House served only two years.Īfter his release, House recorded nine sides for Paramount Records, eight of which were released commercially and zero of which sold well enough to warrant further sessions. House fired back and killed his attacker, earning him a 15-year prison sentence at Parchman Farm (where Bukka White and many other bluesmen did time). His secular career was briefly sidelined in the late 1920s, when a man fired a gun at him on stage. He combined that approach with an ecstatic vocal delivery that he’d honed at the pulpit. He shows that off throughout Forever On My Mind, especially on “Empire State Express”, where he mimics the rhythms and momentum of a runaway train the song moves so relentlessly that it sounds like he’s shovelling coal into an engine, not strumming a guitar. When House left that calling, he became fascinated with blues music, especially the slide guitar players he saw in Mississippi, and he quickly developed his own style, mixing slurred, staggering bottleneck riffs with frantic picking. All that hollerin’ and Bible-thumpin’ proves more taxing than expected, and it’s not long before he’s putting that church behind him. But he finds himself too worldly, too profane, too drunk to command a congregation. Singing from experience, House deadpans every punchline: “I wanna be a Baptist preacher, so I don’t have to work,” he explains, equating the clergy with snake oil salesmen. The experience probably inspired “Preachin’ Blues”, an old song he dusted off for Forever On My Mind. He started preaching when he was 15, but his drinking and carousing eventually drove him from that profession. Born in 1902 deep in the Mississippi Delta, but raised further south in New Orleans, House was more interested in the Church than the juke joint – although not by much. Oddly enough, his original calling was the Gospels. House is a crucial figure in rural acoustic blues, a student of Blind Lemon Jefferson, who passed those lessons down to Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Because he never played anything the same way twice, this sounds like an album of all-new material, one that adds a revealing chapter to his eventful life. Most of all it highlights his ability to inhabit a song fully, whether it’s humorous (a profane “Preachin’ Blues”) or grave (a devastating “Levee Camp Moan”) or tender ( “The Way Mother Did”). Forever On My Mind catches the artist at the peak of his abilities, delivering eight songs – including one, the title track, that he never recorded elsewhere – that showcase his emotive vocals and his dexterous and emphatic bottleneck style of guitar playing. It’s as moving a performance as House ever set to tape. While the popular version is urgent and anguished, this newly unearthed “Death Letter” is understated, subdued, but haunting in its own way as House contemplates the unfathomable finality of death: life stops for one person, but sorrow continues for those left behind. Perhaps it’s a different person on the cooling board, who demands a different rhythm of grieving. House lingers in the moments: reading that letter, seeing the body at the morgue, watching the casket lowered into the ground, facing a lonely future until their reunion on Judgement Day. You know someone he loves is dead and gone. “Well, I got a letter this morning/How do you reckon it read?” he asks the listener, and you know exactly how it read, even if you’ve never heard the song before. He slows the song down and stretches it out. House recorded it in an intimate setting, with his manager Dick Waterman running the tape and with no plans for commercial release.
ORDER NOW: Paul McCartney is on the cover in the latest issue of UncutĬompare that to the new version of “Death Letter”, which appears on Forever On My Mind, an album of lost recordings assembled and produced by Dan Auerbach.The most popular version, which he recorded in the 1960s, is a fast version, with a nervy twitch in his guitar playing and an emotional urgency in his singing. He would invert the guitar riff, reorder the verses, change the lyrics, borrow from different sources, vary the tempo: sometimes fast and jumpy, sometimes slow and languorous. He sang it like he had to puzzle something out or find some dark secret at the song’s core, which made every performance sound slightly different.
It was a highlight of every setlist, and sometimes he’d run through it multiple times during a show, as though something within the song eluded him. When Son House returned to performing in the 1960s, he played “Death Letter” so often it became his signature tune.
0 kommentar(er)
