Skip James: Im So Glad

Nehemiah Curtis James was born near Yazoo City, Mississippi, in 1902. James was raised just south of the Mississippi Delta near Bentonia, on the Whitehead plantation, where his mother was the plantation cook. James’s friends named him “Skippy” due to his peculiar style of dancing. Skip’s father, a guitar-playing bootlegger, abandoned his family when Skip was a young boy. 

In 1931, after years of work as a labourer, bootlegger, and sometimes musician, James entered a singing competition at a store in Jackson, Mississippi. James had just begun to play his song, “Devil Got My Woman,” when he was awarded the prize—a train ticket to Grafton, Wisconsin, and a recording session with Paramount Records. 

Paramount was famous for the poor quality of its recordings, and sadly, many fine performances were poorly recorded by the label, including those by James. James recorded several songs with guitar during his first session, and eight piano songs during the second session. James recalls recording 26 sides in all, though only 18 have been found. Among the classic recordings he made at those sessions were “Devil Got My Woman,” “I’m So Glad,” “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” “22-20 Blues,” and “Special Rider Blues.” 

James was only paid 40 dollars for his efforts, and as the recordings were made during the height of the depression, only a few sides were ever released. Disillusioned with the music business, James quit and turned to religion. Little is known about his life during the 33 years between his Paramount recordings and his rediscovery in the mid-Sixties. 

James played his first show in 33 years at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. His performance was a brilliant one and it seemed that his powers were still completely intact despite his long layoff. Many believed that James' performance at the festival topped all others. 

Despite his huge popularity at Newport, James did not have a recording deal. When Cream recorded “I'm So Glad” on their Fresh Cream album, James, now ailing, used his royalties to get into a good hospital in Washington, DC, where he could have the surgery that extended his life by three years. 

Essential Album Review: Today! (1966)

Released two years after his triumphant rediscovery, "Today!" remains a towering achievement in the 1960s folk-blues revival era. Recorded under crystal-clear studio conditions, this LP allowed modern high-fidelity equipment to fully capture the haunting, ethereal beauty of James's complex D-minor cross-tuning guitar style and his chilling, piercing falsetto vocals. The record features definitive, mature reinterpretations of his bleak 1931 catalog alongside sweeping, spiritual performances. It stands as a vital masterpiece, showcasing an uncompromised master delivering rural acoustic blues with absolute authority to a new generation of listeners. 

• Released: 1966 
• Label: Vanguard Records 
• Producer: Maynard Solomon 
• Core Layout: Skip James (Vocals, Acoustic Guitar, Piano) 
• Key Tracks: "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues", "Cherry Ball Blues", "Special Rider Blues" 

Essential Album Review: Devil Got My Woman (1968)

Serving as his final complete studio album statement before his passing, the 1968 release "Devil Got My Woman" cements his legacy as an irreplaceable titan of the Bentonia blues tradition. This tracking captures James exploring an intense, intensely somber emotional space, backed by his masterful, intricate fingerpicking patterns and precise, rhythmic piano work. The title track, beautifully re-recorded here, possesses a stark, spine-chilling power that remains unmatched in acoustic media. It is an essential, deeply reverent document of an artist looking back across decades of hardship with stark, poetic clarity. 

• Released: 1968 
• Label: Vanguard Records 
• Producer: Vanguard Studios 
• Core Layout: Skip James (Solo Acoustic Performance) 
• Key Tracks: "Devil Got My Woman", "Sickbed Blues", "Lorenzo Blues" 

Essential Archural Collection: Complete 1931 Paramount Recordings

To fully comprehend how radically advanced James's style was compared to his contemporaries, his historic 1931 Paramount sessions are essential audio textbook items. While the original shellac pressings suffered heavily from the label's notoriously cheap, scratchy surface textures, modern digital restorations reveal a hauntingly brilliant architectural blueprint of acoustic blues. His technical speed on "I'm So Glad" and the distinct boogie-woogie structural foundation of "22-20 Blues" (which later inspired Robert Johnson's "32-20 Blues") remain foundational pillars of 20th-century American music theory. 

• Recording Era: February 1931 
• Label: Paramount Records (Grafton, WI) 
• Producer: Arthur Laibly 
• Key Historical Tracks: "Devil Got My Woman", "I'm So Glad", "22-20 Blues" 

James died in 1969 in Philadelphia, leaving behind an immortal musical legacy. 

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W.C. Handy The Father of the Blues

William Christopher Handy will forever be remembered as “The Father of the Blues.” It was Handy who was most responsible for taking this regional folk music of the American South and turning it into another form of popular American music. 

As a brilliant composer, cornetist, and pioneering music publisher, Handy acted as the vital cultural bridge that carried the raw, oral traditions of the Mississippi Delta into the global mainstream. His formal musical training allowed him to accurately transcribe, codify, and orchestrate the idiosyncratic twelve-bar blues structures that had previously gone unrecorded. By establishing the first highly successful African-American-owned music publishing house, Handy transformed a localized folk art form into a commercial juggernaut, forever rewriting the trajectory of twentieth-century popular music. 

Handy was working as a popular minstrel bandleader when he heard blues music for the first time while stopping over in the Mississippi Delta. Handy would eventually write the first popular blues songs, “Memphis Blues,” ”St. Louis Blues,” Yellow Dog Blues,” and “Hesitating Blues.” 

Handy was born in Florence, Alabama, in 1873. His father was pastor of a church in a nearby town. Handy’s upbringing was strict and his pious father viewed secular music and anything associated with it as instruments of the devil. It was with much secrecy then, that young W.C. Handy purchased his first instrument, a guitar. When his father found the guitar, Handy was instructed to return it. Handy moved on to organ and eventually acquired a cornet, the instrument with which he would be forever associated. 

Handy joined a local band as a cornetist during his teens-a fact that he kept hidden from his parents. During the 1890s Handy traveled around Alabama in various bands playing the minstrel music that was popular at the time and working odd jobs to make ends meet. He eventually became the leader of the Mahara’s Colored Minstrels and toured The South with that band for three years. 

From 1900-1902, Handy was recruited as a music teacher at the Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes. Handy’s frustration with the college’s emphasis on European classical music and apparent lack of appreciation for American styles led to his resignation from his post. 

Handy quickly rejoined his old band and set off on the road again. It was while on tour with the band in the Mississippi Delta that Handy heard the blues, a music that he described at the time as “the weirdest music I had ever heard.” Handy studied the blues as played by locals during subsequent visits to the Mississippi Delta, and by the time Handy and his band had relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1909, the blues was part of his repertoire. Handy wrote what is often coined as the first blues song, “Memphis Blues,” as a theme song for a Memphis mayoral candidate, Edward Crump. The song was originally titled, “Mr. Crump.” 

Handy wrote subsequent songs with “blues” in the title such as “Beale Street Blues” and “St. Louis Blues” and became one of the first African-Americans to become wealthy by publishing songs. Handy moved his publishing business to New York City, in 1917, and set up offices in Times Square. 

In early 1917, The Original Dixieland Jazz Band had made the first jazz recording with a side titled, “Livery Stable Blues.” Handy organized a band called Handy’s Orchestra of Memphis to make his own recordings for Columbia. The resulting sides contained music that was closer to blues than that which was recorded by jazz bands. Handy was not enamored with this new music, jazz, and tried to stick to tradition. 

Handy recorded for various labels from 1917 to 1924 and recorded versions of his own songs, “Memphis Blues,” “Yellow Dog Blues,” and “St. Louis Blues,” among others. Handy’s renditions of these classic tunes are not considered as classics of the era, but they are of tremendous historical rather than aesthetic interest. 

Among the limited compilation albums that may be found on Handy’s recordings are “Father of the Blues” (1980) and "Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues" (2003). 

Essential Historical Collection: Father of the Blues (1980) 

This vital archival collection serves as a definitive audio document of Handy's earliest recording sessions. The tracking brings together rare acoustic and early electrical recordings made by Handy's Orchestra of Memphis, providing an irreplaceable look at how the blues was performed by a structured, syncopated orchestra. While these tracks exhibit the stiff rhythms of the late ragtime era, they offer immense historical insight into how the blues first made its transition from southern streets to commercial shellac. 

• Compilation Era: 1917–1924 (Released 1980) 
• Label: DRG Records 
• Producer: Archival Assembly 
• Core Personnel: W.C. Handy (Cornet, Conductor), Handy's Orchestra of Memphis 
• Key Historical Tracks: "St. Louis Blues", "Memphis Blues", "Yellow Dog Blues" 

Essential Compilation Review: Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues - W.C. Handy (2003) 

Part of the critically acclaimed public television documentary series, this comprehensive release features a meticulously remastered look at Handy's architectural compositions. The album brilliantly balances Handy's own rare, primitive band recordings with historic, highly expressive interpretations of his songbook by immediate contemporaries like Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith. It stands as a flawless audio blueprint for understanding how Handy's published sheet music came to define the classic blues era. 

• Released: September 2003 
• Label: Columbia Records / Legacy 
• Producer: Martin Scorsese, Steve Berkowitz 
• Core Contributors: W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith 
• Key Tracks: "St. Louis Blues" (Bessie Smith & Louis Armstrong), "Beale Street Blues", "Ole Miss Rag" 

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