Customer Reviews

Original Delta Blues

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There is so much built on blues out there, so much derived from it, that it is easy to forget where it all began. Son House is so raw, so unaffected by technical tricks or crafty ideas, so far from any pose, pretence or stereotypical imagery of show business that you feel actually privileged to be allowed to come into contact with his singing.

It is like entering an empty temple in an unfamiliar country: you have seen some of the signs, you have some of the knowledge about the faith, but the experience is new and humbling.

Yes, humbling is the word. If loneliness had a voice, it would be the voice of Son House.

Well, maybe "sweet" isn't the right word, but Columbia/Legacy's "The Original Delta Blues" is a really fine distillation of the label's double-disc set "Father Of The Delta Blues", containing 11 highlights from that comprehensive overview of blues legend Eddie "Son" House's 60s recordings.

These 55 minutes of music feature Son House and his National steel guitar, which he played with a slide, and Columbia have managed to include all of House's essential 60s songs.

The powerful a capella spiritual "John The Revelator" is here, as is the slashing slide guitar workout "Pearline", the sarcastic "Preachin' Blues", the bitterness of "Grinnin' In Your Face", and the fantastic 9 1/2-minute "Levee Camp Moan" with Canned Heat's Alan Wilson playing great harmonica fills behind House's clanging, percussive guitar riffs.

And then there's the awesome, razor-edged "Death Letter" ("I got a letter this morning / say, what d'y'reckon it read? / Said hurry, hurry, the gal you love is dead").
Music journalist Ted Drozdowski of the Boston Phoenix once wrote something like this about House:
"The voice of the great Son House not only sounds as though it could split the earth asunder, it is also the voice of a soul utterly alone".

I couldn't have said it better myself. Which is why I steal Mr Drozdowski's line.

For me, this was one of those rare CD's that from the first play became an instant favorite. I had heard of Son House, of course, but had never heard him. I have played this CD about a hundred times since I bought it a month ago (my wife is about to have me put away...) It is absolutely incredible. I have never heard anything like Son House.

I have quite a few blues discs but this one, more than any other, really moved me. If I could only keep one, this would be it.

When you listen to this you feel like you have been transported to the Mississippi Delta. So many great songs and Death Letter gets it started perfectly. Everytime I hear Louise Mcgee I can almost picture Son riding in a box car down a lonely railroad track in the dead of night with his guitar pining for Louise. That may sound corny but that just gives you an idea of how powerful these songs are. John the Revelator, Levee Camp Moan, Sundown, Pony Blues are also great. Hell, there all great. If you are just getting into the blues, specifically the delta blues you have to have this. This and Robert Johnsons King of the Delta Blues Singers vol.1 & 2(I say these volumes because I think the sound quality is superior on these two as compared to the set)is mandatory.

The more I study the forces that bound together the deeply American, and beautifully unique cultures of African Americans since the Civil War, I find myself referring to the Blues more and more. Son House, despite this recording being made in the 1960's, was a master story teller of an earlier era for the Southern United States; one divided by a still-bitter southern aristocracy and a young culture of black Americans struggling to write their own poetry that would come to define what it is to be a free black American. Son House influenced greats like Robert Johnson, another great story-teller, and more popularly driven Muddy Waters and others. I, like so many others, love to listen to blues guitar, and House plays one of the meanest, dirtiest, most hauntingly beautiful slide guitars ever recorded. However, listen to the man, and the story he is telling all of us with each sentence of every song. THIS is culture. THIS is history. THIS is the Blues. Accept no substitutes....you might just learn a thing or two.

When the Mississippi blues giant, Eddie 'Son' House was rediscovered in 1964 he was 62 years old and had given up music some 16 years previously. Practice soon restored much of his original mastery and he was signed up the following year by John Hammond for a Columbia Records session. The LP that emerged comprised the first nine of these tracks, and represented a powerful come-back, with stand-out numbers 'Death Letter', 'Empire State Express', and 'Levee Camp Moan', as well as the unaccompanied 'John The Revelator'.

In 1992 a double CD was released, with the original nine tracks supplemented by an additional seven unreleased titles as well as five alternate takes. But what should have been an occasion for celebration turned out to be disappointing in the extreme. The new material was a pale shadow of that previously issued, and many critics thought it would have been better left in the vaults.

The present single CD includes just five of the originally unreleased titles, and so offers some kind of compromise, with the worst of the 'new' material being omitted. Of that retained, perhaps 'Pony Blues' disappoints the most. The delivery is extremely hesitant and stumbling, in direct contrast to Son's superb 1942 recording of this classic that he learned from his old friend Charley Patton. 'Motherless Children' suffers in the same way, and Son coughs and wheezes his way through a depressing version of 'Downhearted Blues'. Only 'President Kennedy', to the same melody as his 1942 'American Defense', and 'Yonder Comes My Mother' with, presumably, the added guitar of Al Wilson, in any way compare with the quality and power of the first nine tracks which more than justify the purchase of this mid-price CD.

Son House taught Robert Johnson the slide blues. Son House taught Muddy Waters. When Son House started performing at Blues festivals again in the mid 1960s, Muddy Waters would tell all his band members to be quiet and pay attention when the man played because even compared with Muddy, this was the real deal.
Son House is the real deal. Listen and learn

This was part of Columbia/Legacy's endless recycling of their back catalog. Actually, it's pretty slick marketing (before the so-called "year of the blues," no less) to bring together pithy one disc collections of the best known blues musicians on their roster and then put them out for a bargain price. Son House was one of the most famous of the original bluesmen, the one who had a young Robert Johnson sitting at his feet to learn from the best.

Young white scholars and musicians like John Fahey traveled through the south in the early 1960's searching for the music of the pre-war blues and the men and women that made it and one of the musicians that they helped to prominence on the folk blues circuit was Son House. House hadn't recorded for more than 25 years when this music was committed to tape in 1965, but you would hardly know it. Of all the "rediscovered" musicians, Son House was the one who kept the most passion of his earlier music, whether it be the a capella of "Grinnin' in Your Face" or "John the Revelator" or the intense slide guitar of "Death Letter" and his own epic "Preachin' the Blues."

While these may be a touch behind the epochal recordings House made in the 30's and 40's, they have their own special magic. It's ironic that although Johnson gets all the print, his mentor has had the last laugh with one of those rare "second acts" in American music.

If you wanna' know where it started, if you wanna' learn to play slide, if you wanna' get chills and fee like you're on a front porch in the delta, get this one...

That Charles Aubrey review has gotta be a joke! But then again, he also had the gall to give this fantastic CD a 2, so it makes me think he's just seriously off. Since Son House began recording in the 1930's, some 12-15+ years before Page & Plant were born, maybe he could have figured out that those Zeppelin guys are the most well-known plagiarists???

That Aubrey dude should think as carefully as he listens