BLIND WILLIE'S ORIGINAL GRAVESTONE

I'm delighted to learn, thanks to Mr. Jim Stagg, bass guitarist of the rather good band Cooper Black, that Blind Willie's original gravestone is back in McDuffie County - if not in Happy Valley then at least in Thomson GA - in very good condition and in the care of the Thomson Museum, as you see here (c/o Jim's wife, whose name I'm sorry I don't know):

As you will know, he wasn't called Eddie - that was the name of the cousin who commissioned the stone - and he wasn't born in 1898 but in 1903, quite probably on May 5th.

Eubie Blake died 30 years ago today, claiming to be 100. Not quite. But he could make any number of other claims. Here he is at a genuine 93 years of age and glorious:

DEATH OF IDA COX, 45 YEARS AGO TODAY

Ida Cox, born 1896, was one of the "classic" pre-war blues singers, and one whose records Blind Willie McTell attended to. She died this day in 1967. Here's her 'Graveyard Dream Blues' from 1923:

CURLEY WEAVER 50 YEARS DEAD

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Blind Willie's friend and musical partner Curley James Weaver. Here's a favourite performance of mine, by the two of them, recorded for Regal Records in May 1950:

JOHN EDWARDS, FRIEND OF THE BLUES

Three days ago, John Edwards would have turned 80. He only made it to 28, yet without him we might never have heard the invaluable test pressings of the 1933 recordings by Blind Willie McTell, Curley Weaver and Buddy Moss (recorded the year after Edwards was born). Here's the story:

John Edwards grew up to be an Australian amateur botanist, map maker, hiker, banjo-player, guitarist and collector of early American folk and hillbilly music. Born July 22, 1932, he died in a car crash on Christmas Eve twenty-eight years later, but his will left his collections of records and his papers for the “furtherance of serious study, recognition, appreciation and preservation of genuine Country or Hillbilly music...” Did he intend that to cover the country blues? I hope so.

A major country-music record collector from Los Angeles, Gene Earle, with whom Edwards had long been in correspondence, was his executor, and he got together with several of the key academic folklorists with whom Edwards had also corresponded, to make all this happen. The John Edwards Memorial Foundation, the JEMF, duly incorporated in 1962 “to promote the study and dissemination of knowledge about American folk music of the 1920s-1940s”, was established within the Folklore and Mythology Center at UCLA.

At the end of June 1975 the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington DC awarded them a grant of $16,000 to help expand the JEMF’s program of reissuing old recordings, which they had already launched. In a nice touch, the grant letter from the NEA was from a woman called Nancy Hanks - which is the name of a famous, almost mythologised train from 19th Century Georgia. (This train was in turn named after a racehorse, and the horse named after Abraham Lincoln’s mother.) The Executive Secretary at the JEMF who received the letter, Norm Cohen, was himself working on a book about the railroad in American folksong at the time.

One of the albums the JEMF wanted to put out was indeed a collection of those unreleased test-pressings from the 1933 recordings made in New York by Curley Weaver, Buddy Moss and Blind Willie McTell. These test pressings had been saved all through the intervening four decades by the recording sessions’ original producer, Art Satherley, the man who had first come to the States to look for cowboys and indians.

Known latterly as Uncle Art Satherley, he had now donated his unique surviving copies of twenty-three unreleased tracks from the 1933 sessions, among other items, to the JEMF, thanks to a veteran country songwriter and singer from Oklahoma, Johnny Bond, who had kept in touch with Uncle Art all along but was also in touch with Ken Griffis at the JEMF. Bond had been a 1930s radio star, co-written a couple of songs with Ernest Tubb and with Gene Autry, and appeared in the cowboy films Saga of Death Valley, Kansas City Kitty, Duel in the Sun, Gallant Bess, Cowboy Commandos, Six Lessons and TV Ranch Party. In Johnny Bond, Art Satherley had at last found a cowboy of sorts.

The folklorists David Evans and Bruce Bastin got involved in the project of turning some of these test pressings into an LP, eventually to be called Atlanta Blues 1933. (A mildly confusing title, given that the recordings had been made in New York City, and that most people are agreed that there was no such thing as an Atlanta blues style.)

The intention, as with others in the JEMF series, was to press just 1,000 copies of this album: a rather small number, granted the huge amount of work and travel that was to go into providing its sleevenotes, though this too conformed to their policy for the series. Norm Cohen had written in 1971: “We have in mind fairly limited productions…but with particular stress on careful and extensive annotation in the form of elaborate insert brochures.” Material was to be “chosen not only for entertainment value, but also on the basis of historical, sociological, folkloristic and musicological importance.”

The result, JEMF-106, was issued in LA in 1979, and certainly was important.

Thanks to Stefan Wirz's amazing website & database for these two photographs

THE TRUE MURDER CASE BEHIND WILLIE'S DELIA

This story was researched and written by John Garst, veteran blues enthusiast and long-term academic chemist at the University of Georgia in Athens GA. It has come to my attention  -  12 years later!  -  thanks to a prolonged current discussion of the songs 'Delia' and 'McKinley' on a pre-war blues e-mail discussion group, where it has been re-posted by the writer Elijah Wald. I'm assuming that Mr Garst won't mind my re-circulating it here:

The Ballad of Delia Green and Moses "Cooney" Houston*

Dug up by John Garst

June 10, 2000

When I told [fellow music researcher] John Cowley I had found Ella Speed, he said, "Well, go find
Delia. You live in Georgia, and Robert W. Gordon wrote a letter saying that Delia was killed in Savannah. His papers are lost, so we don't have his interviews with Delia's mother or the detective who investigated the
case, but this ought to be enough information for you to find it."

So it was. I got around to looking seriously for it after lunch today, and within two hours I had it.

Delia Green, age 14, was shot and killed by Moses "Coony" Houston, age 16, in the Yamacraw section of Savannah (characterized for me by a local historian as "poor, black, and violent") at about 11:30 pm on Christmas Eve, 1900. She died early Christmas morning in her bed at her home. She had been receiving Coony's attentions for several months, but when Coony claimed her as "his girl" she denied it. This enraged Coony, who shot her without saying another word.

June 14, 2000

The information at the trail, evidently, was that Delia Green died in the afternoon of Christmas day, not at an early morning hour as reported in an earlier article, and that Coony was 15 years old, not 16. Delia is
consistently reported to have been 14.

All accounts, from the very beginning, emphasize how calm, cool, deliberate, and polite Coony was. He maintained that the shooting was an accident, but there were at least three witnesses against his testimony.
He appeared in court wearing short pants (on the advice of his lawyer, I suspect). The jury asked the judge for a clarification at one point, "What would be the sentence for a murder conviction with a recommendation of mercy?" The judge replied that the law specified life imprisonment. Shortly thereafter the jury returned with that verdict and the judge sentenced Coony to "life." He replied, "Thank you, sir."

When asked how he liked the verdict and sentence he said that he didn't like them at all but that he would have to stand them.

It appears that the shooting occurred at the home of people named West. Mr. West had asked Coony to pick up and deliver to him a pistol that West had in a repair shop. Coony duly did so. The pistol was on the
table (I suppose that they were sitting around a table) under a napkin. That is the pistol used by Coony to shoot Delia.

Delia and Coony had been "more or less intimate" (newspaper) for several months and Coony said something to the effect that he would or wouldn't let her do this or that. Delia reacted with strong words to the effect that he had no control over her whatever. Then he shot her.

June 20

This morning I obtained the clemency file for Mose Houston. (In newspapers, he is "Moses." In court and prison records he is sometimes "Moses" but more often "Mose." In the latter records he is usually "Cooney" but rarely "Coonie." In the newspaper he is "Coony.") The file contains a "Brief of Testimony" that appears to be close to a verbatim transcript of Cooney's trial.

Newspapers estimated his age at 14-16. He claimed to be 14, so apparently he wasn't much older than Delia Green. The most precise time of the shooting given in the record is "about 11:20 pm" Christmas Eve night, 1900. Like the first newspaper reports, but not like those surrounding the trial, Delia's time of death is given as early Christmas morning, about 4 a.m. The testimony is conflicting - somebody was lying or had a poor memory, most likely both, it seems to me. Some say that there was a crowd in the house, drinking and carousing. Others say there was a small group, no drinking, everyone was sober, and the main activity was playing "Rock of Ages" on the organ while the group sang.

Cooney and Delia argued earlier in the evening. About 3 minutes before the shooting, Cooney was said to have been cursing and was told to leave. He promised to behave and was allowed to stay.

The conversation before Cooney was told leave went something like this:

Cooney: "My little wife is mad with me tonight. She does not hear me. She is not saying anything to me. (To Delia:) "You don't know how I love you."

This was followed by mutual cursing.

Delia: "You son of a bitch. You have been going with me for four months. You know I am a lady."

Cooney: "That is a damn lie. You know I have had you as many times as I have fingers and toes."

Delia: "You lie!"

This is when Cooney was warned. Cooney was said to have been "full," but not from drinking at the scene.

A few minutes went by and Cooney started out the door. As he approached the door, he pulled out a pistol and shot Delia in the stomach (left groin, according to newspapers).

Cooney left the premises but was chased and caught by Willie West, whose house was the scene of the killing. West turned him over to patrolman J. T. Williams, who testified that Cooney told him that he shot Delia - they had a little row and were cursing one another. He shot her because she called him a son of a bitch. He shot her and he would do it again.

Cooney made a statement at the trial, presumably unsworn. (This is allowed in Georgia - there was no direct or cross examination.) He described going to the West's house at about 7 pm, looking for but not finding Delia. Willie West sent him out to get his pistol from the gunsmith. He brought it back and put it under a napkin. Everybody there was "full" and they sent him out for beer and whiskey. When he got back, he and another boy had a little "fun." "...he got hold of the pistol and in fun we struggled for it. I told him what are you doing with that pistol, and I got it and it went off and struck Delia."

A witness named S. Thomas started to testify for the defense. He said, "I am familiar with the character of the house in which Willie West and his sister and wife stay." This evidence was objected to and he was not
allowed to proceed with it. Raiford Falligant, Cooney's attorney, later represented the situation as follows: "That upon Christmas Eve night about 11 oclock in the year 1900, when he was only a boy 14 years of age, he got into bad company in a rough house and got to drinking and tusseling with another boy over a pistol which went off and hit and killed a girl in the house where all of the parties were drinking."

Willie Mills testified that he witnessed the shooting. He supported Cooney's statement, but Willie Glover testified that Willie Mills was not at the scene of the shooting.

Cooney served 12 1/2 years, the last several years at a facility in Commerce, GA. He was granted a parole in October, 1913, by Governor John M. Slaton (the same governor who eventually commuted the death sentence of Leo Frank, for killing "Little Mary Phagan," to life imprisonment, after which Frank was lynched - Governor Slaton knew that the commutation would bring his political career to an end, which it did. This story has been told recently in the musical "Parade," by Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown, and everyone knows the ballad, "Little Mary Phagan," by Blind Andrew Jenkins, as I recall.)

In 1917, The Prison Commission of Georgia recommended to the governor that Cooney be pardoned. The file did not contain the governor's action.


© John Garst

SKIP JAMES: 110th BIRTHDAY TODAY

Skip James, 1932

Here's his entry in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

James, Skip [1902 - 1969]

Nehemiah James was born on a plantation at Bentonia, Mississippi on June 9, 1902. He was unusual in playing guitar and piano, and unique among pre-war blues musicians in regarding himself as an artist, indeed as a great one, without being told that he was by white blues-revival enthusiasts. And he was right. Had he never survived to be ‘rediscovered’, his reputation would be secure from his sole pre-war recording session, made in about February 1931 in Grafton, Wisconsin: a session that was at least prolific as well as of astonishing virtuosity.

            One of the big cats of the genre, the unique Skip James made the crucial recording of a ‘Special Rider Blues’, after which Dylan named his primary music-publishing company. (Unlike the common blues term ‘rider’, the phrase ‘special rider’ is more special: it seems to occur in only four pre-war songs and by implication in a fifth. One of these is Skip James’.) James is also one of those whose old records saw early vinyl release on the pioneering blues label Biograph, the name Dylan chooses for his 1985 retrospective box set. But Dylan’s inwardness with the blues is such that he cannot help but have imbibed things from this highly distinctive figure, and we can glimpse them all over the place in Dylan’s work.

The only appealing thing about the Hearts Of Fire filler-song ‘Had A Dream About You Baby’ is the comic yet stylishly lazy ‘Late last night you come rollin’ across my mind,’ with its pleasant evocation of someone feeling this image move across from one side of their head to the other: an image that recurs between Dylan’s unmemorable verses, so that it enacts the in-between of ‘in one ear and out the other’ (it’s a self-reflexive text, even)  -  but it’s at least as pleasurable hearing the same main phrase in Skip James’ ‘4 O’Clock Blues’, in which: ‘Brownskin girl, she rollin’ across my mind.’

On Dylan’s nigh-perfect Blonde On Blonde performance of ‘Pledging My Time’, the melody, the gulping movement of the melodic phrases and Dylan’s mysteriously ominous line ‘Somebody got lucky, but it was an accident’ may all echo ‘Come On In My Kitchen’ by ROBERT JOHNSON, from 30 years earlier, but while the restless melodic phrasing is Johnson’s, the melody that inspires it is the same as ‘Sittin’ On Top Of The World’, and the Johnson line that Dylan’s echoes  -  ‘Some joker got lucky, stole her back again’  -  is itself an echo of a line from Skip James’ brilliant 1931 début recording, ‘Devil Got My Woman’.

This is not the whole story: BLIND WILLIE McTELL’s ‘Stole Rider Blues’, recorded at his first session (1927) includes ‘I stole my good gal from my bosom friend / That fool got lucky, he stole her back again’, which anticipates Skip James’ 1931 ‘Devil Got My Woman’ and Robert Johnson’s 1936 ‘Come On In My Kitchen’, and it would be hard to say from whom Dylan picked up the line  -  as Dylan sings his matching line, his ‘accident’ rhymes neatly with the ‘back again’ offered by McTell, James and Johnson  -  except that James’ line, ‘Somebody got lucky, stoled her back again’, is the closest to Dylan’s. And certainly Robert Johnson’s line comes down from Skip James rather than from McTell (who may have picked his up from listening to Ida Cox’s ‘Worried Mama Blues’, which predates all of them with its ‘I stole my man from my best friend / But she got lucky and stole him back again’, from 1923). ‘Devil Got My Woman’ is also the musical basis of another Robert Johnson song, ‘Hellhound On My Trail’, while Johnson’s ‘32-20’ is an almost verbatim reworking of Skip James’ ‘22-20 Blues’.

            These songs came to Johnson via his Jackson Mississippi contemporary Johnny Temple, an ex-protégé of Skip James, whereas for Dylan, James was accessible more or less directly; that is, he was both a figure of legend from the 1930s and one of the most important of the ‘rediscovered’ bluesmen in the couple of years immediately before Blonde On Blonde was recorded.

            Another part of the same Skip James lyric becomes entwined in a different Dylan song, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’  -  which was recorded, coincidentally or not, within a year of the first release on vinyl of the original 1931 James recording of ‘Devil Got My Woman’. The ‘wild geese’ Dylan recalls himself following on a hilltop in ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ fly straight out of a number of old blues songs, in which they feature as a common-stock formulation. Whenever you hear the line ‘I lay down last night, tried to take my rest’ you can more or less bet that the next line will be ‘My mind got to ramblin’ like the wild geese in the west.’ It occurs, for example, in BLIND BOY FULLER’s ‘Weeping Willow’, which Dylan performed at the Supper Club in New York in 1993.

Sometimes the ‘wild geese’, with engaging grammatic license, is singular (‘my mind got to rambling like a wild geese in the west’). There are also several songs called ‘Wild Geese Blues’, as for instance recorded by Barbecue Bob, Alberta Jones and the theatrically masculine Gladys Bentley. Yet because of Skip James’ vocal intensity, and because of a tiny one-word change he makes to the couplet, these wild geese fly most vividly and particularly out of ‘Devil Got My Woman’, so that the image works as a most poignant lunge of the imagination suddenly arising out of his beautifully evoked restless yearning. James sings: ‘I lay down last night, tried to take my rest / My mind got to ramblin’ like the wild geese from the west.’ The more common ‘in the west’ is less moving, in both senses, than James’ ‘from the west’: ‘in the west’ abolishes movement, leaving these birds, and the image, hanging motionless. Skip James’ tiny change sets them flying across the sky, wild geese indeed, making the image one of visitational loveliness.

            James was taught guitar by the unrecorded singer Henry Stuckey, born in the 1890s. James first saw him play in a Bentonia, Mississippi juke joint in about 1908, and learnt guitar from him after Stuckey’s 1917 return from World War I, using pieces like ‘Salty Dog’ and ‘Stack O’Lee’. James’ own wonderful piano-accompanied recording ‘If You Haven’t Any Hay Get On Down The Road’ is based on a ragtime number Stuckey played on guitar as ‘All Night Long’, fused with the traditional ‘Alabama Bound’, learnt in James’ youth from local fiddle-player Green McCloud. Stuckey, tracked down in 1965 by the blues collector and critic Gayle Wardlow, still refused to record, and died in 1966.

            Skip James concentrated primarily on his own compositions, and continued to make many of them out of songs that were not really blues at all, but which he alchemised into blues by the sheer ingenuity of his wayward style. He also found his own eccentric, intelligent ways of enriching his guitarwork from his experience as a pianist, and vice versa. The brilliant, distinctive delivery James uses at the end of his vocal lines  -  an ostentatious yet felicitous filigreeing around the note  -  finds a pale echo in Bob Dylan’s delivery on ‘North Country Blues’. In full, skittering flight, as achieved by Skip James, it prefigures, among other things, Robin Williamson’s Incredible String Band vocals. There is just one occasion when the radiant wondrousness of Mr. James crashes badly. His 1931 performance of ‘4 O’Clock Blues’ holds a disquieting moment for those familiar with 1950s-60s British culture. There you are, entranced by his precarious, eerie genius when all at once the phrase his perilous falsetto offers is ‘Goodbye my darling---’, and he sounds exactly like Charlie Drake.

            James returned to Bentonia in the late 1940s, went on the road again with his wife in the early 1950s but wearied of travelling and retired. The drama of his recording career lies in the fact that he had only ever done one recording session, the substantial one from 1931 that had yielded so much. Then, 33 years later, ‘rediscovered’, he appeared like a ghost at the 1964 NEWPORT FOLK FESTIVAL, and was recorded there by Vanguard Records. The first of his four Newport songs was ‘Devil Got My Woman’ (and of the three others, two were also revisits to songs he had cut at his recording session of three decades earlier).

            Peter Guralnick’s 1971 book Feel Like Going Home is good on Skip James’ ‘rediscovery’, and appears to give an eye-witness account of his triumphant performance at Newport. It is an account that recognises the agitation most of us can fall prey to in coping with the emergence of the much-loved, obscure artefact into clear accessibility:

            ‘As the first notes floated across the field, as the voice soared over us, the piercing falsetto set against the harsh cross-tuning of the guitar, there was a note of almost breathless expectation in the air. It seemed inappropriate somehow that this strange haunting sound which had existed till now only as a barely audible dub from a scratched 78 should be reclaimed so casually on an overcast summer’s day at Newport. As the song came to an end...the field exploded with cheers and whistles and some of the awful tension was dissipated.’ JON PANKAKE’s colleague PAUL NELSON, reviewing Skip James’ performance as issued on one of the festival LPs, wrote that ‘the rediscovered Skip James contributes four of the greatest blues performances...of recent years, his high, emotional falsetto singing and carefully considered guitar-playing setting a nearly impossible standard.’

            James continued to record and perform after Newport  -  and not at all as a shadow of his former self, though it’s expected that you should say so. To listen, for example, to his 1966 recordings for Vanguard’s album Skip James Today! is to be astonished by the man’s genius and chutzpah. He sounds like no-one else on the planet; he sounds ageless and in his prime; his singing is still eerily beautiful and his acoustic guitar-work is inventive and precise. Play Skip James Today! up against Bob Dylan’s 1993 album World Gone Wrong and much as you might love the latter, the former rebuffs with shining energy the notion that blurred guitar-work or last-gasp vocalising is all you can expect from the over-50s; and the Skip James of 1966 was 15 years older than the Dylan of 1993. (James’ album is also, you won’t be surprised to learn, immensely better recorded than Dylan’s.) Still, while one of these artists was recording Skip James Today!, the other was recording Blonde On Blonde. Can’t complain.

            His impact was felt widely in the blues-revivial and ‘rediscovery’ period. Cream's 1966 debut LP Fresh Cream included a version, albeit barely recognisable, of James' 'I'm So Glad' (said to have earned him only $6000). Further James recording sessions followed in the 1960s, including a live concert recording from Bloomington as late as 1968, never released until it appeared on two separately issued CDs in 2002.

            Skip James died of cancer in Philadelphia in early October, 1969. 

           

[Skip James: ‘Special Rider Blues’, Grafton WI, c.Feb 1931, Mississippi Blues 1927-1941, Yazoo L-1001, NY, 1968 & Skip James: King of the Delta Blues Singers 1928-1964, Biograph BLP-12029, Canaan NY, 1970; ‘4 O’Clock Blues’, Grafton WI, c.Feb 1931, Skip James: The Complete 1931 Session, Yazoo 1072, Newton NJ, 1988; ‘Devil Got My Woman’, ‘Special Rider Blues’ and ‘22-20’, Grafton c.Feb 1931, all on Biograph BLP-12029 (James’ only pre-war recordings were c.Feb 1931; the Biograph album boasts the dates ‘1928-1964’ because it includes a 1928 Chicago test pressing by someone else, wrongly attributed to James, and because it draws on a Falls Church,VA session, 16 Dec 1964, at which James cut 22 sides. BLP-12029 uses just two: ‘I’m So Glad’ & ‘Special Rider Blues’); ‘Devil Got My Woman’, ‘Cherry Ball Blues’, ‘Sick Bed Blues’ & ‘Cypress Grove Blues’, Newport RI 23-26 Jul 1964, The Blues At Newport 1964, Part Two, Vanguard VRS-9181 (mono) & VSD-79181, NY, 1965; Skip James Today!, NY, Jan 1966, Vanguard VLP 9219, NY, c.1967; Skip James: The Complete Bloomington Indiana Concert March 30, 1968, Part 1 & Part 2, Document DOCD 5633 & 5634, Austria, 2002.

            Blind Willie McTell: ‘Stole Rider Blues’, Atlanta, 18 Oct 1927; Blind Willie McTell 1927-1935, Yazoo L-1037, NY, 1973 (issued in stereo!). Ida Cox: ‘Worried Mama Blues’, Chicago, Dec 1923. Robert Johnson: ‘Hellhound On My Trail’ (2 takes), Dallas, 20 Jun 1937; one issued Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, Columbia CL-1654, NY, 1961; ‘32-20 Blues’ (2 takes), San Antonio TX, 26 Nov 1936, ditto. (Another significant influence on Johnson, Kokomo Arnold, recorded ‘Front Door Blues (32 20 Blues)’, Chicago, 15 Jan 1935.) Blind Boy Fuller: ‘Weeping Willow’, NY, 14 Jul 1937; Blind Boy Fuller On Down - Vol.1, Saydisc SDR143, Badminton UK, c.1967. Bob Dylan: Weeping Willow’, NY, 17 Jul 1993. Cream: ‘I’m So Glad’, Fresh Cream, Reaction, UK, 1966.

            Peter Guralnick, Feel Like Going Home, New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1971 (reissued London: Penguin, 1992). Paul Nelson, Sing Out! Vol.15, no.5, NY, Nov 1965.]