Down In The Delta Muds-With County Blues Man Son House In Mind

By Jack Callahan

No question the country blues guys, and here I am talking about the guys because you know down in the Mister James Crow South where the blues came into royalty out of the sweats of Mister’s planation, out of the Saturday night juke joint sweats of another kind, it was the guys who bore the brunt of the blues tradition although the blues women, your Bessie and a ton of other Smiths, Memphis Minnie, Sweet Maybelline, Little Ida Simms got the big crowds in the cities and on the circuit, carried a ton of baggage with them. Sang of those temptations until their voices got sore. Talked code words about Captain this and Mister that and their sweated suns which they would not utter short of a strange fruit tree, talked about a two-timing woman who you just spent your last dime on going off with your best friend, talked about taking the measure of that best friend out of his hide if he ever caught up with him, or her, talked being on the low-down, the old style low-down, talked about Mister’s prison too his James Crow prisons all wrapped up in a bow.

 

 

The guys who came out of the muds, out of that silted delta mud oozed out of the south-flowing Big Muddy flowing to the sunless seas, the guys who made the first “race records” that got recorded back in the 1920s, maybe slightly earlier and who to a man had sorrow stories, or created sorrow. Yeah down in the muds a blues guy like Son House did every kind of thing to keep himself afloat, and got the miseries too. Of course it always, always involved, and this is no kidding in his case women, booze, a jack-roll fight over some woman or the thought of some woman, and fighting off the devil in horror of the lord in the sweated sulky night.   

Now I would have taken all of this story-telling about wine, women and song with the grain of salt, would have dismissed it out of hand like a lot of stuff you hear in the urban legend night about stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with cities, would have brought it down to the level of some old-timer legend except I actually saw this incident I want to tell you about. Want to tell you about Son’s burden, about that fight with the devil that he lost more than won happen when I was a kid, a kid back in the 1960s and I got caught up with the big folk explosion that carried a lot of us along who were looking for roots music and if the blues, the muddy Delta blues ain’t roots music then nothing in America is. 

Of course the day to day folk stuff, the hanging out at coffeehouses, hanging out at midnight Hayes-Bickford where for the price of a cup of dissolute coffee you could listen to guys and gals pound their energies out to the winos and weirdos who populated the place checking out the next big thing as he or she tried to hone her art was over in Harvard Square in Cambridge, one of Meccas. But if you wanted to immerse yourself in the bigger picture then you had to head for Newport down in Rhode Island about fifty miles from where I grew up in Carver. And the bigger picture in say 1962, 1963 was the “discovery” of a lot of old-time country blues guys by folk aficionados who headed South looking for those damn roots that they would hear about when some white guys like Dave Van Ronk or Geoff Muldaur would play something they heard from somebody who had “gone South” to dig it out. In the process finding these old-time guys that guys like Harry Smith and the Lomaxes, father and son, had recorded early on and who then fell under the radar. And while they had fallen under the radar some of them, the younger ones who had stayed in the South and had not gone to Detroit or Chicago with the migration, were still very much alive. Not only alive but with some skills still left and they were brought up to Newport to thrill the young urban mainly college students who were crazy for the blues they had heard on records or like I said the folk performers who were doing covers of their work. There were some very famous sessions where guys like Son House, Bukka White, Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt would, sweating pouring out of them with those ancient National steel guitars, duel among themselves for the honor of being the king of the country blues. And those sessions were great, a great karmic energy time which you can actually still see on YouTube if you have the inclination.

But there was also a session that I attended, kind of fell into when I heard that one of the younger guys who had headed north and got wrapped up in the electric blues, Howlin’ Wolf, was playing in one of the small studios set aside to produce stuff with some sidemen and the idea was they would record the stuff live and see what happened. Well there were maybe twelve or fifteen of us, people kept coming in and out so an exact number was hard to put a finger except a couple of guys sitting there in awe (beside me) were James Montgomery and Big Bill Timmons, when Wolf got his head of steam up to do How Many More Years practically eating the harmonica on the piece.

Wolf was a perfectionist, a serious professional musician, and something in the performance did not sit well with him so he wanted a retake. Just as they started up again, Smokey Jim as it turned out blowing a big high white note sexy sax to key the thing, Son House came walking in a little raggedy, a sway that did not go with sobriety, and the deep red of his eyes betrayed him. Whiskey drunk, whiskey sorrows for sure. He started to sing along slightly off-kilter in that measured moaning voice of his when he was sinning and then Wolf stopped himself in his tracks and started berating the legendary bluesman (legendary to all our young white urban mostly student devotees eyes) for being nothing but a worn out drunk who needed to get the hell out of the room if he knew what was good for him. Started talking some Booker T. race pride stuff way before Malcolm came fiercely on our horizons (we were still King boys and girls then in one person, one vote days). Some guy, some friend of Wolf’s came and escorted him out.  Gave him the boot really.

What did we know of that Son House whose Dead Letter Blues was all the craze in Cambridge who had had a life-long struggle with booze, that it had at one point killed his career. Here’s the big point though one time in the Village a couple of years later he told us, red in the eye that night too that he had had a life-long struggle with the devil he called it, the booze, and the devil won more often than not. Said it more in sorrow that anger although he was just rambling along about his life, about the women who had left him, some two-timing, some tired of the beatings, some just tired of the smell of booze, about the preacher man declaiming in front of his congregation that rolled their eyes when he would talk about this struggle between good and evil. And his story wasn’t that unusual as we started getting the background of these guys. James Crow, woman, booze, the Captain, the Mister, some back alley street-fighting, name it.  Yeah, they carried some serious baggage.