Skip James

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Skip James, in full Nehemiah Curtis James, was an American blues musician from the Mississippi Delta: a singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter. He was born in 1902 near Bentonia, Mississippi. His mother worked as a cook and nanny on a plantation. At a young age he learned guitar from local players such as Henry Stuckey, and his mother bought him a guitar for 2.50 dollars. In the 1920s he lived off temporary and often illegal jobs, before auditioning in early 1931 for the talent scout H.C. Speir. He then travelled to Grafton, Wisconsin, to record for Paramount Records.

Music and breakthrough

Those 1931 recordings, including Devil Got My Woman, are idiosyncratic. James played in open D-minor tuning with intricate fingerpicking and sang in an eerie falsetto. That gave his blues a dark, minor sound. The records came out just as the Great Depression began and sold poorly. James stopped playing the blues and became choir director in his father's church, later a preacher. For thirty years he recorded nothing. In 1964 blues enthusiasts such as John Fahey found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. That same year he played at the Newport Folk Festival and recorded albums for Takoma and Vanguard, among others, including Today!. He died in Philadelphia in 1969.

Influence

His work became a source for later musicians. The band Cream recorded I'm So Glad, which earned him the only large sum of his career in royalties. His old recordings still give an impression of how sober and yet compelling the early blues could sound, and he is regarded as a key figure of the genre.

Listening

• 
  Devil Got My Woman · Skip James, 1931
  Apple Music ↗

Discography

Studio albums

• 1966Today!
• 1968Devil Got My Woman
• 1970'A Tribute To Skip James' Volume One
• 1993She Lyin'
• 1996Skip's Piano Blues
• 2003Hard Time Killing Floor Blues
• 2004Cypress Grove Blues
• 2024Special Rider

See also

• Delta blues