UNHEARD MUSIC BY
LEGENDARY “FATHER OF DELTA BLUES”
SON HOUSE DISCOVERED,
AWAITS MARCH 18, 2022 RELEASE ON EASY EYE SOUND
Forever on My Mind was recorded in the
fall of 1964
(ahead of 1965
“rediscovery” album) and never released.
Features
first-time-on-record title track “Forever On My Mind,”
plus never-heard
recordings of “Death Letter” and “Preachin’ Blues”
NASHVILLE,
Tenn. — On the evening of June 23, 1964, a red Volkswagen Beetle bearing
three blues enthusiasts arrived in Rochester, N.Y. The young men were following
a trail of clues in their search of a legend, and they found him sitting on the
steps of an apartment building at 61 Greig Street.
“This
is him,” Son House said.
Born
Eddie James House, Jr. in Lyon, Mississippi in 1902, Son House at that time had
not played music for more than two decades. But the re-release of his early
work — commercial 78s issued by Paramount Records in 1930 and two field
recordings by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1941-42 — by Origin
Jazz Library and Folkways Records had excited fresh interest in a growing
community of blues aficionados.
Within
months of his rediscovery by Dick Waterman (who became House’s manager and
handler), Nick Perls and Phil Spiro, the once-obscure 62-year-old musician was
thrust into the public eye by a story in Newsweek magazine and a series
of performances at folk music festivals and college campuses around the
country.
Forever
on My Mind,
the new album of previously unreleased Son House recordings from Easy Eye
Sound, the independent label operated by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, is the
premiere release from Waterman’s personal cache of ’60s recordings by some of
the titans of Delta blues. His collection of quarter-inch tapes — which are
being restored to remarkable clarity by Easy Eye Sound — have gone unreleased until
now. The collection is due out March 18, 2022.
Waterman
says, “I always knew that I wanted this body of tape that I had to come out
together, as The Avalon Collection or The Waterman Tapes, as sort
of my legacy. They were just here at my home, on a shelf. I had made a few
entrees to record companies, but nothing had really come through. I thought
that Dan Auerbach would treat the material with reverence and respect.”
Auerbach
says, “Easy Eye Sound makes blues records, and not many people make blues records
anymore. This record continues where we started off, with our artists Leo Bud
Welch and Jimmy ‘Duck’ Holmes and Robert Finley. It also is part of my history
— some of the first blues music I heard was Son House. I was raised on his
Columbia LP, Father of Folk Blues. My dad had that album and would play
it in the house when I was a kid, so I know all those songs by heart.”
Forever
on My Mind
is the earliest issued full-length House solo performance recorded after his
rediscovery, at an appearance captured on November 23, 1964 at Wabash College,
a small men’s school in Crawfordsville, Indiana. In terms of power and
intensity, it rivals, and in some cases surpasses, the Columbia album, cut five
months later in a New York City studio. It also reflects a sharp musical focus
that diminished in House’s later concert appearances and recordings.
“As
he toured in ’65 and ’66 and ’67,” Waterman notes, “he developed stories — they
were self-deprecating stories, with humor and things like that. So, he became
sort of an entertainer. But these first shows in ’64 were the plain, naked, raw
Son House. This was just the man and his performance. He didn’t have any
stories or anything to go with it.”
In
the wake of his rediscovery in Rochester, House — who had labored as a foundry
worker, railroad porter and cook, among other jobs, after moving from
Mississippi to New York in 1943 — decided to make a return to music at the
urging of his enthusiastic young fans. Waterman explains, “He had been living
in a [retirement] home with his wife, and they weren’t doing anything but
living on Social Security. So, it was the opportunity to make some money that
put us out on tour.”
House
was outfitted with a new steel-bodied National resonator guitar, the instrument
he had played on his early recordings, and Al Wilson, later famous as the
guitarist and singer of the Los Angeles blues-rock band Canned Heat, gave the
sexagenarian musician a refresher course in his own music.
“Son
and Al would play knee to knee with the guitar,” Waterman says. “Al would say,
‘This is what you called “My Black Mama” in 1930,’ and would play it for him.
And then he would say, ‘This is what you called “My Black Woman” for Lomax 12
years later,’ and he would play that, and Son would play along with him until the
two of them were really rollicking along. And Son would say, ‘I got my
recollection now, I got my recollection now.’”
House,
who to date had only performed before Black audiences in Southern juke houses,
would now be introduced to a young and entirely new group of listeners.
Waterman says, “He hadn’t played in front of white people at all.”
After
some initial appearances that summer at the Unicorn coffeehouse in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, then a center of the American folk music renaissance of the ’60s,
and an August 1964 set at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, House and Waterman
set off on a modest tour of Midwestern campuses in November in the manager’s
new Ford Mustang.
The
manager recalls, “I wrote letters to [university] student activities committees,
one after the other after the other. So we went out, and the first date, I
remember, was at Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and then Wabash was one of
the first ones after that.”
The
college engagements included Oberlin College in Ohio, Shimer College in Mt.
Carroll, Illinois, and the University of Chicago, where local blues fan Norman
Dayron recorded at least part of the November 21, 1964, show; a single track
later surfaced on the 1980 Takoma Records LP Rare Blues. But the Wabash
College appearance two days later was caught on tape in full.
“Wabash
did the taping, and then they later gave me the reel-to-reel tape,” Waterman
remembers. “The show was held in kind of an assembly hall. There were a few
dozen [in the audience] — there may have been up to 50 people, something like
that. They were quiet and polite during the performance … There were no
barriers, there were no filters between him and the audience. He was just
giving them the plain, unvarnished Delta material, as he knew it and as he sang
it.”
Five
of the eight songs heard on Forever on My Mind were later released in
studio versions on House’s Columbia LP. Another two songs that he played at
Wabash College, renditions of his Delta contemporary Charley Patton’s “Pony
Blues” and the gospel blues standard “Motherless Children,” were recorded by
the label but went unreleased until 1992.
The
eighth number heard on the Easy Eye Sound release, the titular “Forever on My
Mind,” was never attempted in a recording studio, but it would be essayed from
time to time in House’s concert performances; there is film footage of him
playing it at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival. On the present album, the song,
which contains snatches of his friend Willie Brown’s classic “Future Blues” and
his own “Louise McGhee,” serves as a living lesson in the improvisatory Delta
blues tradition.
“There
are certain songs that he would play, go into an open G tuning,” Waterman says,
“and just play things in a certain meter. And some of these songs borrowed
verses from each other.”
House’s
1964-65 live appearances and his Columbia album placed him in the pantheon of
such other great, recently rediscovered Delta blues musicians as Skip James,
Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, and Rev. Robert Wilkins. Forever on My
Mind now re-introduces House at the height of his renewed powers in an
essential, previously unheard document of unique force and sonic clarity.
Says
Auerbach, “He sounds like he’s in a trance, and his singing is so nuanced here. He’s very playful with
his phrasing, just right on the money with his singing and playing. It sounds
so right to me — top form Son House.”
“The
late-’64 stuff is as good as it’s going to get,” Waterman says. “I have great
love and great respect for Mr. House, and I hope that this legacy stands up,
for all that he meant to me and all that he meant to the music.”
For
more information on House and his music, see Preachin’ the Blues: The Life
and Times of Son House by Daniel Beaumont (Oxford University Press).
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