Special Rider Blues
Mar. 14th, 2002 02:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2I got into a blues phase last year, around the time I bought the O Brother Where Art Thou Soundtrack in fact. The nice thing about collecting blues is that greatest hits and complete recordings can be had for pretty cheap, so I picked up the best of a number of well-known blues artists like Charlie Patton, Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Leadbelly, Memphis Minnie, Muddy Waters, Gene Autrey...
Yes. Gene Autrey recorded some yodeling country blues at the begining of his career, and I picked up the collected cd just for the novelty of it. I don't have any other cds in my collection like it, which is probably a good thing. ^_^
Robert Johnson is widely considered the greatest bluesman ever. He's the one that supposedly sold his soul to the devil, and had hellhounds chasing him across the South. Like many blues musicians, he died while still young and at the height of his talents. There's some suggestions that he may have been poisoned; he apparently made his share of enemies with his gambling, boozing, and womanizing. One thing is certain -- he played up the "devil is after my soul" angle for all it was worth.
In the movie O Brother Where Art Thou? Chris Thomas King plays a young blues musician who has just sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for great musical prowess. Most likely he's meant to be a Robert Johnson clone. Other bluesmen also made similar claims, but the legends have stuck most strongly to Johnson. Anyway, the Coen brothers play very fast and loose with history and historical figures in the movie, so it hardly matters.
But what's interesting is that, when Chris plays a sad, lonely blues tune, it's not anything of Robert Johnson's, but a tune called "Killing Floor Blues" by a man known as Skip James (and he does a marvelous job of it!). You probably recognize a lot of the blues names I mentioned above... but Skip James isn't as well known. But he's probably my favorite blues artist.
I'm not a musician, so I can't tell the difference between good slide guitar and brilliant slide guitar (for example). I know Robert Johnson is considered by many to be where the blues starts and ends. All I know is, he's okay. I liked Blind Willie Johnson much better, with his bizaare gutteral growling voice. But Skip James... some people say he didn't even play the blues, technically. A lot of blues, despite the name, is not really depressing or depressed music. A lot of it is dance music -- Robert Johnson's music was primarily dance music.
Skip James wrote deep, dark, depressing tunes. They are not meant for dancing, believe me. He's described as "strange, complex, bizaare, enigmatic, haunting, idiosyncratic"... he was not creating music to please others, but only to soothe his own soul. His acoustic guitar playing is original and brilliant (so I'm told!), and his voice -- a high falsetto -- is eerie, full of pain and fear and hopelessness and desperation. In short Skip James is everything I always expected blues to be. According to the critics, he often played songs that "have no intrinsic musical pedigree as blues", but they SOUND like blues, because of his guitar and vocal style, his embellishments and various blues techniques.
As the notes for the cd put it, "His guitar songs have a real emotional expressiveness; they reek of unmitigated misery. In so doing, they achieve the effect that blues were hyped as having, but actually lacked. Despite the universal understanding of blues as songs of sorrow any suggestion of unhappiness found in blues is purely rhetorical; the music itself is not evocative of a mood."
One reviewer at Amazon called Skip James "the musical equivalent to an Edgar Allen Poe tale of terror, or Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_" and then proclaimed James as the Black Sabbath of blues. That's probably overstating it, but to me his music certainly feels darker, more sad and beautiful, than other blues music.
Robert Johnson also has a haunting, falsetto voice, and for that reason some compare Skip James to him, but there aren't a lot of other similarities.
The cd I have collects all of Skip James's extant early recordings, all done in 1931 (about six or seven years before Robert Johnson's recordings). Unlike Robert Johnson, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and (it seems) countless other blues musicians, James did not die tragically while still young. In fact he eventually found religeon and apparently lived a relatively peaceful life -- more peaceful than his youth anyway. In the sixties, like other blues artists, he was "rediscovered" and performed at folk festivals. There are several recordings of him from that era, but they reportedly don't quite match his early recordings. He was old, his talents were fading, and while he was still very proud of his old recordings, he just didn't have the same mindset that he'd had when he was young.
I wasn't too surprised to realize that the blues tune at the end of Blue Mountain's "Dog Days" cd is a Skip James tune. It sounded familiar, and I liked it right away. Although they've turned it into a hard-rockin'tune, vocalist Cary has James's high wail and moan down.
Interestingly enough, the picture on the front of their cd, a blurry black and white photo of a dog (or wolf) running, is listed as "Hellhound On My Trail", copyright 1995 Jack Spencer. "Hellhound On My Trail" was one of Robert Johnson's signature songs, and is based on "Devil Got My Woman" by Skip James (his own signature song).
Biography at Bluehighway
Biography at Blueflamecafe
All Music Guide Entry
Yes. Gene Autrey recorded some yodeling country blues at the begining of his career, and I picked up the collected cd just for the novelty of it. I don't have any other cds in my collection like it, which is probably a good thing. ^_^
Robert Johnson is widely considered the greatest bluesman ever. He's the one that supposedly sold his soul to the devil, and had hellhounds chasing him across the South. Like many blues musicians, he died while still young and at the height of his talents. There's some suggestions that he may have been poisoned; he apparently made his share of enemies with his gambling, boozing, and womanizing. One thing is certain -- he played up the "devil is after my soul" angle for all it was worth.
In the movie O Brother Where Art Thou? Chris Thomas King plays a young blues musician who has just sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for great musical prowess. Most likely he's meant to be a Robert Johnson clone. Other bluesmen also made similar claims, but the legends have stuck most strongly to Johnson. Anyway, the Coen brothers play very fast and loose with history and historical figures in the movie, so it hardly matters.
But what's interesting is that, when Chris plays a sad, lonely blues tune, it's not anything of Robert Johnson's, but a tune called "Killing Floor Blues" by a man known as Skip James (and he does a marvelous job of it!). You probably recognize a lot of the blues names I mentioned above... but Skip James isn't as well known. But he's probably my favorite blues artist.
I'm not a musician, so I can't tell the difference between good slide guitar and brilliant slide guitar (for example). I know Robert Johnson is considered by many to be where the blues starts and ends. All I know is, he's okay. I liked Blind Willie Johnson much better, with his bizaare gutteral growling voice. But Skip James... some people say he didn't even play the blues, technically. A lot of blues, despite the name, is not really depressing or depressed music. A lot of it is dance music -- Robert Johnson's music was primarily dance music.
Skip James wrote deep, dark, depressing tunes. They are not meant for dancing, believe me. He's described as "strange, complex, bizaare, enigmatic, haunting, idiosyncratic"... he was not creating music to please others, but only to soothe his own soul. His acoustic guitar playing is original and brilliant (so I'm told!), and his voice -- a high falsetto -- is eerie, full of pain and fear and hopelessness and desperation. In short Skip James is everything I always expected blues to be. According to the critics, he often played songs that "have no intrinsic musical pedigree as blues", but they SOUND like blues, because of his guitar and vocal style, his embellishments and various blues techniques.
As the notes for the cd put it, "His guitar songs have a real emotional expressiveness; they reek of unmitigated misery. In so doing, they achieve the effect that blues were hyped as having, but actually lacked. Despite the universal understanding of blues as songs of sorrow any suggestion of unhappiness found in blues is purely rhetorical; the music itself is not evocative of a mood."
One reviewer at Amazon called Skip James "the musical equivalent to an Edgar Allen Poe tale of terror, or Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_" and then proclaimed James as the Black Sabbath of blues. That's probably overstating it, but to me his music certainly feels darker, more sad and beautiful, than other blues music.
Robert Johnson also has a haunting, falsetto voice, and for that reason some compare Skip James to him, but there aren't a lot of other similarities.
The cd I have collects all of Skip James's extant early recordings, all done in 1931 (about six or seven years before Robert Johnson's recordings). Unlike Robert Johnson, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and (it seems) countless other blues musicians, James did not die tragically while still young. In fact he eventually found religeon and apparently lived a relatively peaceful life -- more peaceful than his youth anyway. In the sixties, like other blues artists, he was "rediscovered" and performed at folk festivals. There are several recordings of him from that era, but they reportedly don't quite match his early recordings. He was old, his talents were fading, and while he was still very proud of his old recordings, he just didn't have the same mindset that he'd had when he was young.
I wasn't too surprised to realize that the blues tune at the end of Blue Mountain's "Dog Days" cd is a Skip James tune. It sounded familiar, and I liked it right away. Although they've turned it into a hard-rockin'tune, vocalist Cary has James's high wail and moan down.
Interestingly enough, the picture on the front of their cd, a blurry black and white photo of a dog (or wolf) running, is listed as "Hellhound On My Trail", copyright 1995 Jack Spencer. "Hellhound On My Trail" was one of Robert Johnson's signature songs, and is based on "Devil Got My Woman" by Skip James (his own signature song).
Biography at Blueflamecafe
All Music Guide Entry
