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Books | By Frank-John Hadley
How Son
House
Preached,
Rambled
and Lived
Eddie “Son” House Jr. was one of
the sterling bluesmen of the 20th
century—the chief architect of Delta
bottleneck guitar technique and
a powerful singer, with a dark, rich
voice. His songs harbor profound
lyrics on the plight of Deep South
blacks during the Depression era.
The eloquence of his recorded
blues, rags and levee-camp moans
rings like a timeless clarion call of
self-dignity. But House could hardly
be more obscure today, overshadowed
by his students Robert
Johnson, Muddy Waters and Howlin’
Wolf. Things are looking up,
though. Not long ago, Ted Gioia
rightly affirmed House as a “Mississippi
master who revolutionized
American music” in his excellent
book Delta Blues, and now there’s
a Son House biography by University of Rochester
professor Daniel Beaumont, Preachin’
The Blues (Oxford University Press).
Beaumont starts the book off in the early
1960s with white, middle-class blues aficionados
traveling the back roads of the Delta
and elsewhere looking for House and other
bluesmen known to them from old 78s. The
romance of the quest, however, is undercut
by Beaumont’s assertion that these searchers
were motivated by the wish to promote these
elders on the burgeoning folk-blues scene. Finally
locating him in western New York, Dick
Waterman and two cohorts “were faced with
a man who may have been an enigma even
to himself.” Some 200 pages later, House remains
as much an enigma to the reader as
he was at the start of the book. And the author
can’t square the nagging contradiction of
House the minister and House the “ramblin’”
blues musician. To be fair, perhaps no one can,
though it’d be interesting if a journalist or an
academician with knowledge of the blues and
the story of the black Baptist church and culture
gave it a try. A good beginning already exists:
Biblical college scholar Stephen J. Nichols
devotes several pages to House in his recent
book Getting The Blues (Brazos Press).
Still, Beaumont has done commendable
research, teasing out facts about House from
many sources, even sorting through conflicting
information given by the man himself. After taking
stock of House’s semi-popular “rediscovery,”
Beaumont recounts his life story as best
he’s able. The mystery man began preaching
in his mid-teens, reportedly hating blues music.
But upon hearing Willie Brown use a small
medicine bottle to “zing” (House’s word) the
strings, he suddenly took up playing blues guitar
in his mid-twenties—while still preaching.
He soon fit the nasty caricature of the down
’n’ dirty bluesman: drunkenness, adultery, violence.
House, in fact, killed a man and served
time on the dreaded Parchman Prison Farm.
He went on to record for Paramount in 1930
and—his stark artistry at its peak—the Library
of Congress in 1941–’42. Beaumont, a good
writer, is especially interesting when telling of
House’s friendship with a fellow giant of Delta
blues, Charley Patton.
There’s scant information on House between
World War II and his re-emergence in
1964: He worked for the railroad in Rochester,
and he fatally stabbed a labor camp worker
on Long Island. This time he wasn’t sentenced
to jail, but Beaumont is of the opinion
that House “did not escape prosecuting himself”
and “sought refuge in oblivion.” After his
’60s folk-blues celebrity, House, supposedly
an alcoholic, spent his last years in Detroit,
dying there in 1988. Instead of padding the
last chapter with digressive information on
Rochester music gadfly Armand Schaubroek,
Beaumont could have sought out Bonnie
Raitt, Taj Mahal, Geoff Muldaur and other
friends of House to share their thoughts on
the Mississippian and his inner conflict between
moral goodness and corruption—what
House termed “stradlin’ the fence.” DB
Ordering info: oup.com
SEPTEMBER 2011 DOWNBEAT 59