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Legends of the Delta Bluesby Mark Humphrey

There was an intensity about them which was bothfrightening and beautiful. Their music, more than mereentertainment, seemed at times a wrenching experi-ence of self-exorcism. Some of these men, subject ofwild speculation or rumored dead, sprang to life seem-ingly from the underworld, certainly from a time andplace not our own. The reality of their presence wasawesome enough, yet they carried, too, a thick auraof spectral presences, of departed legends they weretouched by (or themselves touched). For Son House,the associations went deep into both the past and thefuture of the blues. He was a companion of CharleyPatton and Willie Brown, a mentor to Robert Johnsonand Muddy Waters. For Johnny Shines, his unshak-able ghost was Robert Johnson, whose music he wouldbring to Chicago. Bukka White idolized Charley Patton;John Lee Hooker was free of legendary associationsto color our sense of him, unless the distant (yet dis-cernible) echoes of the African griots present in hismusic count.

These men’s legends, when all else is said anddone, are etched from their music’s urgency and

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power. And some of that power is undoubtedly that ofFirst Cause: “A number of facts suggest that the bluesmay first have taken shape in Mississippi,” writesSamuel Charters in Lawrence Cohn’s Nothing But theBlues. “In the northwest counties of Mississippi, thefamous Delta cotton country, the concentration of Af-rican American communities was so dense that themusical life preserved elements of African melody andinstrumental style that had all but died out elsewherein the South... Somewhere, probably in a Delta cabin,a singer who knew the melodies and the improvisedverses of Mississippi work songs decided to sing thein a new way, and that was the blues.”

Awestruck by this primal music, some of its ar-dent admirers perceive in it something other than re-built work songs and whiskey bravado. They sense aspiritual dimension. “This intersection in the Delta ofheaven and earth, good and evil, the temporal andthe eternal at their extreme limits...is life underneatha real, existent Cross and this is what makes this mu-sic and this land so eerie,” writes John Fahey. “Thegreat value of the Delta blues is that the people whorecorded them lived vivid, exciting, anguished livesfilled with a deeper penetration of reality...they werepeople who once were in close touch with essencesand not appearances.”

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Son House(1902-1988)

“Blues—they won’t do to fool with. Makeyou wish you was dead sometimes.” – Son House

No one would seem to better fit Fahey’s descrip-tion of the Delta bluesman than Son House. A ‘back-slid’ preacher, House felt an intense ambivalence to-wards the music he seemingly embodied, the blues.His mixed emotions come through in the 1972 mono-logue drawn from private footage which opens thisvideo. There is something wonderful about seeing oneof the Delta’s primordial figures recall his first expo-sure to the blues, and his bewilderment: “What thedevil is that—blues?”

On another occasion, House offered a rather dif-ferent explanation: “People keep asking me where theblues started, and all I can say is that when I was aboy we always was singing in the fields. Not real sing-ing, you know, just hollering but we made up our songsabout things that was happening to us at that time,and I think that’s where the blues started.”

Eddie James House, Jr. was raised on a planta-tion between Clarksdale and Lyon, Mississippi. He waspreaching by age fifteen, and his ‘reverse conversion’to the blues doesn’t seem to have occurred until Housewas in his early twenties. A 1928 shooting at a houseparty resulted in House serving a little over a year atParchman Farm on manslaughter charges. After hisrelease he met bluesmen Charley Patton and WillieBrown in Lula. Patton recommended House to Para-mount label talent scout A.C. Laibly, who arrangedfor House to record on May 28, 1930 in Grafton, Wis-consin. The seven surviving recordings from House’ssole pre-War commercial recording session aredeemed masterpieces of Delta blues.

Following his return from Wisconsin, House settledin guitarist-singer Willie Brown’s hometown ofRobinsonville, Mississippi. His musical partnership withBrown flourished in the 1930s and 1940s, when

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House’s prowess as blues singer and guitarist madehim a role model for such young men as RobertJohnson and Muddy Waters. “It was Son House whoinfluenced me to play,” Waters told Peter Guralnick. “Iwas really behind Son House all the way.” (Ironically,House outlived both of his star pupils.)

In the summer of 1941, folklorist Alan Lomax waslooking for Johnson when he found House instead (atMuddy Waters’ direction). During that and the follow-ing summer Lomax recorded House solo and with aband featuring Brown, Fiddling Joe Martin on mando-lin and Leroy Williams on harmonica. These legend-ary Library of Congress recordings, which includedthe prototype of “Levee Camp Moan,” originally en-titled “Government Fleet Blues” and heard here in a1968 University of Washington performance, wouldbe House’s last until after his ‘rediscovery’ in 1964.He abandoned blues playing after Willie Brown’s 1953death, a decade after House had himself moved toRochester, New York. His stint as Pullman porter theremay in part have inspired “Empire State Express,” oneof the staples of House’s repertoire during the decade(1964-1974) he was again actively performing. Alongwith blues, the ‘backslid’ preacher always included aspiritual in his performances, albeit often a rather secu-lar one with the ‘bluesy’ cautionary tone of “Don’t MindPeople Grinning in Your Face.”

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Johnny Shines(1915-1992)

September 5, 1941 was a date Johnny Shinesnever forgot: it was the day he moved to Chicago. Fit-tingly, the first of his songs in this video is “Sweet HomeChicago,” a song first recorded in 1936 by Shines’sfriend Robert Johnson. Shines was among that gen-eration which brought the Delta blues to the WindyCity, where the Midwestern urban environment trans-formed it into the hard amplified poetry of post-WarChicago blues. The second song we hear from Shines,“Kindhearted Woman,” was another Johnson standardwhich Muddy Waters, who arrived in Chicago a coupleof years after Shines, recorded at the outset of his ca-reer in 1948.

A patient but proud man, Shines honored count-less requests for Johnson’s songs in the last twenty-five years of his life from young white admirers whoknew him best as “Robert Johnson’s traveling com-panion.” Certainly the time Shines spent with Johnsonin his twenties was formative, musically and person-ally. Yet there was too often an inclination to reduceShines to little more than a living reflection of the manmany considered the greatest recorded Deltabluesman. Shines, however, was more than a RobertJohnson knockoff.

John Ned Lee Shines, Jr. was born in Frayser, Ten-nessee and moved to Memphis when he was six. Helearned his first music from a guitar-playing brother,who showed him such Delta standards as “Rolling andTumbling.” At seventeen he had become adept enoughin both standard and Spanish (open G) tunings to stealthe thunder of Howlin’ Wolf at a country dance. Dur-ing Wolf’s break Shines commandeered his guitar:“When Wolf came back I had the joint rocking,” hetold Pete Welding (Living Blues # 22). It was the be-ginning of a rivalry which lasted several years in theDelta and which earned Shines the nickname LittleWolf.

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“I’ve pretty well always kept me a day job,” Shinesrecalled, and it was as cattle driver at a Memphis pack-ing house that he earned enough money to buy hisfirst guitar: “A little black Regal guitar...it cost $6 andsomething.” He then began to scrutinize many of Mem-phis’ best bluesmen: “To learn from these fellows youhad to watch and listen,” Shines told Welding. “After Ihad got the guitar I would say it took me about eightmonths before I was ready for hire.” Returning to Ar-kansas, scene of his encounter with Howlin' Wolf, “Iwent as a professional,” Shines proudly recalled. Andit was with that assurance that he met Robert Johnsonin Helena, Arkansas in 1934 or 1935.

“I couldn’t handle a slide like he could and therewere lots of things he did I was trying to learn,” Shinesrecalled. Though Johnson was “kind of long-armed,”he tolerated Shines’ interest and eventually took himas a traveling companion. They entertained on farmsand city streets, traveling from the Delta as far northas Windsor, Ontario. Johnson would sometimes leaveShines without word, only to reappear months later.Shines absorbed a great deal of Johnson’s repertoireand brought it with him to Chicago in 1941.

The flood of migrants from the Delta to Chicagomeant that Shines would eventually meet many oldfriends from home, including Robert Jr. Lockwood,David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, the second guitarist on“Love of Mine,” and Walter ‘Shakey’ Horton, whoShines first met in 1930. “Harp playing seems to be abirthmark with Walter,” Shines told Welding. “That’sone of the reasons Walter’s so hard to beat. It’s some-thing he was born to do...”

In 1946, Lester Melrose recorded Shines for Co-lumbia, but the four sides weren’t issued for decades.Meanwhile, Shines fronted a sextet called the Dukesof Swing, which used Lionel Hampton’s “Flying Home”as a theme. Shines enjoyed jazz, but it was strictlyblues when he made his sole appearance on Chess inOctober 1950 as ‘Shoe Shine Johnny’ in the company

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of Little Walter and Jimmy Rogers. Two years later,his recordings for the small JOB label included one ofthe songs he plays in this video, “Ramblin’.” “Some ofthe songs I do now I wrote a long time ago,” Shinestold Welding. “Like this song ‘Ramblin’.’ That’s some-thing I created when I first began to play with the slide.I met this fellow Eli Green—I had already met Rob-ert—and he played a tune almost like that. The peopleseemed to like it so well 'till I begin to put my wordsbetween his music and Robert’s music.” While“Ramblin'” is indebted to Johnson’s 1936 recordingof “Walking Blues,” that too, can be traced to SonHouse’s 1930 version. The blues evolved as an ongo-ing, impassioned dialogue.

Around 1958, however, Johnny Shines simply quittalking. Embittered over his lack of success, he hockedhis equipment and vowed never to play again. It wasnot to be: his JOB recordings had become coveted byinternational blues collectors, two of whom arrived athis door from England in 1965 and arranged for himto record with his old friend Walter Horton for the Van-guard album. Chicago: The Blues Today! It marked thebeginning of a comeback which took Shines to Eu-rope in the company of Willie Dixon’s Chicago All Starsand produced some wonderful recordings (“I Don’tKnow” was one of Shines’ later originals which he con-sidered among his best work) by a man who main-tained a rueful attitude towards the blues business evenas he loved the music. Speaking of his acoustic GibsonB-25, Shines told Jas Obrecht: “I bought a home andfed eleven people and clothed them, just out of thatlittle round hole there. That means a lot to me, thatguitar does.”

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Bukka White(1909-1977)

James Joyce wouldhave loved BukkaWhite. Both the Irishnovelist and the Afri-c a n - A m e r i c a nbluesman were mastersof the stream-of-con-sciousness narrative.Three rarely-seen ex-amples of Bukka’sunique artistry gracethis video. Bukka testshis prowess as ser-enader against the re-solve of his Catherine in“I ’m Going Sett le

Down” (“I always heard the people say that you couldplay somebody back if they was in love with you,” hegrowls.) “Old Lady” is wry reverse ageism, while“Freight Train Blues” details the lure the rails held forBukka, son of railroad fireman John White. “I got thetrains from him,” Bukka told Bruce Cook, “and I gotthe music from him, too.”

Booker T. Washington White was born in Houston,Mississippi in the hill country west of the Delta. Hisboyhood ambition, he once recalled, was to “come tobe a great man like Charley Patton,” who Bukka cred-ited with introducing him to both blues and booze. Itwas his father, however, himself a guitarist, who gaveBukka his first guitar for his ninth birthday. The guitarand the girls at the country dances gave him ideas,and by his early teens Bukka had embarked on thehoboing life-style he sings about in “Freight TrainBlues.” He rode the freights to St. Louis, where, Bukkarecalled, “I put my boots on” as a blues singer. Ironi-cally, his first record release in 1930 was labeled asthe work of Washington White, ‘The Singing

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Preacher.’“I Am in the Heavenly Way” and “PromiseTrue and Grand” are the sole sacred works amongBukka’s remarkable body of pre-war blues.

Nicknamed ‘Barrelhouse’ in his youth, Bukkahoboed as far north as Buffalo, New York, but alwayscame back to the Delta. “I couldn’t get the Delta outof my mind,” he told Margaret McKee and FredChisenhall (Beale Street Black & Blue: Life and Musicon Black America’s Main Street). “There was moremoney in the Delta than was in Chicago for me...I wasjust around there with them old musicians and we’dhave a ball.” But violence skirmishes were as much apart of Delta life as the fish fries and country frolicsBukka loved. A shooting incident sent him toParchman Farm, where John A. Lomax recorded himfor the Library of Congress in 1939. After his releaseBukka went to Chicago in March 1940 for what wouldbe his most memorable recording session. Spurred byproducer Lester Melrose’s demand for original mate-rial, Bukka unleashed a startlingly original torrent ofautobiographical songs about prison, women, depres-sion, trains and death. “Fixin’ to Die Blues” would beconstrued as a deathbed confessional by romanticblues enthusiasts twenty years later, while “AberdeenMississippi Blues” would lead to White’s rediscovery.For all the poetic power of Bukka’s fourteen 1940sides, they were little noticed when released. His 1937recording, “Shake ‘Em On Down,” was his sole hit,selling over 16,000 copies and inspiring the likes ofBig Bill Broonzy to cover it.

If his best work caused no commercial stir, Bukkadidn’t much mind. “In the 1940s I played my musiceverywhere,” Bukka told McKee and Chisenhall. Whenhe tired of hoboing his way through the jukejoint cir-cuit Bukka would, in his words, ‘play the girls.’ “I neverdid want to live off no lady,” he said, “but it was kindatime for me to take some rest, you know.”

When not resting, Bukka often played blues onBeale Street with such old-time Memphis blues veter-

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ans as Gus Cannon and Frank Stokes. A skinny cousinnamed Riley King arrived in Memphis after World WarII and roomed for awhile with Bukka. “Booker was theonly one of us that ever went into show business,”B.B. King recalled years later. “He had a steel bar hewould put on his finger, and the sound he’d get fromthe strings with it would go all through me. I nevercould do that, but I learned to trill my hand...” By thetime B.B. was enjoying his first hits in 1951, Bukkahad quit hoboing and was little known beyond hisMemphis neighborhood.

That started to change when Samuel Charterspraised Bukka in his influential 1959 book, The Coun-try Blues. “He had a heavy, dark voice,” wrote Char-ters, who compared Bukka to Charley Patton. “Fixin’to Die Blues” was reissued on the Lp, also entitledThe Country Blues, which complemented Charters’book, and began to be covered by the likes of BobDylan. In 1963 blues enthusiast John Fahey addresseda letter to ‘Bukka White, Old Blues Singer, c/o Gen-eral Delivery, Aberdeen, Miss.’ It was a shot in the darkthat found its target: a relative of Bukka’s worked atthe Aberdeen post office and forwarded the letter toBukka in Memphis. Bukka’s cordial reply led to hisTakoma label ‘rediscovery’ debut, Mississippi Blues,and in short order to appearances at folk festivals hereand abroad (he even sang at the 1968 Olympic Gamesin Mexico City).

Big and bluff, Bukka cut an impressive figure wher-ever he performed with his ringing National guitar andgrowly vocals. He was, among other things, an ex-boxer who walloped his guitar while spinning what hecalled ‘sky songs,’ extemporaneous poetry aboutwhatever happened to be on Bukka’s mind. Bukkaclearly relished his role as living legend: “I did betterthan I ever did in my life,” he said of his rediscoverysuccess. “He was sure enough of himself as an artist,”Charters wrote of the rediscovered Bukka, “that inmore than 30 years his style changed as little as the

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stones scattered along the banks of the Yazoo River.”Yet within the constancy of Bukka’s music was a re-freshing lyrical immediacy, a reflection of an artist whowasn’t merely recreating a fabled past but who wasactively creating in the moment. He never lost theeager spark of the kid who ran away from the mulesof Mississippi for the nightlife of St. Louis. “I was likea game rooster,” Bukka said of his young self, “andI’d jump up for any big kind of congregation and domy thing. I wasn’t ashamed or nothing.”

John Lee Hooker(ca. 1920- )

It is the mark of a savvy entertainer to sense whatan audience wants and then deliver. By that standardJohn Lee Hooker has been a show biz genius for nearlya half century now, delivering the primal groove of“Boogie Chillen” to African-American audiences in1948, ‘folk-blues’ to the coffeehouse circuit in the1960s, ‘endless boogie’ to 1970s party animals, andGrammy winning duets with blues-influenced rockersto the world in the 1980s-1990s. By any measure hishas been a remarkable career; by comparison with

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other downhome Delta bluesmen, it is completely un-paralleled.

Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Hooker learned hisidiosyncratic guitar style from his stepfather, WillMoore. “The style I’m playing now, that’s what he wasplaying,” Hooker told Jim and Amy O’Neal (LivingBlues, Autumn 1979). “I’m doin’ it identical to his style.And nobody else plays that style.” Having absorbed afew additional pointers by observing the likes of TonyHollins and Tommy McClennan, Hooker made his wayto Memphis when he was about fifteen. Three yearslater he passed through Cincinnati (“I stayed thereabout three years,” he recalled) before settling in De-troit in 1943.

It was at a Detroit house party that record storeowner Elmer Barber heard Hooker and was sufficientlyimpressed to alert Sensation label owner BernieBesman to this new talent. Hooker, who recalledBesman and Barber as “this Jewish guy and this blackcat,” made his first recordings in 1948. “BoogieChillen,” which Besman placed with the Los Angeles-based Modern label, was a phenomenal debut: “The

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thing caught afire,” Hooker told the O’Neals. “It wasringing all across the country.” B.B. King well recallsit popularity and impact on other bluesmen: “Hardlyanybody around at the time didn’t play ‘BoogieChillen.”’

The next few years often found Hooker in the R&Bcharts with such hits as “I’m In the Mood” and “Crawl-ing Kingsnake.” By the mid-Fifties, however, the R&Bcharts were rarely touched by solo bluesmen likeHooker. His recordings still sold respectably, but it wasa savvy move into the ‘folk-blues’ circuit in the early1960s which gave Hooker’s career a welcome resur-gence.

Hooker’s performances here from 1970 are fromthe year in which his collaboration with Canned Heatwould propel him into yet another phase of his career.Before the ‘endless boogie,’ however, he deliveredthese smoldering solo performances of “I’ll Never GetOut of These Blues Alive,” a title first waxed forBluesway in 1966, and “It Serves Me Right to Suffer,”a sentiment Hooker first expressed for Vee Jay in 1964.Percussive of notes spray from Hooker’s guitar be-tween the near silences (the feet are always there asrhythm section) and the somber confessions: “Mydoctor wrote me out a prescription for milk, creamand alcohol.” Ry Cooder once extolled this perfor-mance at length to Jas Obrecht (Blues Revue Quar-terly, No. 9). “The thing is this little Super 8 film some-body in Seattle did with him in the Sixties, where hesings ‘Serves Me Right to Suffer,”’ said Cooder. “He’sin a trance the whole time...I mean, this guy’s got norapid eye movement at all. He’s just into it, and it’s sodeep. And it’s the best performance I’ve ever heardfrom him...It’s all done in this no mind condition. Andhe plays and he sings, the unbroken thread which iswhere his music is at. You watch his hands...His thumbbends way back...Hooker has hyper-extendedjoints...Pads shaped like frogs...Rhythmic tension inhis feet. Now you tell me that isn’t hip.”

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Son H

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Recording InformationThe footage presented in this video is some

of the rarest material we have ever discovered.The per formances by Johnny Shines, 1970(SWEET HOME CHICAGO, KINDHEARTEDWOMAN and I DON'T KNOW), John LeeHooker,1970 (I'LL NEVER GET OUT OF THESEBLUES ALIVE and IT SERVES ME RIGHT TO SUF-FER) and Son House, 1968 (EMPIRE STATE EX-PRESS and LEVEE CAMP MOAN) come from out-takes from sessions recorded at the University OfWashington. These were not known to exist butStefan Grossman had a feeling that more footagefrom the original sessions recorded between 1968-1972 should be in storage somewhere at the Uni-versity. Between the years of 1993 and 1994 withthe great help of University Of Washington ar-chivist Laurel Sercombe, the material was dis-covered in long forgotten boxes and rusty filmcans in a dusty corner at the EthnomusicologyArchive offices.

Son House performing I HAD THE BLUESTHIS MORNING and TALK ABOUT THE BLUESwere recorded in England in 1970 by Pat Gavin.The closing number, DON'T MIND PEOPLE GRIN-NING IN YOUR FACE, was recorded by the BBCin 1972 but never transmitted.

Gene Rosenthal recorded Johnny Shines,Honeyboy Edwards and Walter Horton in 1969in Chicago, Illinois at the Thunderbird Motel. Thetitles LOVE OF MINE, GOING TO ALGIERS,RAMBLIN' and TELL ME HOW YOU WANT YOURROLLING DONE are from these sessions. Thismaterial has never before been available on video.

The titles by Bukka White come from a filmcirca 1970 from Memphis, Tennessee.

Son

Hou

seJo

hn

ny

Sh

ines

1. SON HOUSE

Talk About The Blues2. JOHNNY SHINES

Sweet Home Chicago3. JOHNNY SHINES

Kindhearted Woman4. BUKKA WHITE

I'm Going Settle Down5. JOHN LEE HOOKER

I'll Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive6. SON HOUSE

I Had The Blues This Morning7. SHINES/EDWARDS/HORTON

Love Of Mine8. BUKKA WHITE

Old Lady

9. JOHNNY SHINES

Going To Algiers10. JOHNNY SHINES

Tell Me How You Want Your Rolling Done

11. JOHN LEE HOOKER

It Serves Me Right To Suffer12. SON HOUSE

Empire State Express13. SON HOUSE

Levee Camp Moan14. JOHNNY SHINES

I Don't Know15. BUKKA WHITE

Freight Train Blues16. JOHNNY SHINES

Ramblin'17. SON HOUSE

Don't Mind People Grinning In Your Face

The Mississippi Delta is the source of America's deep and pervasive bluestradition. At a time when that tradition appeared in danger of disappearing, manyof its most elemental practitioners reappeared to remind us of the bruising forceof this music's headwaters. They were living legends who demonstrated strongbonds with legends passed. This is music which has mesmerized everyone from ayoung Muddy Waters to today's blues-based rockers. Its earthy vitality remainsfresh in rare performances rife with slide guitars, driving rhythms and songs assearing as a hellhound's bay across the Delta darkness.

ISBN: 1-884691-35-8

0 1167 -13038 -3 3

Running Time: 62 minutes • B/W and ColorFront Photo: Bukka White by Stephen LaVere

Back photos: Johnny Shines & Son House by Tom CopiDuplicated in SP Mode/Real Time Duplication

Nationally distributed by Rounder Records,One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140

Representation to Music Stores by Mel Bay Publications® 1995 Vestapol Productions / A division of

Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop Inc.

VESTAPOL 13038