Son House Never Chained Christina Ricci To A Radiator
Last night, I rented Black Snake Moan DVD, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci. It's the unintentionally hilarious story of an R.L. Burnside- like bluesman who has stopped playing the blues but starts again when he discovers that the blues can cure Ricci's nymphomania. And here I thought it was supposed to work the other way around!
The reason I bring the whole sorry subject up is the fact that the movie is book-ended by clips of the great Son House. His story is one of my favorite in all of the blues. Born in 1902, he began preaching in Baptist churches when he was 15. As he later sang in "Preachin' Blues", his logic was as follows:
"Oh, I'm gon' get me religion, gon' join the Baptist church
I'm gon' be a Baptist preacher then I won't have to work"
Son wandered around the Mississippi delta preaching, drinking and working as little as possible. Around the age of 24 he began to learn the guitar. In 1928, he shot and killed a man, possibly in self-defense. A judge reviewed his case in 1929 and he was granted his freedom with the proviso that Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he had born, would no longer look upon his presence kindly. So he fled to Lula, where he met Charlie Patton, who he played and recorded with until Patton's death in 1934. It was during this period that a young guitar player named Robert Johnson began hanging around, begging them to let him play with them. He wasn't the only one. McKinley Morganfield, who you may know better as Muddy Waters, was also powerfully influenced by House.
In 1941, a folk-song collector for the Library Of Congress came to the Delta, looking for Robert Johnson, unaware that Johnson had died three years earlier. Instead, during the week of August 24-31, Alan Lomax recorded both Muddy Waters and Son House. It was Water's first time being recorded, and the first time House had recorded for ten years. Lomax returned in 1942, and hearing himself for the first time gave Muddy Waters the confidence to, in 1943, move to Chicago, where he would go on to electrify the blues and change the course of modern music.
That same year, Son House moved to Rochestor, New York to work as a railroad porter. He stopped playing for good in 1956.
In 1965, the folk blues revival was in full swing. A group of young folk researchers began to search for House. When they finally found him, Son House thought some sort of a prank was being played. He couldn't believe that anyone was interested in records he had made twenty to thirty years earlier. Studio time was set up, and this resulted in the excellent Father Of The Delta Blues sessions. House's alcoholism made it necessary for the producer to dole out whiskey to him to keep his hands from shaking, but this music is as powerful as any ever made. The force and intensity of House's playing and singing is amazing.
What if Son House had followed Muddy Waters to Chicago? What kind of music would he have made with the brilliant Chicago blues players of the forties and fifties?
Son House played the folk and blues festivals until the early seventies, when Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease forced him to stop. He died in 1988. Here's a clip from 1967:
Both from the excellent Father Of The Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions
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