Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  —Martin Scorsese

  SON HOUSE: SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

  Son House killed a man at a party on a Saturday night.

  That’s the way the story goes, anyway. It was at a gathering in Lyon, Mississippi, in 1928. House had learned how to play the guitar only a few months before but had already landed a couple of gigs performing at juke joints. House’s primary audience of black laborers, after hard, hot days in the field working for white landowners, needed to release some tension, had to cut loose, and the Saturday night parties could get dangerous. On this particular Saturday night at this particular juke joint, a man opened fire. History hasn’t recorded the man’s name, and we don’t know why he started firing or even at whom he was aiming. But it’s said that House was hit in the leg. That’s when he returned fire, killing the man.

  Son House—whose given name was Eddie James House Jr.—is said to have pleaded self-defense but was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years at Parchman, a penal work farm. Parchman’s main purpose, from its founding in 1904 until reform came around in the 1970s, was not to rehabilitate its prisoners, or even to punish them—Parchman was a state-run seventeen-thousand-acre cotton farm, and it used its inmates to make money, which went directly into the coffers of the state legislature. The Parchman work farm, according to many accounts, was run like a pre-Civil War plantation, with prisoners substituting for slaves. Men who didn’t follow the rules were quickly introduced to Black Annie, a four-foot leather strap used to administer discipline. Luckily for House, a judge is said to have reviewed his case and freed him after less than two years—but with a warning that he never set foot in Clarksdale again.

  According to the records of the Mississippi State Penitentiary, only one inmate with the surname House was incarcerated during that period—an Ed House who was sentenced on September 8, 1930, in Clark County for manufacturing liquor, received by Parchman on September 16, 1930, and released on April 28, 1932. Is Ed House really Son House? Was Son House a killer or merely a bootlegger? Son House never liked to talk about his time on the penal farm and would brush off the subject when it came up. One thing is for certain: Son House’s murky, vaguely felonious past added to the mystery and shadowy allure of his art. It also helped set the biographical tone for all the bluesmen, rockers, and hip-hoppers who would come after him: This was music for people who wanted to break rules, not follow them.

  Son House grew up with religion; he was “churchified” as he put it. He was born in Mississippi, “a little past Riverton,” as he once said; his birth certificate lists the date as March 21, 1902, but he may have been born much earlier. He indicated to folklorist Dick Waterman, who managed House’s later career, that he was born in 1886. Waterman also says he has an application for social security that Son House filled out in 1943, in which House lists his birth year as 1894. Later in life, House may have adjusted his birth date so he wouldn’t be too old to work for the railroad.

  House attended Sabbath School at the Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church, but, when he was a youngster, religion didn’t touch him, at least not deeply. He’d see the old folks holler and “squall ‘round,” possessed by the spirit, but House didn’t feel it, and he didn’t want to fake it. So he began to pray—harder and harder, trying to feel what the others were feeling. One night he went out to an old alfalfa field, one that was full of snakes and weeds, and he fell down on his knees and reached out to God in supplication—and finally, feeling the spirit, he hollered out, “Yes, it is something to be got, too, ‘cause I got it now!”

  House, when he was just a teenager, strove hard to establish himself as a church man and a family man. He preached his first sermon at age fifteen, and became a pastor at age twenty. When he was in his early twenties, he married Carrie Martin, who was then in her early thirties. House’s mother, Maggie, and his father, Eddie James House Sr., separated when he was young and so, when he got to be “some size”—around twenty or twenty-one—he went to work. He gathered moss in Algiers, Louisiana, pulling the gray strands down from the trees (it was shipped out and used for mattresses). He also worked other jobs—raising horses with a friend, picking cotton in the fields, driving a plow. The wages were low: “Well, people kind of suffered a little during some of those years,” said House. “Suffered right smart.” Music helped people get by. House heard music all around him, the work songs of men in the cotton field, the hollers of mule drivers echoing across the fields at dusk, singing what House called “the old corn songs, old long-meter songs.” He also heard the blues—from guitar-picking street musicians and the like—but at first, at least, he didn’t like the sound. Said House, “I just figured that was one of the wrongest things in the world to be doing, you know. Wasn’t no other way you could get to heaven—not fooling with them things. Just putting your hands on an old guitar, looked like that was a sin. To me.” But the music kept calling. House’s father played in a band with his seven brothers, and although the elder House didn’t play the blues, his son was exposed to music close-up at an early age. “He played a bass horn,” House recalled about his father. “He had been a church man, but he had gotten out. Finally, he went back to church and laid it all down, quit drinking, and became a deacon. He went pretty straight from then on.”

  Son House finally got the idea to start playing music in the late 1920s. He had been living in Louisiana, but after only a few years of marriage, decided to walk away from it all and return to Clarksdale. A year later, in 1927, he had a streetside epiphany. As House told the story: “I saw a guy named Willie Wilson and another one named Rubin Lacy. All before then, I just hated to see a guy with a guitar. I was so churchy! I came along to a little place they call Mattson, a little below Clarksdale. It was on a Saturday, and these guys were sitting out front of a place, and they were playing. Well, I stopped, because the people were all crowded around. This boy, Willie Wilson, had a thing on his finger like a small medicine bottle and he was zinging it, you know. I said, ‘Jesus! Wonder what’s that he’s playing?’ I knew that guitars hadn’t usually been sounding like that. So I eases up close enough to look, and I see what he has on his finger. ‘Sounds good!’ I said. ‘Jesus! I like that!’ And from there, I got the idea and said, ‘I believe I want to play one of them things.’ “

  House paid $1.50 for “an old piece of guitar” with only five strings. Said House, “It was nearly all to pieces, but I didn’t know the difference.” Wilson helped House tape the guitar up, add the missing sixth string, and even showed him a few chords. House immediately set to work on developing what would become his famous slide guitar technique, slipping the neck of a bottle around his ring finger to slip along the strings. Said House, “I got me an old bottle. Cut my finger a couple of times trying to fix the thing like his, but finally I started zinging, too.” Even after the repairs, though, the guitar must not have sounded right to House’s ears. He thought back to when he was a church-choir leader and was singing “do-re-mi.” He tuned the guitar to sound like the choral church voices in his head, and in a few weeks he had taught himself a number that he had heard Willie Wilson play called “Hold Up Sally, Take Your Big Legs Offa Mine.” He must have been excited because the next time he saw Wilson, he played it for him.

  Son and Evie House relaxing at the Newport Folk Festival, 1964

  It was a Saturday night, and Wilson had an idea. “Come on and play with me tonight,” said Wilson.

  “I ain’t good enough for that,” said House.

  “Oh, yes, you is. You just play that. I’ll back you up.”

  So House launched his musical career with a repertoire of one song. Wilson left the area, but House kept practicing, focusing on improving his guitar playing and rhyming words. He realized he didn’t need to learn more songs by other people. Said House, “I can make my own songs.” He was interrupted in his musical exploits by his incarceration at Parchman, but soon after his release he set off for Jonestown, Mississippi, catching a ride to the
Lula train station. After his performances drew a crowd, a woman named Sara Knight invited him to perform on her cafe porch and also introduced him to Charley Patton. Patton was already well known in those parts—he had recorded a couple of 78s. House and Patton soon became drinking buddies and, after teaming up with another local bluesman, Willie Brown, a short, wrinkly faced brown-skinned man with watery eyes, the trio began to hit the juke joints around the region.

  They had some wild times, those three. They would sling their guitars over their shoulders and walk four or five miles to their next gig. Saturday night was money night: They’d line up three straight-back chairs right next to each other at a juke joint, and they’d play and play and go outside to cool off and let the sweat dry and come back in and play some more. Patton would do tricks with his guitar—spinning it round, strumming it behind his head, throwing it into the air and catching it again—and Brown sometimes would stomp his bare foot and slap his guitar to keep the beat. All three would take turns singing the verses to the songs, and with just a look they’d know when to change off. On record, blues songs are often around three minutes long, but at parties, House and his buddies would sometimes make tunes last nearly a half-hour. Listeners would dance to the music—slow-drag, two-step—they’d “lope all night long,” House said. The crowd was wild, crying out, “Say it again!” to lyrics that they liked, or shouting out, “Yes!” if they liked the way the music was going. You had to sing loud and you had to have a strong voice, if you wanted to be heard over the crowd. House and his friends would perform for three, four, five dollars, “no big money,” but good enough for that time. Sometimes Son would play birthday parties for two or three dollars and a slice of cake. Other times he’d perform until the whiskey was gone.

  House—his style nurtured at these very secular parties—transformed the blues into a spiritual experience. When he played, he sometimes seemed to fall into a trance—his head would rock, his eyes would roll back into his head, he’d strum the same chords over and over. He worked the slide like no one did before him, using it to give his guitar a voice of its own—a siren’s song of emotional turbulence, spiritual longing, and raw seuality. House’s singing employed a full range of vocal effects that would be much copied by the bluesmen, soul stars, and rock & rollers who would come after him: his thoughtful melisma, his spontaneous use of falsetto to emphasize certain lines, his growls and whoops and moans. House’s performances seemed inner-directed—as if he was playing for himself and not a crowd. Songs like “Dry Spell Blues” offer up a kind of intimate theater of suffering and endurance. His singing voice was also that of a man—not a minstrel currying favor, not a clown courting an audience, not a field hand trying to get in good with his boss. House’s bold, dark voice was that of a man expressing himself to the world—without compromise, and his aggressive guitar attack was a fitting complement. House’s best songs—the immortal “Death Letter Blues” and the aching “Pearline”—have an emotional force that has echoed through the decades and made them standard fare for artists to cover—even in the twenty-first century.

  House’s music had an impact on his contemporaries, as well. At some of the Saturday-night balls, House started noticing a young boy who would come around to watch. The boy—sometimes called Little Robert—played some harmonica, and he wasn’t bad as far as that goes, but he really wanted to play the guitar. His mother and stepfather didn’t like him hanging around the rough juke joint crowd, but every Saturday night Little Robert would slip out through a window and come to where House and his crew were playing. He’d sit right down on the floor and watch House and Brown and Patton, his eyes going from one to the other to the other. Whenever the fellas took a break to cool off, Little Robert would run up and fool around with their guitars. The sound he would make was far from sweet.

  “HELLHOUND ON MY TRAIL”

  By Robert Johnson

  I got to keep movin’

  I got to keep movin’

  Blues fallin’ down like hail

  Blues fallin’ down like hail.

  Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

  Blues fallin’ down like hail.

  Blues fallin’ down like hail.

  And the days keeps on worryin’ me

  There’s a hellhound on my trail

  Hellhound on my trail

  Hellhound on my trail.

  If today was Christmas Eve

  If today was Christmas Eve

  and tomorrow was Christmas Day

  If today was Christmas Eve

  and tomorrow was Christmas Day

  (Aw, wouldn’t we have a time baby)

  All I would need my little sweet rider just to pass the time away

  Uh huh to pass the time away.

  You sprinkled hot foot powder

  Mmmmm, around my door, all around my door

  You sprinkled hot foot powder all around your

  daddy’s door Mmmmmm mmmm mmmm

  It keep me with a ramblin’ mind, rider, every old place I go.

  Every old place I go.

  I can tell the wind is risin’

  The leaves tremblin’ on the trees

  Tremblin’ on the trees

  I can tell the wind is risin’

  Leaves tremblin’ on the trees

  ummm hmmm hmmm hmmm

  All I need my little sweet woman

  And to keep my company

  Mmm hmm hey hey hey

  My company

  “Why don’t y’all go in there and get that guitar away from that boy,” people would say. “He’s running people crazy with it.”

  So Son House would talk to Little Robert.

  “Don’t do that, Robert,” he’d say. “You drive the people nuts. You can’t play nothing. Why don’t you blow the harmonica for ‘em?”

  After a while, Little Robert disappeared for about a year. One Saturday night, Brown and House were playing a little place east of Robinsonville called Banks, Mississippi, when the boy—now a man—reappeared, swinging through the door with four or five harmonicas stuck in a broad belt around his waist and a guitar slung over his back.

  “Bill!” Son House said. “Look who’s coming in the door.”

  “Yeah, Little Robert.”

  “And he’s got a guitar,” said House.

  The two men laughed about it as the man made his way though the crowd and came up to them.

  “Well, boy, you still got a guitar, huh?” said House. “What do you do with that thing? You can’t do nothing with it.”

  The man replied, “Well, I’ll tell you what.”

  House said, “What?”

  “Let me have your seat a minute.”

  “You can hear richness and complexity in Robert Johnson’s music. He’s an incredible figure, and he always sparks my imagination. I can visualize what his life was like. He embodies that journey from the plantation to life on your own, which is the beginning of the blues.”—Cassandra Wilson

  “All right, and you better do something with it,” House said, and he winked at Brown.

  Little Robert proceeded to put on a performance that left House and Brown stunned. Little Robert—his full name was Robert Johnson—was finally showing his true genius. House would say later, “That boy could play more blues than [any] of us.”

  Johnson hung around for a week or so, and House gave him a “little instruction”—probably in slide guitar technique and the like, much as House had gotten some tips from Willie Wilson years before. House also gave Johnson some advice: He told him he was a little crazy when it came to women; and corn liquor and Saturday-night balls and women saying, “Daddy, play it again, Daddy” were a dangerous mix. Said House, “Don’t let it run you crazy. You liable to get killed.” Johnson laughed it off. Not long afterward, House heard some of Johnson’s records. The first one was “Terraplane Blues.” Son House thought, “Jesus, it was good.” Other songs would follow, and they would all become classics: “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” “Hellhound on My Trail,” “Love in Vain,�
�� “Come On in My Kitchen,” “From Four Until Late,” “32-20 Blues.” House thought Johnson was going places. But the trip turned out to be a short one. Said House, “The next word we heard was from his mother, who told us he was dead. We never did get the straight of it. We first heard that he got stabbed to death. Next, a woman poisoned him, and then we heard something else. Never did just get the straight of it.”

  After that, death followed Son House like a shadow. His pal Patton died in 1934 in Indianola, Mississippi, of a long-standing heart condition that probably wasn’t helped much by his itinerant ways and constant drinking. House moved to Rochester, New York, in 1943 and tried to settle down with his wife Evie. His friend Brown joined him in Rochester but eventually moved back down South and died in 1952. House got a letter from Brown’s girl about his passing—he died, she said, “of the effects of alcohol.” House, depressed and discouraged, and wondering if his lifestyle wasn’t to blame for all the tragedy around him, mostly gave up the blues after that but kept drinking. He worked odd jobs around Rochester a grill cook at a Howard Johnson, a porter on the New York Central Railroad, a veterinary assistant who shaved animals before surgery.

  Now, Son House had been discovered and rediscovered throughout his career. In 1930 Son was “discovered” by H.C. Speir, who hooked him up with Paramount; House traveled from the Delta to Grafton, Wisconsin, to record with his pals Brown and Patton, and was paid forty dollars for his trouble. In 1941, he was discovered working as a tractor driver by Alan Lomax, who recorded a series of House’s songs for the Library of Congress, including “Death Letter Blues”; House was given a cold Coca-Cola for his work. In 1964 three folklorists, Dick Waterman, Phil Spiro, and Nick Perls, drove from the Delta to Rochester and rediscovered House, just in time for the folk boom of the mid-1960s. Most people thought House—like the rest of the original Delta bluesmen—was dead. He hadn’t played a guitar in five years and his hands had a senile tremor, but he could still sing. In 1965 House’s comeback was underway and he recorded for Columbia. But bluesmen are not objects to be lost and then found. Having vast talent, and having it go unrecognized, takes a toll. One winter morning in 1966, House was found by a Rochester snow-plowing crew—numb, drunk, and almost lifeless in a pile of snow. In 1976 he moved to Detroit; he died in obscurity in 1988. He might have been 86 years old or he might have been 94 or he might have been 102.