Everyone knows that the mysterious and fleeting Robert Johnson left an indelible mark of genius on history; his hexed virtuoso has inspired tremendous imagination. Johnson famously sold his soul to the devil in a secret hoodoo ritual, and though these things are commonly understood as folklore, I can’t help believing it might be true.
But there was another man in those times who also came from Mississippi backwaters, a man who also spent his life running from the devil. He was a master of piano and guitar, but he stopped playing blues for more than three decades. On his deathbed he renounced the blues, repenting for playing the devil’s music. Skip promised never to touch them again, if God let him live.
God didn’t relent, however, but he had let Skip James live considerably longer than poor Robbie. Skip’s first recording- and last for three decades to come- was Devil Got My Woman, the inspiration for Johnson’s Hellhound on my Trail. Skip’s eerie, mournful falsetto is the voice of a haunted man. That afternoon in 1931, in a stifling attic in Grafton, Wisconsin, Skip recorded for Paramount Records some songs that would soon become rare collector’s items and earn him respect as one of the very best bluesmen now and forever. But the Depression forced Paramount into bankruptcy and Skip skipped off to sing a new tune, becoming an itinerant preacher throughout the south.
As an outside observer to the blues scene, not terribly knowledgeable but drawn in by the stories, I was touched and educated by a film by Wim Wenders, Soul of a Man. The gorgeous tribute from Wim Wenders paints a romantic hero, innocent of the small fame that blooms from him even in his absence. He put down his guitar to preach the gospel after poverty defeated him. 
And yet I sensed that the darkness in the man’s voice was not simply poverty robbing an artist of his passion. Skip James was a hard living loner who said he always carried a gun, and he was known to use it. His daddy was a bootlegger and a preacher and like father, like son.
Skip roamed the backwoods and highways of the south working like a dog and gambling and sampling the hookers. Seemed he never feared God’s wrath for these biblical sins- sex, murder, pimping, playing cards- but nonetheless, he feared God because he was playing the Devil’s music.
Stephen Calt’s biography, I’d Rather Be the Devil, written from taped conversations with Skip by a friend and blues writer, merits the criticism it garners from irate Skip defenders- but only for its melodramatic prose. The biography insinuates and even proclaims all manner of madness- whoring, gambling, and shooting sprees, but some blues aficionados want to believe, as Tom Jacobson wrote, that Skip James was a “softie.”
Tom also said, “Stephen Calt has written a pathetic book. It will go down in the annals of blues history as an act of great betrayal and deceit.” He shares his personal witness of an elegant and kind man who wrote him gracious letters after Tom helped him with some money.
With all due respect, no. Understandably, sympathetic fans want to make Skip a hero. Like Tom, I want to believe that I can touch Skip’s blues, or speak for him, but in reality, his blues stem from what I don’t have. I have blues of my own, but I can’t know hardest poverty and racism, backbreaking work, life on the run as a gambler, drunkard and murderer. If Skip’s songs were just about twisted love or wishful thinking, they would be tepid melodies of debatable depth, and they wouldn’t be the blues of Skip James.
Now, I can’t say that every word of Calt’s work is true, and Jacobson’s worry that Calt exploited his friend for money may or may not be founded. Calt is an affable and respected, if adjective-heavy blues writer, and I doubt he made any kind of ‘fortune’ from his taped conversations with Skip. He waited politely until 25 years after Skip’s death to publish. I am certain he meant for serious seekers of Skip’s music to find some of what they were looking for, harsh though what they found might be. It’s clear, too, that he retained a love for the mysterious man, even if he did, like his subject, have a penchant for melodrama.
It’s understandable that dedicated blues aficionados and historians like Jacobson want to make sure the things that are being said are true, and to be concerned about the reputation of their blues idols. But even as an outside spectator, I know that sanitizing history may ultimately detract and dilute what the blues are all about.
The kind of grief and bitterness and agony inside the blues didn’t come from a warm and fuzzy place. The rebel drifter artists were not pretending anything- the grim reality of poverty, racism, dehumanization, slavery, grief, loss, crime, hatred, fury, despair, love, fear, whisky, murder was reality indeed. There is no reason whatsoever to doubt that Skip James was at least a few of the things he is reputed to be.
That said, despite his fame, this figure is still shrouded in mystery and totally obscure. In this regard, he is much like his fellow Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson, who made no secret of his devotion to Skip, paying homage by experimenting with his style. Johnson’s premature death at the age of 27 may always remain an enigma- voodoo, murder, poison? But it is Skip James’ life and not his death that we have so little window into- Nehemiah was named Skip because he was always skipping town. He is a man who did not particularly want to be found. And so for those decades between his first recording and finding him in the ‘60s, we have little to go on.
Skip James didn’t like people, and so he didn’t hang around with other musicians more than was necessary. He died with few friends and no family, and fathered no children that he or we know of. Some connections have been made to other artists who knew him, peripherally or otherwise, but there’s not much.
We can be pretty sure of a general picture, however. Skip was born Nehemiah Curtis James and grew up on a Mississippi cotton plantation. His mom was the cook and his father was reputed locally as a low life. He was perpetually on the run from the law, a bootlegger and a preacher, too. Most of the time, Skip’s grandparents raised him. They had been brought in from Virginia on the slave market.
Skip was a proud and articulate man, so he said he had earned his high school diploma though this wasn’t true. Skip was proud of his wide vocabulary and wanted some recognition for his intelligence. He was singing and composing early on, after his mother gave him a cheap guitar as a gift when he was around eight. “My mother made me put that guitar down to eat meals,” Skip said in Calt’s book. “I was just that interested.” Soon he took up piano, too.
Skip drifted around, doing hard labour in levee camps or road construction and so on. Life meant backbreaking labour- the work was hard, but the living was harder. The men drank a lot, and gambled and made money renting their favourite women out to other men. Skip never trusted women, but his early exposure in these environments certainly wouldn’t contribute to a positive image. These women plied their trades because they needed to earn a living, too, and couldn’t labour in the camps like men. Skip became known as a skilled gambler, and sometimes he would risk his whole week’s pay and earn ten times as much.
He had love affairs with some of the ladies, but they weren’t happy ones. “My love is like ice water,” he said. “Once you fuck ‘em, it’s like you never knew ‘em.” He always carried a pistol and there’s no real reason to conclude he never used it. “I never draw a gun unless I pull the trigger,” Skip reportedly said.
He married the daughter of preacher man, Oscella Robinson, the first relationship he had with a woman who was not a prostitute. But his happiness was short-lived. He found his wife having an affair with a friend of his. She was starving emotionally, others said, and observed that Skip wasn’t faithful to anyone except the bottle and the betting. It was this experience that likely fuelled the desolate heartbreaking masterpiece, Devil Got My Woman.
It’s easy to dismiss the devils and the voodoo underneath blues stories as myth, rumour, or even as racism, but that would be an unfortunate erasure of history. Not every blues singer used words like “mojo” and “conjure” man just for effect. To the best blues scholars, this is a large part of the picture and history. I will never understand the secret history of Africa, but it had tremendous power to keep some of the slaves from going insane or going extinct. The rituals and magical beliefs were common threads for broken communities, tying their spirit to Africa. To people who had no possessions, the voodoo objects that outsiders think of as bizarre or frightening or silly became especially important. Any objects could be sacred if they were the only few things you owned.
Whether or not voodoo was practiced, it was in the blood of the slaves and their children and is still going strong today. You didn’t have to practice voodoo, though many did. It was in your blood. And while descendents of Africa layered Christianity onto their own traditions, seeing no disparity between the two, some had the fear of the white God beaten into them. The lingering terror that their own music, rituals, beliefs, and skin colour were from the Devil himself was impenetrable. And that could be a tremendous comfort, the only link to your displaced ancestors. Or it could be cause for a lifelong haunting.
Matt R. Lohr describes the sound of Skip’s blues: “James’ vocals are delivered in either a pure, keening falsetto or a flat, affectless tenor, both tones almost supernatural in their melancholic detachment and both expertly complementing the chillingly pristine tone of his guitar playing. This voice, eerily ethereal … high-pitched and ghostly … conjures nothing so much as the wailing of a tormented Deep Southern banshee.”
Town like Bentonia, Mississippi, population 170, towns like the ones that Skip and Robert Johnson were raised, well, that was voodoo country. It’s not a stretch for me to consider that spiritual turmoil was a prominent element in the lives of many southern blacks. And sometimes that spiritual turmoil showed itself like a hellhound of the trail.
Of course I don’t mean that Satan traded a guitar with Robbie at the crossroads- that’s a metaphor, and a good one. But Robert and Skip both surely wrestled with those demons, alongside all the other bleak, dark, crazy, hostile, wretched, dangerous, violent things- by life so hard, their blues could be born. Skip was still singing and playing music after he split from his wife, and he had developed a very distinctive style that Robert Johnson and other Delta bluesmen tried to adopt and never quite pulled off. His sinister depth felt like voodoo indeed, born of the seesaw torment between God and Satan.
In his essay, Can’t Find No Heaven, Lohr describes beautifully what it is about Skip James. He “is frequently recognized by musical aficionados and critics as one of the most creative and distinctive in the blues canon. Not only are these works notable for their uncommon utilization of blues conventions and precise, disciplined musicianship, but they are also remarkable in the uncanny feelings they conjure within the listener, feelings of unease, foreboding, and soul-dead dread unlike that produced by anything found in the blues before or since.”
He quotes David Harrison. “”[James] didn’t come across as someone with whom you could enjoy leaning on a bar; his songs are unremittingly gloomy and devil-ridden, and if his 78s were the only ones to have survived, the myth of the blues as a depressing music would have been fully justified…[the songs] hint at anger and lurking madness…If the blues can really be said to have a genius, then Skip James is the sinister contender for the title.””
Finally, he describes for those who listen but can’t play what makes that sound so distinct. “When a guitar is tuned in the open-string “Bentonia” style, the resulting pattern is E-B-E-G-B-E, which, provided the G string is not raised to G sharp, creates an E minor tonality. The result of this “cross-note” tuning (a term coined by James) is an off-centre sound with an unmistakably dark undercurrent, a sound that can be heard most vividly in the bottom-scraping bass notes and chilling ascending treble figures…”
James picked his guitar with his fingernails for the effect that Giles Oakley called “icy precision.” He used three fingers, isolating fierce notes. Furthermore, his genius on guitar is so legendary that often his piano prowess in overshadowed. But he used a wooden box at his feet to emphasize thumping and stomping and got totally lost in the notes and rhythms. Lohr comments, “His keyboard work is distinguished by its almost avant-garde utilization of irregularly spaced breaks, helping to create within the music a gripping fits-and-starts tension, and his 1931 piano recordings possess a heavily percussive quality thanks to his complex, syncopated foot pounding… James was also skilled at using runs, fills, crescendo, and diminuendo to create musical power within his piano pieces…creating the gut-shot effect of thudding rapid-fire bullet hits…”
It was in 1931, after leaving his wife, that a talent scout heard these wonders and got Skip that now-famous record deal. He bought a ticket to Wisconsin, and recorded over a two day session for Paramount Records. He was paid a few bucks for his work, but with the Depression stretching before them, Paramount went bankrupt and Skip became an ordained traveling minister like his father. Varying accounts, including his, attest to continued drinking, gambling, womanizing, and wandering. Unbeknownst to Skip, those who had bought the few record pressings Paramount had sold before folding considered the mysterious and absent singer one of the greatest they’d ever heard, and a cult bloomed. That no follow up appeared for decades heightened the hunger and allure for this elusive genius’s work.
There were also rumours that Skip was on the run from the law. Mumbles and murmurs of murder were common- Skip’s music had been full of murder, and he himself had already bragged about how many times he used his gun, how many people he shot- though he was always careful to say he didn’t know what the outcome was of the bullet wounds. But whether Jesus or guns and gambling or women or all of the above were taking place, they were taking place apart from the public eye. If Skip had never recorded that ill-fated record, his blues would have been totally lost to the world.
And then the legend comes full circle. In 1964, a group of blues enthusiasts discovered Skip James in a hospital in Mississippi, and convinced him to appear at a blues revival, the Newport Folk Festival. His strange, reclusive, haunting performance blew everyone’s mind. And for these last five years of his life, years spent in poor health, he recorded for various labels, revisiting some of his 1931 songs as well as making new ones.
“Skip James’ strikingly singular music was a product of his surroundings, musical iconoclasm, and bizarre psychology,” Lohr says. The music was affected by “the damaged psychology of James, a man whose paranoia and misogyny spawned edgy, violent songs that rejected society, race, and gender roles, and whose life was a constant battle between the influence of the church and the dangerous blues lifestyle, a battle which James never resolved and which lent his music its distinctive anxiety and fearful pleading for peace in the next world. The life of Skip James was not a happy one, but the sadnesses and angers that fueled his existence were distilled into his music, allowing him to create accomplished, emotionally devastating work that will let his name live on.”
“The one great fear that marked his existence,” Lohr writes, was “the possibility of dying before receiving the opportunity to make peace with God. While on his deathbed, James denounced his past, acknowledging the “sinful” nature of blues music and announcing that he would perform only spirituals if God would let him live.” But before turning 70, he died of cancer. The torment of damnation was something he never reconciled, never able to shake the belief that blues were straight from hell.
It’s worth going back to the beginning of the story as it relates to me. My first encounter with Skip James was a subtle and unforgettable scene with Thora Birch in the teen angst flick Ghost World. Enid was dying her hair back from green, depressed, and listening to a random record she bought from a blues fan out of a milk carton.
I found it spellbinding to see the darkness descend on her like a wave of heat, the intensity in her eyes, as the strains of Skip’s guitar mesmerize her. The film is worth watching for this brief and brilliant scene alone. I felt the strange and solemn sharpness of desperation in a song that stood alone in the world of music.
When Enid went back to ask Seymour, the blues guy, for more records like that one, he shook his head and said, “There aren’t any more records like that one.”
The scene was my personal invitation, a portal into a part of history I know nothing of. It’s the world whose spectre I glimpsed when I was a braver woman, drifting in my youth. The Mississippi Delta marked me, it made me hungry for its stories, and the houses and stores and gas stations and cotton fields felt like relics, a world that time forgot.
Skip’s heavyweight delta voodoo was completely transcendent, summoning the sick weight of love’s grief into the belly, into the throat. I was suffocated by it; choked- it was the feeling of drowning. I was haunted, by love, by Skip, by the devil himself.
It’s unlikely that Skip knew even a few moments of happiness in a harsh and bitter life, and more than seven decades later, the weight of his blues feels like a stone tomb, the darkest room.
There is nothing I could understand of that weight, but I felt it once traveling through the Delta, and tried to capture the haunting in a poem. I was “hitch-hiking down a slow hot Mississippi highway. The crimson sky stained the cotton fields bloody on either side of that dusty ribbon. I was weaving past scattered porches. Someone was wailing the blues.”
If you like art, literature, madness and interesting people, you’ll love Lorette C. Luzajic’s books. Her first book is “The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.” Her second is “Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (Irreverent Ramblings from the End of the World.)” Her poetry and her collected blogs, musings, reviews, memoirs, notes, eulogies, requiems, interviews, profiles and more are both devastating and hilarious romps through one woman’s wild mood swings. Lorette proves that there’s life after death, even for manic-depressives. “Think Courtney Love meets Margaret Atwood,” says Donnarama, Toronto’s premiere performance artist.
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