Down And Dirty In The Delta-With
Bluesman Skip James In Mind
CD Review
By Zack James
Skip James Unchained, Skip James Around
Records, 1985
“Hey, Josh, Sally Ann and I are headed
to Newport this weekend for the folk festival, do you want to go?” asked Seth Garth
plaintively knowing that Josh would give his right arm to be there that
weekend, the weekend when the great old time country blues singers “discovered”
by the young urban folk archivists and aficionados were going to “duel” it out
for the “king of the hill” title. Of course Josh, stuck in a job as a research
assistant in order to pay his way through college could not go since Professor
Levin had some paper he was going to present to a conference out in California,
out at Berkeley that needed last minute upgrading and footnoting, a fact of
life in the profession, and so would be drudging around at least until Tuesday.
Even if he had been able to sneak away for several hours to run down there some
seventy miles away he knew that Seth and Sally Ann would be heading down
courtesy of the Greyhound bus and so that was strictly out.
Seth, knowing of Josh’s plight thought
that it had really been something for a couple of guys from the working poor
Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville who were deeply into blues by guys from
down in places like the Delta in Mississippi and the swamps of Alabama, places
like that. City boys really and to the core, corner boys by inclination and so
previously heavily attuned to nothing but bad boy rock and roll, you know,
Elvis, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee, country boys too but guys who had hooked into
some primal beat that moved them, spoke to them, hell, spoke for them, in a way
that no sociologist could ever figure out in a hundred years. Strangely it had
almost been an accidental occurrence since one night Seth had taken Annie
Dubois from Olde Saco up in Maine to a blues concert in Cambridge where an old
blues man from rural Texas, Mance Lipscomb was playing at the Café Algiers. He
had been “found” by Alan Battles down in some Podunk town in Texas and came
North via bus in tow with Alan. His Ella
Speed and a couple of other tunes wowed him and he began studying up on
Harry Smith’s anthology, Charles Seeger’s playlist and that of the Lomaxes,
father and son. Watched too when unnamed aficionados were combing the South for
country blues guys they had heard on old RCA records from the 1920s when that
company sent out scouts to find talent for their “race records section.”
Surprising some the guys, some of the best ones too, were still alive working
in farm jobs or in small trades maybe playing the juke joints for drinks and
pocket change.
Then in golden age 1963 (that golden
age a true retrospective since many of the great bluesmen like Mississippi John
Hurt, ditto Mississippi Fred McDowell, Sam Sloan, Bubba Ball, Bukka White would
pass away within a few years of discovery so yes golden age) news came from
Newport as they were announcing the festival program that Allan Battles had
found Son House and Skip James to go with John Hurt. Now there was no publicity
like today that would make the thing some kind of a shoot-out among the three
for the title but Seth had a sneaking suspicion that that would happen. Would
happen on the assumption that if you put three big gun bluesmen (or any three
big guns in any musical genre) you were bound to have a shoot-out. That is what
had animated all the conversations between Seth and Josh all spring on the
assumption that Josh would be going along.
In the event Seth had been right, at
least in the end right. Each of the three men had their individual sets in a
tent area set aside for them which actually was too small by the time serious
folkies heard what was afoot. Seth and Sally Ann had gotten seat pretty close
to the front because Seth although murder on any instrument he might play had a
sense about who could play the guitar and who, beside him, could not. They all
did a pretty good job, took a break and then came back together supposedly for
one final collective song, John Hurt’s Beulah
Land. Son House jumped out first but Seth detected that tell-tale glint he
knew from his own drinking experiences that he had been at the bottle. John
Hurt did well as would be expected on one of his signature covers. But then
Skip James, not as good as a guitarist as the other two pulled down the hammer,
came soaring out with that big falsetto voice and kept the field for himself.
And if you don’t believe Seth then
check out this CD and then weep for your error.
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