This Next Number Will Be a Blues: Son House, Endings, Restarts, and a Delta Triptych

Having resolved to write my college thesis on the less-than-practical idea of the similarities between vorticist poetry and rock ‘n’ roll lyrics — for I was an idiot — I found myself listening to a lot of blues. This wasn’t my original plan. I figured I’d spend a lot of time with the early discs of the Rolling Stones and various English beat merchants, but when you start doing that, you end up on the lookout for old Muddy Water records, and sides by Slim Harpo, Otis Rush, and Little Walter.

Listen to them for any amount of time, and you’re going back to what is tantamount to a nexus of mystery, meaning, poetry, brutality, deception, revelation, and modes of emotionalism quite unlike any in music: the Delta, that is, where the blues is always primordial, and always immediate. A most paradoxical place, that Delta, as you know if you’re someone who delights in the music of, say, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, or Mississippi John Hurt.

Like a lot of rock fans, I began with Johnson, and could scarcely believe that that was just one man playing the guitar. You listen to someone like Jimi Hendrix and, naturally, you’re floored, but when you sit there late at night, hearing Johnson do what he could with an acoustic guitar, you’re incredulous that a human could do that with a mere six strings.

But as much as I came to love Johnson and his wizardry, it was one of his teachers, the wonderfully named Son House — as if his name conjured both filial and structural authority — who came to fire my imagination like only a few performers ever have. In part, I think, because House was one of the rare Delta bluesmen whose output extended across three eras.

Normally, with a Delta blues artist, you get their early sides, from the late ’20s or early ’30s, rescued from oblivion and sounding like it: scratchy, buried beneath hiss, but coming off more intensely because of it, like some long gone artist is emanating forth from another world to press down firmly upon yours. A number of these artists had a second career of sorts in the ’60s, having been “rediscovered” by ardent blues fans and then finding themselves in cafes and bars playing their material of three decades prior in softer, gentler versions, a blues equivalent of one of those baseball Old Timer games.

House, though, didn’t do anything soft or gentle. We have three anniversaries, or near-anniversaries, anyway, with his three major performance periods, the middle of which was but the briefest sojourn. The 80th anniversary of House’s first session, from 1930, just passed, and if you haven’t heard the eight sides that were issued from that date (with a ninth being discovered in the mid-’80s), you have one of the most visceral, galvanizing musical experiences awaiting you.

I don’t really know anything like that session, in terms of rawness, which is all the more remarkable in that House had previously abhorred any notion of the blues. He grew up north of Clarksdale, Mississippi, a church enthusiast who in turn become downright devout, and a fiery preacher. His vocals, on that first session, certainly display a talent for declaiming, especially on the two-part “Preachin’ the Blues”, a furnace-blast of protean exhortation that could make you get up and dance with the apocalypse swirling about.

The result of the big change-up, for House, as it has been for so many of us, was a woman. He married someone older, a woman farmer, despite his family’s objections. She put him to work on her father’s farm in Louisiana, and so out went the churching, and in came the milking, until House basically said, enough, I’m out, fleeing the woman he later, and quite frequently, called a whore. His new hatred was less for secular music and more for farm work. Bad memories and all.

We’re somewhat foggy on the exact details of House’s backstory, but the gist is he traveled around, worked in a steel plant, spent time on a horse farm, and then in 1927, in his mid-20s, he heard his clarion call: the sound of a bottleneck guitar. We all have those moments when everything clicks into place when you just know. House became an instant convert to the bottleneck style, and in only a few months, he was good enough to busk and make some money doing so.

It’s hard to conceive of now when you hear the primacy that dominates the Delta blues medium, but the genre was the rock ‘n’ roll of its time, capable of shifting large quantities of records for people who preferred their music, shall we say, steeped in realism. They wanted something they could take their troubles to and find solace in, or inspiration, or, simply, someone whose burden might have been comparable to what they deemed theirs to be, that sublime commonality — or perceived commonality — from which the blues derives so much of its import and influence.

House, who was hanging with the musician Willie Brown, friend to the legendary Charley Patton, must have thought there was a way to preach his new fervor well beyond the walls of any church. He was honing his skills in a juke joint when, as the story goes, a man started shooting up the place. Our Mr. House unholstered his gun — because what hoary bluesman didn’t have one on him– and killed the miscreant. Fifteen years in the state penitentiary got knocked back to two, and that brings us to ’30s, with House now hanging out with Charley Patton himself.

Patton is the only blues musician, in my view, close to being in House’s neighborhood so far as making you think, “Good God, man, you are beyond intense.” The joint sessions these two must have had comprise the top portions of my wish list for lost musical moments I most would have liked to be privy to. But whereas Patton was an established performer and showman, House was — well, no one was really sure what House was. Some thought he was over-the-top, others just too crude. He tagged along with Patton and thus got that initial studio time when the latter had finished recording his material, and if there is an audio equivalent of a jolt of straight-up adrenaline, it is those nine numbers.

Listening now, though, I hear sophistication beneath that r, as with the walking guitar line, appropriately enough, in “Walkin’ Blues”, a piece of blues poetry that takes such a simple conceit — really nothing more than putting one foot in front of the other, and ambling from point A to B — and turns it into something Dantean, the manful striding out of hell, away from evil, and maybe on towards a new hell, but such is life, and one must walk if one wishes to live, rather than merely exist. And no, that’s not a gender thing, but it is a blues thing, and House embodied it. Embodies still, really.

I got up this morning, feeling sick and bad

Thinking ’bout the good times that I once have had

I said soon this morning, I was feeling so sick and bad

You know I was thinking ’bout the good times now that I-I once have had

House didn’t write the song; he is the deliverer of it, though, and that’s more than enough. The deliverer, as it were, of that precise feeling of desolation one encounters upon waking, having escaped the night before from one’s torments into sleep, only to arise with that reminder that, yes, that bad thing did happen to you, and now you have this unshakeable, it would seem, feeling. What to do, what to do.

If that’s not the riddle of life, it’s certainly the riddle of loss, which may well be the same thing. The eight sides released from the session didn’t sell at all. House continued to gig some and drove a tractor for his day job. He figured he was done with making records.

We then jump ahead to 1941, as we approach the 75th anniversary of the recordings that musicologist/historian Alan Lomax made of House with a mini-band, almost, featuring pal Willie Johnson, at a store in Clack, Mississippi. Why a store? Because there was some empty space there that was handy, and Lomax was not in the business of making what were termed race records for a buying market. He simply wanted to preserve the most legit, organic music he could find, for future generations.

These are my favorite Son House recordings. I wouldn’t want to suggest he sounds jaunty with his little band, but the terror in his music — which remains — is further outfitted with humor, some real swing and bounce, and shout-outs to Willie Johnson, who was probably drunk out of his mind. At one point you can hear a train go by because the store was situated next to the tracks. It’s a neat effect, like some kind of locomotive pun on the dogged, ever-advancing quality of House’s music, a product of the modern era, in one way, but one that has channeled the elements of the earth in others. His in-store performance — which meant something quite different back then — of “Walkin’ Blues” is one of the towering performances, regardless of genre, in 20th-century music.

The vocal is such that from the very first time you hear it you all but defy the world to find you a more impassioned one. That train outside goes rattling past, and it seems to quake as it does so, House’s voice remaining totally undeterred even as the locomotive drowns out the band. There’s a jaw-dropper of a guitar break near the end, with House vocalizing atop it, grunts, and wordless expressions of melody that ramp up the energy of the performance further. To be somewhat crude and use a blues-based analogy, it’s like the soul, having been pent up for too long, is being jerked off and about to explode all over the room. If you want a singular musical performance, this is where you come.

Lomax returned one year later, in the summer of 1942. House is every bit as good, and more chatty. The vibe is that of passing a jug of corn between two men who had a deep respect for each other, for different reasons. Lomax, you may know, made a lot of recordings that are essential listening, and yet I have never had the sense that anyone moved him as profoundly as House did.

Still, House disappeared, in the music-making sense, again, this time moving up north, to New York, and working as a railroad porter. I sometimes wonder if the sound of the latest passing train would ever remind him of that store shack session with Lomax. It’s so difficult to conceive of House taking your bags for you as you alighted from the car that just came in from Boston, but that’s what he did — as well as a stint as a chef (the man was nothing if not eclectic in his occupations) until we come to the mid-’60s, when, about 50 years ago, House had his rediscovery.

Alan Wilson, of the blues-rock outfit Canned Heat, was tasked by producer John Hammond, Sr. to not only find House but to teach House his own music. House was located, and then re-taught both how to play as he did in 1941, and in 1930, so that he could do, for instance, both approaches to “Walkin’ Blues”. Wilson was 22 at the time. House’s 1965 sessions have, as you’d expect, the best fidelity of anything he ever recorded, and now his protean blues is a magisterial one.

Which, I suppose, pleases some people and disappoints others. His guitar playing is cleaner; lines are picked with much fluidity, and he doesn’t slap his guitar for rhythmic effect nearly as much as he used to (a tactic he may have picked up, in part, from Charley Patton, who positively pounded the shit out of his guitar like it had made off with his woman the night before). House has found finesse, one might even say ease, although he was incapable of gentleness.

There’s something of what I think of as “the end” in these 1965 studio sides: the final phase, after so much musical journeying. The gap between House’s eras helps you feel that way, but the man would live on until 1988. This always blows my mind, this idea that you can play around with; I mean, Son House could have watched a juiced-up Jose Canseco in the baseball postseason that year. A conceptual overload, really, with two worlds existing simultaneously in the same sphere.

As much as I appreciate the 1965 studios recordings, there were some live sets taped around the same time and in the following years that represent House more at his essence, if you can get around the faltering fidelity. House was always good, but you didn’t know how much he was going to go for things, so to speak, to lay himself out fully from an emotional standpoint.

At New York City’s Gaslight Café in early January 1965, House bends forward into the microphone to announce the next number, “Death Letter Blues”, which will end up incomplete on the extant tape, the final portion having disappeared like House did, twice. “This next number will be a blues,” he says, and does so in such a way that you believe, for a moment, the word “number” could be replaced with just about any noun relevant to the depths of the human experience. Some music you come to, some music goes through. House’s finds you, no matter where you are, and his subsequent ingress is inevitable.