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Playing with partners Charley Patton and Willie Brown, he exerted a profound influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, both of whom copied his music and carried it to new generations. In many respects, he is the true father of . Sitting tall in a straight- back chair, he planted both feet on the ground and tapped time with his left foot. He set his propulsive rhythms in motion by waving his right arm up and down, almost like a symphony conductor, in an arc that typically traveled above the upper bout of his guitar. He held his right hand very loose, and he. He wore a metal slide on his left- hand ring finger, which he held at a 4. For certain high- note slides, such as those in the .
An extremely physical guitarist, House not only kept time with his left foot and swinging right arm, but his whole being . While the figures he played were often rudimentary, his performances were extraordinarily dynamic. Even more compelling than his guitar playing, Son House. Be it a window- rattling, impassioned plea like . For sheer strength of delivery, he was on a par with Bessie Smith, Blind Willie Johnson, and precious few others, and every note he sang was uniquely his own. Original and uncompromising, House.
Small wonder that as young plantation hands in the 1. Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters were mesmerized when they saw him perform. Waters, for one, gave credit where credit was due. When Muddy Waters made his initial recordings, in August 1. Library of Congress, his first selection, .
The song, Waters responded, . I learned it from Son House; that. I been knowing Son since . Whenever I heard he was gonna play somewhere, I followed after him and stayed watching him. I learned how to play with the bottleneck by watching him for about a year.
Showed me how to tune my guitar in three ways . Really, though, it was Son House who influenced me to play. I was really behind Son House all the way.
He had vivid childhood recollections of the hollers of solitary mule drivers echoing across cotton fields. His father, Eddie House, Sr., blew horn in a band with his seven brothers and knew a few songs on guitar. For many years after that, House preached the gospel and worked in cotton fields. Throughout his church- going days, House shunned guitar players. Just putting your hands on an old guitar, why, looked like that was a sin. So I eases up close enough to look and I see what he has on his finger. He fashioned a bottle neck into a slider and learned to match thumbed bass notes with treble slides.
The life and music of Son House, the Mississippi Delta bluesman who inspired Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson in the 1930s and was rediscovered in the 1960s. MIDI & Tablature collection of Fingerstyle Guitar. Music and Tablature from Steve McWillam, Mike Martin, and others. The 2016 Mississippi Blues Marathon has been selected as the RRCA Southern Championship Event, marking the sixth year that a Mississippi Blues event has served as a. For thirty years, volunteers of the Mississippi Valley Blues Society have been organizing and presenting the Mississippi Valley Blues Festival.
Mississippi Delta Blues Bar RIO DE JANEIRO Pedro Ernesto, 89 - Gamboa Ter
- Live blues on weekends TBA
- Lyrics to 'Coffee Blues' by Mississippi John Hurt. This is the 'Coffee Blues', I likes a certain brand / Maxwell's House, it's good till the last drop / Just.
- Tim Sparks has come up with an awesome arrangement of this Willie Brown classic. It's part of Tim's ROOTS RAGS & BLUES video instruction package, produced.
A few weeks later, Wilson backed House at his first juke appearance. House also admired James Mc. Coy, who taught him . He pleaded self- defense and was convicted of manslaughter, drawing 1. Parchman. A judge reviewing the case freed him two years later and warned him never to set foot in Clarksdale again. House hotfooted it to the small settlement of Lula, Mississippi. There, a friend introduced him to Charley Patton.
House had heard Patton. House settled in nearby Lake Cormorant and became drinking buddies with Patton. Teaming up, they performed at juke joints and picnics with another local bluesman, Willie Brown, who worked mostly as a sideman. Many times, House recalled, the trio would throw their guitars over their shoulders and walk four or five miles to a gig. Patton requested that House, Willie Brown, and pianist Louise Johnson come along. House recalled that at the time, all three guitarists were playing Stellas: . We used to get these catalogs .
Mine cost $1. 1, and so did Willie. Son recalled that Paramount used blinking lights to cue performers, and the studio.
House inaugurated his recording career with his mantra- like two- part masterpiece, . House then re- tuned his guitar to open D and followed with his two- part .
Pure juke, this version differs significantly from the one Robert Johnson recorded in 1. Willie Brown recorded .
On his return to Mississippi, Son House proudly displayed the $4. Patton died in 1. House and Brown continued to play together at juke joints on weekends. At one point, they reportedly added a trombonist and drummer to the lineup.
House was typically the featured singer, while Brown acted as . There they made many fine recordings of Son House with a hot country band featuring Willie Brown, Fiddlin. House paid tribute to Patton with .
House and Brown also collaborated on the haunting . Basic chord is open or E major position. With his superb vocals and sure- handed bottleneck, House was at the peak of his powers on these Library of Congress recordings.
His performance netted him a bottle of Coca- Cola. Around 1. 94. 3, House moved to Rochester, New York, and took a job as a rivet heater in the New York Central Railroad dispatch shop where boxcars were assembled. After the war he was promoted to porter and assigned the Empire State Express run to Chicago, a job he held for more than a decade. He stayed pals with Willie Brown, buying him a ticket to Rochester in the early 1. Mississippi in the fall of 1. When he received a telegram a few weeks later notifying him that Brown had died, House quit playing music. As he later explained to Sing Out!, .
After he died I just decided I wouldn. In June 1. 96. 4, after weeks of hard searching, young blues enthusiasts Dick Waterman, Phil Spiro, and Nick Perls learned in Mississippi that Son House was still alive. His son had once been married to Son House. So we found the son: . We knew he was alive in.
This is now twenty- something years later. Living in Rochester, New York. We talk, but they don. The neighbor went and got Son, and we spoke to him on Sunday, June 2.
And we were in Mississippi, and George Wallace was running for President under the motto of . A little wine eased the strain. First he began to recall snatches of songs, then little phrases, and finally whole songs with their complicated harmonies. The next day they taped his blues.
By the end of the week, record companies were actively competing for him, and this month. His first comeback appearance was actually at the Philadelphia Folk Festival about six weeks later in late August.
With Waterman working as his manager, House signed with Columbia Records. Recording executive John Hammond, father of the bluesman with the same name, produced House. Alan Wilson provided guitar support and showed the bluesmen how to play parts he. He later moved to L. A. Their necks would bow and break. He would throw his head back, and he didn’t give a flying hoot what anybody was thinking or doing. He simply was playing for the power of the music.
He shook because he was an old man, and he had an alcohol problem. He had to be rationed, and he would ask for his bottle a lot and talk about it. Performing alone, he often introduced songs with asides such as, .
It was just him playing guitar and singing, and it was so good. This slapback echo was coming back, and you could hear a pin drop.
Everybody was completely silent, and it was just amazing. I could just picture it being 1. Mississippi someplace.
It was hard to believe it was a bunch of hippie kids at a big outdoor festival listening to him. It seemed like he played so slow, but right in meter, and his voice was just so great. He sang with his wife too.
He said something about, . But boy, it was amazing seeing him. Fortunately, he was also filmed several times, and much of this footage is available on DVDs.
One of the best is the Masters of Country Blues. House is seen wailing on a metal- bodied guitar as intelligent close- ups reveal the techniques that fascinated young Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters: his high- slapping, open- handed rhythms, radically slanted ring- finger slide, and notes pulled pistol- like with the index finger. Son sings a capella gospel and introduces . Now, this is the truth .
And I was taught all the things. I know everything about the King James version of the bible: 3. Old Testament, 2.
New, which makes it 6. And 4. 50,0. 00 words, and I knew . Now, this is a thing that come from God. Them two fellows, they don. The devil believes in one way, and God believes in a different way.
Now, you got to separate them two guys. You got to follow one or the other. You got to turn one of them loose.
Which side do you think is the best? Well, I already was regenerated and born again. I was born in sin, now I got to regenerate myself to realize what a great creator is. He moved in with his family in Detroit, and for a long while had an apartment in Highland Park. On October 1. 9, 1. Mississippi Delta blues singers died in his sleep at Detroit.
He was laid out at the Mayfield Baptist Church and buried in Mt. Son House was survived by his wife Evie, his daughters Beatrice and Sally, and two- dozen grandchildren and great- grandchildren. This article may not be reposted or reprinted without the author.