Photo by Bruce Jackson
Skip James sometimes stayed with us in Cambridge when he was performing nearby. The last time he visited, I gave him a dog, Dewey Decimal, a fyce I’d brought home from a trip to San Antonio a few weeks earlier. The fyce and my four-year-old son Michael didn’t get along. Skip said he’d be happy to take him home to Philadelphia. They bonded immediately. I next saw Skip at a blues session in the Smithsonian’s annual Festival on the Mall. He was performing in it and I was doing the introductions. He and his wife said they and the fyce were doing just fine. He died a year later—on October 3, 1969—-of the cancer he’d been dealing with the entire time I knew him.
We’d met in 1964. John Fahey brought him by a few times to record in my basement. The session I remember most was when John and Skip brought Mississippi John Hurt with them. We taped in the basement for a while, then Skip said that he really wished there was a piano around because there were songs he liked doing on piano more than guitar. I said there was a piano the previous tenant of my study in Harvard’s Adams House had left. I didn’t know how in tune it was. John Hurt and Skip both laughed at that: a slightly out-of-tune piano was hardly alien to them.
So we went to Adams House. We recorded blues, but the startling moment was when Skip and John began singing songs by 1920s country singer Jimmy Rodgers. Jimmy Rodgers was famous for his yodeling. Skip and John did those songs and they yodeled.
Skip James and John Hurt were, each in their own way, great musical artists. What I learned in that moment when they yodeled white country songs on that out-of-tune piano was, if you think you know who those guys were or what those guys knew on the basis of their classic records, forget it. They were all more complicated than you or I will ever know.
The first time I heard Skip perform had been two years earlier at the Saturday afternoon Blues Workshop of the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. It was called a “workshop” but there was a huge audience.
Newport that week was cold and damp. The wind and rain went on and off at irregular intervals. The cold stayed on just about all the time. When the music was good you could maybe forget it for a while, but rarely for very long. Some of the performers announced songs, then decided to do something else when they realized the coldness had gotten through to the bones and their fingers just couldn’t respond the way they should.
For most of us, many of the people Sam Charters and Willis James introduced in that workshop had been names in books. A few were voices heard on friends’ old 78 r.p.m. records. One by one they came up, were introduced, made the foulness of the day go away for a few minutes: Mississippi John Hurt, Rev. Robert Wilkins, Robert Pete Williams.
And then Sam Charters introduced Skip James. I was sitting behind the small stage with Hammy Nixon. The name made us both look up. A thin, dark-suited man, with a serious hat settled into the iron chair and we saw his back against the field of three thousand or so faces.
Then suddenly—I don’t know quite how to describe it—Skip’s incredible voice began the slow agonizing wail of “Devil Got My Woman Blues,” and it wasn’t a matter of competing with the weather at all, but instead one of those rare electric moments when things manage to connect and coalesce perfectly. Skip’s precise tenor soared into the grey and careless cold and many of those young faces in that vast field were suddenly still as they listened, were taken up, and began to feel something of what it was all about.
If you can find it, listen to the Vanguard album The Blues at Newport/1964/Part 2, which had a recording of that performance. Imagine that hostile gray afternoon sky and Skip’s voice splitting it open. Or listen to Skip’s best studio album, Skip James/Today!, and you’ll get some more. Today! was Skip’s third LP, the first that was well enough recorded to give some idea of his range and versatility. You’ll never mistake another guitar or voice for his. Somehow within the quality that is his alone there is a sweeping range of techniques and styles. Each piece sounds as if it had been programmed to the last note, the last multiple hammer, but then you hear other recordings or make it to a live performance and you realize that it is not the specifics that characterize his musical personality but his skillful and completely idiosyncratic manipulation and juxtapositioning of them.
Nehemiah James (“Skippy” was bestowed by schoolmates as a comment on his dancing style) was born June 9, 1902, just outside Bentonia, Mississippi, a small town halfway between Yazoo City and Jackson on US 49. He spent parts of his youth in the Delta—to your right if you drive south out of Memphis on US 61 toward Vicksburg—an area rich in cotton and blues. The blues are one of American folk music’s greatest indigenous products and the central and Delta Mississippi bluesmen have been its greatest exponents : Charlie Patton, Bill Broonzy, Willie Brown, Son House, Robert Wilkins, Robert Johnson, Skip James.
Skip’s father, a Baptist minister, played organ and guitar. When he was 7 or 8, Skip heard Henry Stuckey and Rich Griffith, two Bentonia musicians, and begged his mother to get him a guitar. It cost $2.50 and he couldn’t put it down: ” It was just in me, I guess, and I was just graftin’ after it. I would just sit until… I didn’t have sense enough to know how far to go and how hungry I’d get ’cause my mind was on the music, what I was trying to learn.”
Learn: though music came naturally to him he always consciously tried to learn technique, always deliberately watched, studied, worked at his craft. A year or two later he went to Jackson to hear a musician who already had a growing reputation in the area, John Hurt. When he was about 12 he started high school in Yazoo City and had his only formal musical training—two piano lessons at $1.50 each, which, he told me, he terminated because he decided it was too much for the family budget. In his mid-teens he traveled and worked, learning along the way: “I came to a place in the upper part of Mississippi, long about the middle of the Delta part. Rosedale, Mississippi. They had a good road camp there. And I worked a little while in that good road camp and there was a guy there, he could play guitar a little bit. Not very much. More than I could.” He traveled through Texas, back to Mississippi, then to a sawmill job in a small town about fifty miles south of Memphis where he met a piano player, Will Crabtree, who worked both white and Black dancehalls. Crabtree, Skip said,
was a professional musician, played piano and nothing but that for his living. Found out that I was so eager to learn music, he decided that he’d take a little interest in me…. ’Course, I always was reared up to be kind of malleable in respect to old people. And he just taken a liking to me. Well. at his rest periods, when he got up off the stool to go and take a recess or get him a drink or sandwich or something, soon as he’d get up, I’d sit right on the stool behind him…. And so he would give me an idea about some things, different notes and so on. Well. I stayed there two years and seven months….About four or five months before I left there, then I could kinda crawl a little bit.
As Skip’s playing got better, Crabtree’s breaks got longer. Skip went to Memphis, played music in a barrelhouse for a while, met a group of musicians there, then returned to Mississippi, where he met Little Brother Montgomery and some other bluesmen. Eventually, he settled in Jackson. He summed up his musical education:
After I got that much from those, then I just used my own self: Skip. I don’t pattern after anyone or either copycat. I may hear something, but if it’s nice enough for me to get an idea about, I think I like a phrase or something, I may get it and put it in where it will be befitting in some of my pieces. But other than that, I don’t. lt’s just Skip’s music….I don’t sing other people’s songs, I don’t sing other people’s voices. I can’t.
In 1931, he was rooming with Johnny Temple in Jackson. Temple and two friends persuaded Skip to apply at H. C. Spier’s music company for a job. Skip says he was hoping to get a job playing in the store. (Son House told me similar stories of visits to Spiers’ second-floor office). Skip saw Spiers and was told to return the next day. When he arrived, the place was crowded with other performers who were hoping to audition. Skip played two stanzas of “Devil Got My Woman” and was suddenly stopped by Spiers, who told him he’d made a “terrific hit” with the judges, that he was the only performer that day to do so. Skip was signed to a two-year recording contract and told to get ready for a trip to the Paramount studios in Wisconsin.
He reached Grafton two days later at six a.m. on a frozen February morning. Arthur Laibley met him at the station and took him to a hotel, where he slept until noon, then got up for the afternoon’s recording session. He cut about a half-dozen songs that day, and finished the next. He remembers recording 26 sides, most of them on piano. “Cherryball” was the last song he cut for Paramount. He said he wrote it that afternoon. “There was a tall slender girl standing right to the back of my chair. And quite naturally she was very cheery looking and glamorous to me…. She had two big bowls of cherries over each shoulder. As I played I dedicated that piece to her. That was the first time I met her and I haven’t seen her since.”
Only a few of the Paramount sides were released and they do not seem to have been widely circulated. “I didn’t do anything but play around for frolics in different places a little while, then I gave up music then, just quit it altogether until I organized me a quartet. A group of singers—went singing spirituals.”
That lasted two years, then he went to Birmingham where his father was running a small school. Skip was ordained a Methodist minister about 1942, then was ordained again as a Baptist minister a year later. He worked in a mine in Birmingham, returned to Mississippi where he had a job cutting timber. Then he was “‘driving tractor, doing day work, and after they taken me off the tractor I was just overseer over the hands on a plantation.”
He played no more music until 1964, when John Fahey, Bill Barth and Henry Vestine appeared at his bedside in the Tunica hospital. He wrote a song about his hospital stay in Washington a few weeks later: “Washington, D.C., Hospital Center Blues.” It is on Skip James/Today!.
His songs were often a blend of traditional lines and his own comments on the life he was living. The threnodic “Cypress Grove” is based on feelings about a place where he used to cut timber in Mississippi. His “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” ranks with Y. A. Harburg’s “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime” as one of the three or four great Depression songs. The phrasing is odd, but never strained when Skip sings: “Hard times is here and every / where you go / times are harder/than ever been before.” He wrote the song when “Back to Dallas, the people was on soup lines. You know, lines just getting soup, wasn’t having anything, just what the government was giving us.”
The only song he ever made any real money from—I think it was $10,000—was a children’s song, “I’m So Glad.” The money came not from one of his performances, but from royalties from Cream’s cover. His own performance of “Hard Time Killing Floor” is on the soundtrack of Joel and Ethan Coen’s film O Brother, Where Art Thou; I assume his estate got something for that.
The best thing I’ve seen about Skip’s work is Peter Guralnick’s 1966 review in Crawdaddy of Skip James/Today! It reads, in part:
This new Vanguard release is a great album. Of all the singers who have been rediscovered—indeed I would say of all the country blues singers—Skip James along with Robert Johnson initially possessed the greatest talent. And of all the rediscoveries, except perhaps for Furry Lewis, Skip James retains the most of the talent that he did have. Son House flails away at his guitar, and Bukka White grossly recalls the brilliant recordings he once made. Peg Leg Howell embarrasses us. But Skip James makes his music live now. While it has metamorphosed, while it is different from what it was, mellower, less harsh and more lyrical, the changes come together not to drain the music of its meaning but to make it live now, Today! as the album boasts. We are more suspicious of today’s music because it does not stand still for us; but I think only an archaist would be able to find greater value in Skip James’s 1931 recordings than in his present ones.
One reason to say this is that Skip James more than almost any other blues singer is a conscious and brilliant artist. He is a sensitive, thoughtful man who attempts uniquely to bridge the gap between himself and audience. “As I first said, it’s a privilege and an honor and a courtesy at this time and at this age to be able to confront you with something that may go down in your hearings and may be in history after I’m gone. I hope to try to deliver and to promulgate some things and teachings for the students and those that are really eager and conscientious to try to learn some music, and my style especially. And I try to play it in a way some time so they can get ideas.” Or he may introduce a song: “It was during Depression times that I recorded this number. Times was hard all over, and that’s the title of this song, ‘Hard Time Killing Floor Blues).’”
Peter’s got it right (except perhaps for the Furry Lewis comparison).
I’ve seen Skip described as cold, aloof, moody, and difficult to deal with. Someone wrote me about him recently saying all of that. I never experienced him that way.
Skip James was a man of great dignity and seriousness. Not grimness—he could be very funny—but seriousness about his person and about his art. He was in the Mississippi blues tradition, but no other bluesman sang what he did, played the way he did, or sang how he did, and he knew it. He’d spent a long time learning the craft on the way to becoming the great artist he was. Little wonder that he didn’t spring into immediate chumminess with people less than half his age expecting such a relationship simply because they liked the blues, or that he didn’t like people telling him how he should perform. He’d spent too long and been through too much becoming the person and artist he was for that. The whole time he was part of that 1960s folk music scene—less than five full years— he had a cancer he knew was killing him.
Something that happened and something he said the first time I met him gets that better than I can.
The 1964 Newport Folk Festival was paradise for blues fans. In addition to Skip, there were at least a dozen great blues performers on the program: Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Willy Doss, Reverend Robert Wilkins, Jesse Fuller, Robert Pete Williams, and more.
Many of them were housed in the same building. On the Saturday night of that weekend, going from room to room, you could open a door and another blues tradition was in process.
Skip was playing in one room and for a while a friend of mine named Al Wilson played harmonica along with him. (Al got famous for a short while for two songs he did with a group called Canned Heat: “Goin’ Up the Country” and “On the Road Again.” Al could play any instrument well. He died in 1970 at the age of 27 of a drug overdose). That night in the Newport mansion Al played while Skip performed and then said, “How was that, Mr. James?”
Skip said, “It was okay. But why do you look like that?”
Al was generally pretty scruffy. That evening was no different from any other. Without a word, he got up, left the room, then came back a while later shaved, combed, and smelling better. He’d just gone into someone’s room and cleaned up. Skip nodded and they played some more. No one asked: Whose razor did you use? Whose shirt is that?
The two did another song, one of Skip’s1931 Paramount recordings. When they were done, Al said, “How was that, Mr. James?”
Skip looked at him a moment, nodded in approval for Al’s performance on the harp, then said, “Skippy been places you ain’t never gonna get to go.”
I think about that sentence a lot: “Skippy been places you ain’t never gonna get to go.”
xxx
Excerpted with permission from Changing Tense: Thirty memento mori by Bruce Jackson, published by BlazeVOX.