Son House was a pioneering Mississippi Delta bluesman whose emotionally intense style has never been matched. His early life was the stuff of legend, as he went from Baptist preacher, to convict, and then to country blues singer, and this tension between the sacred and the secular is vividly apparent in his music. Although he thought the blues was the Devil’s music—“You can’t hold God in one hand, the Devil in the other one,” he said—he nevertheless felt compelled to play it.
House was born Eddie James House, Jr., in March 1902, on a plantation near Lyon, Mississippi. An avid churchgoer as a youth, he sang gospel unaccompanied and preached his first sermon at 15. By age 20, House was a pastor at a Baptist church, but he took up with an older woman and left the area. He returned to Mississippi in 1926 and learned to play guitar, influenced in part by a local guitarist who emulated Blind Lemon JEFFERSON. By 1927, House was a popular entertainer at Delta parties. Things took a turn for the worse in 1928, when House shot a man dead in self-defence and was sentenced to 15 years to the state penal farm at Parchman.
After early release from Parchman in 1929, House met Charley PATTON and Willie Brown, with whom he started playing blues. The following summer, the three men recorded for Paramount, including the songs “My Black Mama” (this later evolved into Robert JOHNSON’S “Walkin’ Blues” and Muddy WATERS’ “Country Blues”) and “Preachin’ the Blues,” which carried a theme that frequently figured in House’s songs: the battle between good and evil. House and Brown became good friends, playing as a team out of their homes in Robinsonville, Mississippi, for more than a decade. House supplemented his income by working as a tractor driver on a cotton plantation.
House’s blues were fierce and personal. His deep, raw, barking voice and heavily rhythmic guitar playing conveyed a passionate, often agonised intensity that ran through his whole body. His hands were fascinating to watch as he slapped the strings rhythmically, pulling on them so the notes cracked, and running his sharply slanted slide cleanly across them. One writer described him as “possessed” by the music while he played and sang it. Both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters learned from House. Waters recalled showing up to watch him wherever House was playing, and said House taught him new tunings for the guitar.
The 1930 recordings were not built upon until Alan Lomax recorded House while doing field research in the Delta for the Library of Congress in 1941 and 1942. Brown died soon after, and in 1943 House moved to Rochester, New York, where he worked as a porter and barbecue chef. During this time he all but retired from music, playing only occasionally and locally.
It was not until the 1960s folk-blues revival that researchers rediscovered House, and he signed with CBS Records in 1964. House soon gained a large white audience, and began to tour enthusiastically on the campus and coffeehouse circuits, as well as playing larger venues such as the Newport Folk Festival and Carnegie Hall. He went to Europe in 1967 with the American Folk Blues Festival, and on his own in 1970, although by then his health had begun to deteriorate. House gave up performing in 1974 and moved to Detroit with his family. He died in October 1988.
Stan Hieronymus
SEE ALSO:
BLUES; FESTIVALS AND EVENTS; FOLK MUSIC.
FURTHER READING
Cohn, Lawrence, ed. Nothing but the Blues: The Music and the Musicians (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993);
Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues (New York: Hyperion, 1995);
Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Delta Blues: The Original Library of Congress Field Recordings, 1941–42; Son House; Son House, Father of the Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions.