missing was the guitars being plugged in and a drummer's backbeat and you were getting a glimpse of the future of the music.
But just as House had gone a full decade without recording, this time after the Lomax recordings, he just as quickly disappeared, moving to Rochester, NY. When folk-blues researchers finally found him in 1964, he was cheerfully exclaiming that he hadn't touched a guitar in years. One of the researchers, a young guitarist named Alan Wilson (later of the blues-rock group Canned Heat) literally sat down and retaught Son House how to play like Son House. Once the old master was up to speed, the festival and coffeehouse circuit became his oyster. He recorded again, the recordings becoming an important introduction to his music and, for some, a lot easier to take than those old Paramount 78s from a strict audio standpoint. In 1965, he played Carnegie Hall and four years later found himself the subject of an eponymously titled film documentary, all of this another world removed from Clarksdale, MS, indeed. Everywhere he played, he was besieged by young fans, asking him about Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and others. For young white blues fans, these were merely exotic names from the past, heard only to them on old, highly prized recordings; for Son House they were flesh and blood contemporaries, not just some names on a record label. Hailed as the greatest living Delta singer still actively performing, nobody dared call himself the king of the blues as long as Son House was around.
He fell into ill health by the early '70s; what was later diagnosed as both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease first affected his memory and his ability to recall songs on-stage and, later, his hands, which shook so bad he finally had to give up the guitar and eventually leave performing altogether by 1976. He lived quietly in Detroit, MI, for another 12 years, passing away on October 19, 1988. His induction into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1980 was no less than his due. Son House was the blues.
by Cub Koda
Heaven on Earth
Feeling the power and glory of the great Son House
by Ted Drozdowski
Robert Johnson's been dubbed the King of the Delta Blues. And yeah, it's true that his slippery genius on guitar dealt the cards that blues stringslingers have been playing ever since, and that the hellhound that was on his trail is one of the music's indelible images, and that his recordings hold a simultaneous beauty and terror that few artists have been able to raise. One could argue that nobody rekindled the twined blaze of those emotions as brightly as Johnson until Kurt Cobain come along.
But to me, Johnson is more of the blues' flamboyant prince than its king. The king is a man who both inspired and outlived Johnson, whose rippling slide can be heard resonating in Johnson's quicksilver licks, but whose own style was an unstoppable rhythmic juggernaut, full of muting and popping and frailing. And whose songs went Johnson's devil's music one better by summoning angels and demons, and whose singing then gave vent to the sound of their apocalyptic battle for his soul. Today Johnson's voice, cranked in a darkened car traveling through the one-lane highways of the Delta at midnight, still induces the willies. (Muddy Waters recounted that he once saw Johnson and was so unnerved he fled the scene.) But the voice of the great Son House not only sounds as though it could split the earth asunder, it is also the sound of a soul utterly alone.
Like his contemporary and friend Charlie Patton, House told the stories of his life and his times in his songs. "Levee Camp Blues" talked of the dangerous workplaces along the Mississippi where infidelity, cruel bosses, drinking, gambling, and death were the only constants. Recorded in a general store at Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, by blues historian Alan Lomax in 1941 -- when he was 39 -- Son House sang about the emotional fallout World War II rained on soldiers and their families in "American Defense." That song even shows House's pre-blues roots, in the banjo strumming minstrelsy tradition. Twenty-four years later, after the '60s American folk-blues boom gave his career new breath, he authored and recorded a lament for the assassinated John F. Kennedy that again hewed closer to the minstrel's craft than the blues.
Even at that advanced point in his life he was still singing songs like "John the Revelator," a praise for the Biblical author set only to his voice, handclaps, and stomping feet, and "Preachin' Blues," a jab at the hypocrisy of organized religion, in the same set. It was a conflict House seemed to feel in every fiber of his body -- an impulse to get with religion and the feeling that it was an all-around sham. It reflected his corporal attitude: he was man who lived a very real life of hard labor and hard times, hard drinking and hard love. And he came from a culture where the church was the axis of society. Yet in deciding to be a bluesman, he exempted himself from welcome by the church-going community.
Son House - Sometimes I wish, From: zowieso
But for me the deep, chilly heart of House's music can be found in two songs: "Death Letter" and "Grinnin' in Your Face." The first is about love and regret -- about a man who gets a letter telling him his woman's dead, about his shock at seeing her laid out "on that cooling board," and the heartwrenching realization that he shouts out at its end: "I didn't know I loved her, 'til they laid her in the ground." If that sounds very heavy, it's because it is. Imagine loving someone but not being able to articulate or understand it until she's dead. Imagine the pain of having never told her, of never being able to tell her or touch her, and of eventually carrying those unrequited feelings to your own grave. What songwriter today can even begin to approximate such complex, heart-dragging emotions? And to pin them to House's voice, which seems to be shouting the story from the deepest pit of his soul? No wonder our era's Diva of Darkness, avant siren Diamanda Galás, has taken to covering the tune. This is the kind of razor-edged truth that real life's made of. So's "Grinnin' in Your Face," which tells of the betrayal and cunning that surrounds us, reminding us that "a true friend is hard to find." And there's a rippling want in House's quavering voice that lets us know he arrived at that conclusion after plenty of searching.
Hearing House perform is an emotional experience equaled by few in recorded music. Two CDs remain the measure of his power: Delta Blues, Alan Lomax's original Library of Congress recordings from 1940 and '41, on the Biograph label; and Father of the Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions, a compilation of the Death Letter LP and leftover tracks from the same dates, put out by Columbia in '92. Just before Christmas '95, Capitol added to the House legacy with Delta Blues & Spirituals by Son House, a live recording made in England of some of his most famous songs, plus conversation in which House's blues spirit seems to have been nipping spirits. Not a great performance, but an entertaining one -- it's fun to hear House explaining the carnal nature of the blues, and the dynamics of relations between the sexes.
By now, I hope you're sold on the importance of Son House and, if you don't already know his work, will go buy one of his albums and let a song like "Death Letter" change your life, or at least your value of it. Especially now that his former manager, Dick Waterman, has seen to it that money is getting out of Columbia's paws and into the hands of House's survivors, including his widow (his fifth wife).
But imagine being able to see House perform live -- potent and rocking in solid form before a small studio audience, filmed with clarity. It's awe-striking to watch him close his eyes and seemingly leap into a different world to summon forth "Death Letter" or "John the Revelator," his feet stomping time in unison, his right hand flying across and prodding the strings into a heavy grind and sweet keen. And all that's caught in a half-hour program split between House and Bukka White as part of Vestapol's Masters of the Country Blues series. Shot in 1968, it captures House old-but-vital, 20 years before his death at age 86. And though this tape is essential to anyone who loves music, let alone the blues, there's an even hotter performance on video -- a bootleg from an old New York public-television program that's circulated a bit. The show's split between House performing solo and a young Buddy Guy with his hot Chicago band. Here House is asked to comment on what Guy's group is playing. He makes a remark reminiscent of what Cab Calloway said about bebop. Cab called Bird's thing "Chinese music"; House calls Guy's music "monkeyjunk." But that doesn't stop him and Guy from duetting at the video's close, sitting side by side, House's dobro and Guy's acoustic guitar speaking a language both men understand.
Playing with Son House is an experience few have had. Besides Guy and the handful of musicians he recorded with, I know of only two others. One was Willie Brown, House's old running partner in the days when Robert Johnson was an aspiring musician who'd come to see them ignite crowds at fish fries. The other is Cambridge's resident country-blues dynamo, Paul Rishell, who met and played with House at Waterman's apartment for three days in April 1977.
"When I met him, he was a like a feral old man," recalls Rishell. "Very powerful. He had this sort of wild look in his eye, like Charlie Manson. He was scary. Here was a man who carried a gun and had once shot another man through the head and gone to prison for a year. He had five wives. And the strength of his humanity struck me; he was no longer an abstract blues musician, someone whose records I'd studied. I felt like he was on a hairtrigger, too. Like he could spring up from his chair and be on me in a second if he wanted to. He was just such a powerful presence. And somehow, I'm not sure, he gave me a stronger sense of the blues as an African music, something from another place.
"I was told that I could pour him a drink if he asked, but I couldn't let him drink it. He told me, `I got soft brain, boy. You know what that is?' That was from drinking too much liquor over the years; all he had to do was sniff it to get high. And when you'd leave the room, he'd shoot the whiskey down, and then he'd start talking in a French patois and want to go out. Apparently he'd spent some time in Louisiana and picked that up."
"When Son was singing songs about religion and the church," Rishell continues, "he was looking for loopholes. Like W.C. Fields. When Fields was dying, someone asked him why he was reading the Bible. And he explained he was looking for loopholes. Son said he was saved by the blues. But you know, he was an outlaw, like Jesse James. See, for most of his life, he couldn't live in his own community. When he was growing up in Mississippi, the church was a safe place, a sacred place. It wasn't until the integration struggles of the '60s that they started firebombing black churches. Before that, the church was the sanctuary, the be-all and end-all of the black community.
"Son was ostracized by that community. It says in the Bible, the carnal mind is an enemy of God, because it's not subject to the rule of God, to God's laws. And the carnal mind . . . that's what the blues is all about. The blues looks for Heaven on Earth, not a reward in Heaven. The blues says, `I'm gonna do it now! I'm gonna get high and get laid and I'm gonna play music!' And Son was a 100 percent carnal man. That was his whole thing, but in his old age he was ashamed of it. And it was a conflict for him.
"He told me that he was once living with a woman, and she was sick. After coming back from work one day, he told her, `I'm going out; you wanna come?' `No,' she said. `I'm too sick.' When he came home and went to bed, he could tell she was still sick. And he told me, `I woke up in the morning, and had to go to the commode. And I opened the door to the outhouse, and she had died there, sitting on the board.' I asked, `What did you do?' `Nothin' for me to do; she was dead. So I left; I just left.' Completely matter-of-fact.
"My deepest fears were his everyday life. Losing somebody like that, or getting lynched or murdered or shot at a dance or something. He lived like that and wrote his songs and made some money and -- in the days when it wasn't so easy for a black man -- traveled wherever he wanted. He was proud he'd been to Hollywood, just because he wanted to go. Even then, after he'd toured Europe in the '60s, he was still proud of the fact that he'd always gone wherever he wanted to go."
"His blues were intense, anguished, and powerful. Unlike his 30s playing partner Charley Patton -- a "clowning man" with a guitar -- Son House took his music mighty seriously. Sitting on a straight-back chair, he'd suddenly whip his head back, roll his eyes inside his skull, and slide a bottleneck up his guitar's neck. Veins bulging in his forehead, he'd moan, thump a bass note, and sing with the deep conviction of a sinner on judgment day. Seeing him in 1930 caused a teenage Robert Johnson to abandon harmonica for guitar. House cast a lifelong spell over Muddy Waters too. Eddie James "Son" House remained true to his Mississippi roots. His 1930 Paramount 78s captured unsurpassed Delta blues singing but brought him little money or recognition. He made superb field recordings -- solo and with a band -- in 1941 and 1942, and then followed a girlfriend to Rochester, NY, where he took a job on the New York Central Railroad. Blues researchers located House in 1964 and prompted him into playing again. The hard-drinking guitarist recorded passionately primitive albums for Columbia, Verve/Folkways, Vanguard, and other labels, giving concerts until deteriorating health forced his retirement in 1974. He lived with his family in Detroit until October 19, 1988, when the last great voice of first-generation Delta blues was finally stilled." - Jas Obrecht
Son House Portrait by Linda-Lou Nelson
References
Discography
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