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James, Skip – Worried Blues - New LP
Fat Possum Records

James, Skip – Worried Blues - New LP

Regular price $ 23.00 $ 0.00

recorded 1964

1. All Night Long
2. Broke & Hungry
3. I’m So Glad
4. Bad Whiskey
5. Cypress Grove Blues
6. Catfish Blues
7. Goin’ Away To Stay
8. Crow Jane
9. Devil Got My Woman
10. She Lyin’
11. Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues
12. Drunken Spree
13. Black Gal
14. Illinois Blues
15. Worried Blues*
16. Look Down The Road

 

one of America’s greatest, Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James, born June 9, 1902 on a plantation near Bentonia, Mississippi (one of the few towns that had a subgenre named after them). Skip started writing songs as a teenager building levees and roads, got to recording in 1931, a bad time for selling records with the country suffering from the Great Depression and of course black people of the South facing a mighty load of suffering before, during (and after)...those times might have reduced a huge percentage of the population down to a pair of stained overalls, but for folks like Skip those old overalls was nothing new, the pain coming through his music clear as an ambulance siren on a Sunday morning. If you listen to any haunting music today, or any form of blues, it might not have been directly influenced by Skip James, but it was very likely influenced by someone who was influenced by him. After finding no success with his 1931 recordings, James stopped recording and while sources give different accounts of his life, he worked various jobs and reportedly led the choir at a church and became a preacher. For the last five years of his life, he was rediscovered, found by John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine and bought to the attention of musicians around the world with new performances, reissues and new recordings. It’s easy to claim integrity when you come from privilege (and judge others who need money to rise out of poverty) but the integrity James showed during his rediscovery was inspirational. Because of this, his name might not have become as known as some, but musicians took notice and his rediscovery drastically and forever changed the face of American music. — winch

 

Artist Biography by 

Among the earliest and most influential Delta bluesmen to record, Skip James was the best-known proponent of the so-called Bentonia school of blues players, a genre strain invested with as much fanciful scholarly "research" as any. Coupling an oddball guitar tuning set against eerie, falsetto vocals, James' early recordings could make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Even more surprising was when blues scholars rediscovered him in the '60s and found his singing and playing skills intact. Influencing everyone from a young Robert Johnson (Skip's "Devil Got My Woman" became the basis of Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail") to Eric Clapton (who recorded James' "I'm So Glad" on the first Cream album), Skip James' music, while from a commonly shared regional tradition, remains infused with his own unique personal spirit.


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