Son House

The preacher who sang the devil's music

Eddie James "Son" House Jr. spent his whole life caught between the pulpit and the juke joint. He was preaching before he was out of his teens, swore he would never play the blues, and then, at twenty-five, picked up a guitar and became the most intense performer the Mississippi Delta ever produced. He slammed the strings, drove a bottleneck slide up the neck, and sang like a man arguing with God in public.

His recorded output from his first career is tiny: a handful of Paramount sides cut in 1930, and two sessions for the Library of Congress in 1941 and 1942. But his influence was out of all proportion to it. In the juke joints around Robinsonville and Clarksdale he played beside his partner Willie Brown, and two young men watched him closely. One was Robert Johnson. The other was a Stovall Plantation tractor driver called McKinley Morganfield, later known as Muddy Waters.

Then, in 1943, House left Mississippi for Rochester, New York, put the guitar down, and disappeared from the blues for twenty years. When three young enthusiasts tracked him down in 1964, he had no guitar, no telephone, and had to be taught his own style again by a twenty-two-year-old fan.

What followed was one of the great second acts in American music: the 1965 Columbia album Father of Folk Blues, festival stages across North America and Europe, and a new song, "Death Letter", that a Detroit rock band would carry to the Grammy Awards nearly forty years later.

Worth knowing

Eleven things about Son House

1. He was preaching at fifteen.

   After his parents separated, his mother took him to Tallulah, Louisiana, and then to Algiers, across the river from New Orleans. He began preaching there at about fifteen, and later served as a pastor in Baptist and Colored Methodist Episcopal churches.

2. He hated the blues before he played it.

   By his own account he was hostile to secular music on religious grounds until 1927, when he heard a drinking companion play bottleneck guitar. He named that companion differently in different interviews: James McCoy in some, Willie Wilson in others.

3. Nobody agrees how old he was.

   Every legal record gives March 21, 1902. House himself said he was middle-aged during the First World War and claimed to be 79 in 1965, which would put his birth around 1886.

4. Even his birthplace has two answers.

   He said he was born near Lyon, in Coahoma County. Some accounts place it at nearby Riverton, now part of Clarksdale.

5. His best-known 1930 side was nearly lost.

   Only one copy of his Paramount 78 "Preachin' the Blues" is known among collectors. A photograph of it is reproduced on the back of his Mississippi Blues Trail marker at the site of the old Clack Store in Tunica County.

6. "Walking Blues" sat on a shelf for 55 years.

   He recorded it in 1930, but it survived only as a test pressing and was not issued until 1985, long after Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters had made their own versions famous.

7. Listen for the trains.

   The 1941 Library of Congress session took place in the Clack Store at Lake Cormorant, close to a railway branch line, and train noise can be heard behind the music.

8. He worked the railroad, not the stage.

   In Rochester he worked for the New York Central Railroad, including as a porter, and as a cook, and stopped playing music altogether.

9. A fan taught him to be Son House.

   House's manager Dick Waterman later said that Al Wilson taught Son House how to play Son House. Wilson went on to co-found the blues-rock band Canned Heat.

10. He was in the first class of the Blues Hall of Fame.

    The Blues Foundation inducted him in its inaugural year, 1980. His 1930 "Preachin' the Blues" followed it into the Hall of Fame as a single in 2017.

11. The White Stripes' first album is dedicated to him.

    The White Stripes' 1999 debut album carries a dedication to House.

Life in brief

From the pulpit to Rochester and back

1. 1902Born March 21 near Lyon, Coahoma County, Mississippi, by the date on every legal record. House himself later claimed to be much older.
2. c. 1917Begins preaching at about fifteen, while living in Algiers, Louisiana.
3. 1927Takes up the guitar at twenty-five, after hearing a friend play bottleneck slide.
4. c. 1928Kills a man in a juke joint and is sent to Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary. By his own accounts he served about two years.
5. 1930Meets Charley Patton in Lula and travels with him, Willie Brown and pianist Louise Johnson to Grafton, Wisconsin, to record for Paramount.
6. 1934Marries Evie in Robinsonville, where he drives a tractor, plays the jukes with Willie Brown and preaches now and then.
7. 1941Records for the Library of Congress at the Clack Store, Lake Cormorant, for Alan Lomax and John W. Work III. A second session follows at Robinsonville in July 1942.
8. 1943Moves to Rochester, New York, works for the New York Central Railroad and as a cook, and gives up music.
9. 1964Rediscovered in Rochester on June 23 by Dick Waterman, Phil Spiro and Nick Perls. He plays the Newport Folk Festival that summer.
10. 1965Father of Folk Blues, recorded for Columbia in New York in April, introduces "Death Letter" and "Grinnin' in Your Face".
11. 1974Retires through ill health after a last concert in Toronto, and moves to Detroit two years later.
12. 1988Dies October 19 in Detroit of cancer of the larynx. He is buried at Mt. Hazel Cemetery, where the Detroit Blues Society later raised money for a monument.

A divided man

The pulpit, the juke and Parchman Farm

For a Black churchgoer in the Delta of the 1920s, the blues was not simply secular music. It was the devil's music, the soundtrack of the juke joint, the gambling house and the Saturday-night fight. House had been raised and ordained inside that view, and he never fully escaped it. Even after he became a bluesman he went on preaching from time to time, and the conflict ran straight through his songs.

"Preachin' the Blues", from the 1930 Paramount session, is the clearest statement of it: a song in which a preacher confesses that the blues has got hold of him, sung with the cadences of a sermon over a pounding slide guitar. Years later, on Father of Folk Blues, he sang the spiritual "John the Revelator" with no guitar at all, only his voice and hand claps, as if to show that the two halves of his life used the same instrument.

Then there was the killing. Around 1927 or 1928, a man began shooting in a juke joint near Lyon. House was wounded in the leg, and by his own account he shot the man dead. He was sentenced to fifteen years at Parchman Farm, the state penitentiary, but was released after about two, and credited his family's appeals and the intervention of an influential white planter he had worked for.

• The story

  House told the tale many times: a man running wild with a gun, House shooting back in self-defence, a fifteen-year sentence, and an early release won by friends on the outside. It became a fixed part of his legend, the preacher who had taken a life.

• The record

  He gave different dates and sentence lengths to different interviewers. His biographer Daniel Beaumont searched the court records of Coahoma County and the archive of the Mississippi Department of Corrections and found no trace of the case. That something happened is widely accepted; the details rest on House's word alone.

Out of prison, he drifted to Lula, where in 1930 he met Charley Patton. Patton was already Paramount's star in the Delta, and he took House, Willie Brown and the pianist Louise Johnson north to Grafton, Wisconsin, to record. House cut "My Black Mama", "Preachin' the Blues", "Dry Spell Blues", "Clarksdale Moan", "Mississippi County Farm Blues" and "Walking Blues". Most discographies date his session to late May 1930. The records came out as the Depression deepened and sold poorly, and House went back to the cotton fields.

Rochester, 1964

Lost and found

By the early 1960s, House's 1930 records had become holy relics to a small circle of young white collectors, who passed them around on tape and reissue albums and assumed he was long dead. Three of them, Dick Waterman, Phil Spiro and Nick Perls, set out to find him. They searched Memphis and the Delta, following tips, a liner note and some wrong directions, until a lead pointed north. Two days after speaking to him by telephone from Memphis, they knocked on his door in Rochester, New York, on June 23, 1964.

They found a man in his sixties who was out of work, had no guitar and no phone, and had no idea that a folk-blues revival was under way or that his name was spoken with awe in record shops on both sides of the Atlantic. The news of his rediscovery travelled fast, and the same summer he was on stage at the Newport Folk Festival, where Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James, also lately rediscovered, were on the bill.

The comeback lasted about a decade. House played coffee houses and campuses, toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival package in 1967 alongside Skip James and Bukka White, appeared at Montreux in 1970, and was filmed for television with Buddy Guy. Ill health ended it: after a last concert in Toronto in 1974 he retired, and moved to Detroit in 1976.

Start here

Songs to hear, and where they went

• 1930 My Black Mama A two-part Paramount side with a slow, pumping slide figure. Part two contains the story House later rebuilt into "Death Letter".
• 1930 Preachin' the Blues The preacher's confession, sung like a sermon. Robert Johnson recorded his own "Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)" in 1936. Robert Johnson 1936
• 1930 Walking Blues Unissued until 1985, yet it became a blues standard through his students. Johnson's 1936 "Walkin' Blues" keeps many of House's features. Muddy Waters recorded it as "Country Blues" for the Library of Congress in 1941, and it later reached the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Eric Clapton. Robert Johnson 1936Muddy Waters 1941Paul Butterfield Blues Band 1966Eric Clapton 1992
• 1965 Death Letter His signature song: a man reads that the woman he loves has died, and goes to see her buried. Recorded for Columbia on a National resonator guitar with a copper slide. Cassandra Wilson's 1995 version later became the theme for the third season of True Detective; the White Stripes played theirs at the 2004 Grammy Awards. Cassandra Wilson 1995The White Stripes 2000
• 1965 Grinnin' in Your Face Just a voice, off-beat hand claps and a stamping foot, warning against false friends. Jack White plays the record in the 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud.
• 1965 John the Revelator The old spiritual, sung unaccompanied: the preacher, back in the pulpit, in the middle of a blues album.

Why he matters

The teacher in the juke joint

Son House is the hinge between the first generation of recorded Delta blues and everything that came after. Robert Johnson learned at his elbow. House later remembered a young Johnson around Robinsonville who could play the harmonica brilliantly but drove everyone mad with his noise on the guitar, and who went away and came back a master. That story fed straight into the crossroads legend, and House himself told the writer Pete Welding that Johnson must have sold his soul to play like that, a remark that may well have been a joke.

Muddy Waters told the writer Paul Oliver that House was the best musician in the jukes around Clarksdale, and that watching him play with the neck of a bottle on his finger was where he got the idea for slide guitar. Muddy took that sound to Chicago, electrified it, and handed it on to the Rolling Stones and every rock band that followed.

The second wave of influence came through the 1960s recordings. "Death Letter" became a standard covered by artists from Johnny Winter to the Grateful Dead and Gov't Mule, and the White Stripes brought his songs to a new generation. His Mississippi Blues Trail marker stands in Tunica County, a second marker in Rochester marks the apartment where he was found, and he was inducted into the Rochester Music Hall of Fame in 2013.