Skip James

The loneliest sound in the blues

Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James made eighteen records in two days in the winter of 1931, and they are among the strangest and most beautiful in American music. A high, keening falsetto floats over a guitar tuned to an open minor chord, the bass notes rolling and the melody picked fast and clean. Where most Delta blues is hot and heavy, James's music is cold, private and unsettling, like a man singing to himself in an empty room.

He came from Bentonia, a small town in Yazoo County, north of Jackson, and he learned the local style from an older guitarist, Henry Stuckey. He was also an unusual pianist, and five of his 1931 sides were made at the keyboard. The records were released at the bottom of the Great Depression, sold almost nothing, and James gave up the blues for the church.

For more than thirty years he was a rumour among record collectors. Then, in 1964, three young guitarists found him in a hospital in Tunica County, Mississippi, and within weeks he was on stage at the Newport Folk Festival. Two years later a British rock trio called Cream put his "I'm So Glad" on its first album, and the royalties became the only real money he ever made from music.

His shadow falls across the whole blues. Robert Johnson borrowed from him twice, the Coen brothers put his song in a hit film, and in Bentonia itself the Blue Front Cafe still keeps his style alive.

Worth knowing

Ten things about Skip James

1. The tuning has a legend of its own.

   Henry Stuckey, who taught James, was said to have learned the open minor tuning from Caribbean soldiers, often described as Bahamian, while serving in France in the First World War. Stuckey's service card shows no overseas service, so the story may be just that.

2. Thirteen on guitar, five on piano.

   Of the eighteen sides from his 1931 Paramount session, the first thirteen were played on guitar and the last five on piano.

3. His first guitar cost $2.50.

   His mother bought it for him. In Grafton in 1931 he played a twelve-string Stella guitar restrung with six strings.

4. His father was a bootlegger turned preacher.

   Eddie James left the family around 1907, later reformed and became a minister. After his records failed, Skip directed the choir in his father's church and was himself ordained.

5. Some thought he had been murdered.

   The bluesman Big Joe Williams believed James had been killed in Mississippi, and many collectors assumed he was dead.

6. He was found in a hospital bed.

   The guitarists John Fahey, Bill Barth and Henry Vestine tracked him to a hospital in Tunica in 1964. Vestine later played lead guitar in Canned Heat.

7. Three decades between shows.

   His appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1964 was his first public performance in more than thirty years.

8. A cover paid his medical bills.

   "I'm So Glad" earned him about $10,000 in royalties, the one windfall of his career, and the money helped pay his medical bills.

9. A band named itself after his song.

   The English rock group the 22-20s took their name from his "22-20 Blues", a song about a gun.

10. An actor plays him as a young man on film.

    No footage of James exists from before the 1960s, so in Wim Wenders's 2003 film The Soul of a Man, part of Martin Scorsese's series The Blues, the actor Keith B. Brown plays the young Skip.

Life in brief

From Woodbine Plantation to Philadelphia

1. 1902Born June 9 on the Woodbine Plantation near Bentonia, Mississippi, where his mother works as a cook.
2. c. 1907His father, a bootlegger, leaves the family. He later becomes a preacher.
3. 1919Leaves Bentonia for work on road-building crews and levee camps, playing guitar and piano along the way.
4. 1931The Paramount session. After an audition for the talent scout H. C. Speir in Jackson, he travels to Grafton, Wisconsin, in February and records eighteen songs.
5. 1930sTurns to the church, leading his father's choir and becoming a minister, with spells in Dallas and Birmingham.
6. 1964Rediscovered in Tunica County by John Fahey, Bill Barth and Henry Vestine. In July he plays the Newport Folk Festival.
7. 1966Today! on Vanguard, and Cream's "I'm So Glad" on Fresh Cream.
8. 1969Dies October 3 in Philadelphia of cancer, aged 67. He is buried at Merion Memorial Park in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
9. 1992Inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.
10. 2008Mississippi Blues Trail marker dedicated in Bentonia on September 18.

A town and a tuning

The Bentonia sound

Most Delta guitarists of the 1920s tuned to an open major chord, or played in standard tuning. Henry Stuckey, an unrecorded guitarist from Bentonia, used something darker: an open D minor, with the strings tuned D, A, D, F, A, D. Strum the open strings and the guitar sounds a minor chord, hollow and mournful. James learned it from Stuckey as a boy and built his whole style on it, combining it with a fast, classical-sounding fingerpicking technique, a heavy, hypnotic bass line, and a falsetto that sounded half like a cry and half like a hymn.

Other players around Bentonia, notably Jack Owens, used the same tuning and some of the same songs, and writers came to speak of a "Bentonia school" of the blues. Not everyone agrees. In his 1994 biography of James, I'd Rather Be the Devil, Stephen Calt argued that the idea is overstated, and that the Bentonia players were mostly working from James's own ideas rather than from a shared local tradition.

1931 and 1964

Two days in Grafton, and a hospital in Tunica

The man who sent James north was H. C. Speir, a white record-shop owner in Jackson who scouted Black talent for several labels and also sent Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson to record. After an audition in Speir's store, James travelled to Paramount's studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, in February 1931. Over two days he recorded "Devil Got My Woman", "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues", "Cypress Grove Blues", "22-20 Blues", "I'm So Glad", "Special Rider Blues" and a dozen more, including the piano pieces "If You Haven't Any Hay Get on Down the Road" and the spiritual "Jesus Is a Mighty Good Leader".

It was perhaps the worst moment in history to release a blues record. Paramount was collapsing, Southern farm workers had no money for records, and the discs sold so poorly that only a small number of copies survive today. James returned to Mississippi and to his father's church.

By the early 1960s, collectors such as the guitarist John Fahey had heard the few surviving 78s and wanted to know who had made them. In 1964 Fahey, Bill Barth and Henry Vestine followed leads to Tunica County, where they found James in hospital. The same summer brought the rediscovery of Son House in Rochester, and Stephen Calt later wrote that the two finds together marked the start of the blues revival.

James was not an easy man to sell. He was proud, moody and private, and insisted on playing his songs his own way. His later albums, especially Today! for Vanguard in 1966, showed his playing largely intact, but the dark, inward quality of his music kept him from the wider popularity that Mississippi John Hurt found. Cream's version of "I'm So Glad" changed his fortunes: James reportedly approved of the new arrangement, and the royalties gave him a measure of comfort in the last years before he died of cancer in 1969.

Start here

Songs to hear, and where they went

• 1931 Devil Got My Woman The essential Bentonia record, sung in falsetto over the minor tuning. It is widely heard as the pattern for Robert Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail", recorded in 1937, and Jimmy "Duck" Holmes still plays it in Bentonia. Robert Johnson 1937Jimmy "Duck" Holmes 2019
• 1931 Hard Time Killing Floor Blues A Depression song about hunger and hardship. Chris Thomas King sings it in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and his version is on the Grammy-winning soundtrack. Chris Thomas King 2000
• 1931 22-20 Blues A piano blues about a gun. Robert Johnson reworked it on guitar as "32-20 Blues" in 1936. Robert Johnson 1936
• 1931 I'm So Glad A dazzlingly fast guitar piece whose cheerful refrain sits on top of a restless song. Cream recorded it on Fresh Cream in 1966, and Deep Purple opened their first album with it two years later. Cream 1966Deep Purple 1968
• 1931 Cypress Grove Blues A meditation on death and loneliness, with the falsetto at its most ghostly. It gave Jimmy "Duck" Holmes the title of his Grammy-nominated album. Jimmy "Duck" Holmes 2019

Why he matters

A sound nobody could copy

Skip James's influence runs in two directions. Backwards, it reaches Robert Johnson, who knew his records and borrowed both a song and a mood from them, and whose own dark minor-key pieces, "Hellhound on My Trail" above all, would be hard to imagine without "Devil Got My Woman". Forwards, it reaches Cream, the British blues boom, and every guitarist who has tried an open minor tuning and found that it sounds like a haunted house. AllMusic's biography of James says his early records could make the hair stand up on the back of the neck.

He is remembered in Bentonia with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker, and in the Blues Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 1992. In 2007 the singer Dion, of "Runaround Sue" fame, named a blues album Son of Skip James. But the best memorial may be the simplest: on a Saturday night in Bentonia, at the Blue Front Cafe, the tuning Henry Stuckey taught a boy about a century ago is still being played.