Complete Early Recordings

Skip James - Complete Early Recordings

Complete Early Recordings
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Music CD Cover

Artist: Skip James
Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1994-09-15
Music Label: Yazoo
Soundtracks:
  1. Devil Got My Woman
  2. Cypress Grove Blues
  3. Little Cow And Calf Is Gonna Die Blues
  4. Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues
  5. Drunken Spree
  6. Cherry Ball Blues
  7. Jesus Is A Mighty Good Leader
  8. Illinois Blues
  9. How Long 'Buck'
  10. 4 O'Clock Blues
  11. 22-20 Blues
  12. Hard Luck Child
  13. If You Haven't Any Hay Get On Down The Road
  14. Be Ready When He Comes
  15. Yola My Blues Away
  16. I'm So Glad
  17. What Am I To Do Blues
  18. Special Rider Blues

Free Music Notes for Complete Early Recordings

Free Music Review: Some of the Most Intense and Moving Recorded Sound
Hit: 5 Stars

The eighteen songs presented on this CD may, if allowed, cause the listener to re-define their standards of what personal expression in music might be. Skip James' music has been called strange and idiosyncratic. If these terms are adequate to describe sound that resists all attempts to pigeonhole and categorize, than perhaps they apply. These surviving sides, recorded in Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1931 (not 1930 as the title of this disc would indicate, the only flaw in this otherwise perfect presentation) show James as someone who chafed against existing musical idioms. Rather than subscribe to a pat or pre-figured means of communication, Skip James created his own unique means of expression through sound, depicting a unique world-view in an equally unique series of sonic vignettes, each one full of beauty and terror.

We have come to regard James as a blues musician, although very little of this music fits into the conventional blues idiom. This music embodies the sense of pain and the desire to transcend that pain that most blues music supposedly (but seldom actually) expresses. The songs address living with an unabashed intensity. They speak of surviving economic hardship, lost love, reckless living, and travel. They sometimes aspire to salvation, although this salvation always seems distant or chimerical. The world they articulate is one suffused with pain, joy and the threat of violence. In this, James' music is a very distant cousin to Guns n' Roses Appetite For Destruction, another group of songs founded upon a desire to live life in spite of extreme self-loathing.

To critique the audible surface noise present on the 78 source records is a bit like dismissing a Vermeer painting because the paint has crazed slightly in the centuries since it was painted. In some cases, Yazoo has used the only surviving copy of an original 78 as source material. Given these parameters, this disc sounds wonderful, especially when compared with other versions of these same recordings that have been previously available .

Skip has sometimes been compared with Robert Johnson - but their similarities are superficial, and comparisons between them most often stem from their common apocalyptic imagery and use of the Devil as an overt lyrical presence. Robert Johnson was a dance musician. His arrangements prefigured the band-driven sound of postwar electric blues. Skip James' music is not for dancing - his rhythms are frequently changing within songs and even within measures. It is impossible to imagine him recording with other musicians - the very private and exclusive essence of his expression precludes collaboration. His entire being, as evidenced in his sometimes ethereal, sometimes in-your-face guitar and piano playing, was devoted to finding a personal course of survival in a world plagued on all sides by hardships.

If you open yourself to this sound, you may find the most personal and private of rewards. If the music is not enough, I recommend reading Stephen Calt's provocative and engrossing biography of Skip James, "I'd Rather Be The Devil: Skip James and the Blues" (Da Capo, 1994).

Complete Early Recordings Poster

With an unmistakable falsetto delivery, Skip James created some of history's eeriest blues records. His blues sounds dark and mysterious, using odd tunings, structures, and rhythms, and exploring gloomy lyrical themes. Unlike other bluesmen of the day, James's music was personal and bleak, played for his own emotional release and not for purposes of entertainment. "Devil Got My Woman," "Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues," "Hard Luck Child," and "Special Rider Blues" convey sorrow and misery like few others can. Uptempo numbers such as the classic "I'm So Glad" and "Drunken Spree," which resembles the hillbilly traditional "Late Last Night," showcase his forceful guitar picking while rags "Little Cow and Calf" and the jumpy "How Long 'Buck'" feature his unique piano work. --Marc Greilsamer

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