skip james hard time killing floor blues tab

#SKIP JAMES HARD TIME KILLING FLOOR BLUES TAB DRIVER#

Now he had a second chance at the acclaim that had eluded him. Soon after making them, he quit music for good, thinking himself a failure. But James earned little money from those records. There, the 28-year-old recorded the songs that made him a legend and eventually spurred these young strangers to search him out-music so haunting and hallucinatory that a critic would later compare him to Poe and Van Gogh. On a winter night in 1931, he’d boarded a segregated train to Grafton, Wis. He had gone north to seek fame once before. Night had fallen by the time the car reached Virginia, and the riders lapsed into silence. And then the old man left Mississippi behind forever, crossing so many bodies of water that he eventually stopped asking. He packed a shabby old suitcase, and donned a dark suit and preacher’s hat. The students assured James that if he accompanied them back to Washington, D.C., capital of the so-called “blues revival,” he’d soon be as famous as Mississippi John Hurt, who’d been rediscovered the summer before and now ruled the local coffeehouse scene. He was rusty, but he still clearly retained his talent. At his sharecropper’s shack, James picked up the borrowed guitar and began playing his old songs, which he hadn’t performed in years. He softly rasped the lyrics to “Sick Bed Blues,” in which he envisioned a “thousand people standing by my bedside.”Ī few days later, the hospital discharged him, after the pilgrims had paid not only James’ medical bills, but also the money he owed his landlord. Doctors forbade any commotion for the ailing man, but James nevertheless began working out a brand-new song. In the hospital, one of the young admirers offered him a guitar James no longer owned one.

He sounded like someone possessed, a one-man Southern Gothic drama. And then there was James’ eerie voice, sliding back and forth between a keening falsetto and heart-slain soprano. James’ intricate guitar work was rivaled only by his near-surreal piano playing, and no other major bluesman had mastered two instruments. His legendary 1931 recordings were some of the rarest of all the classic blues 78s, and their sublime artistry made them priceless. The students worshiped the “lost” bluesman-among their idols, the 62-year-old James ranked as the most mysterious and most revered. The bedridden James seemed to expect the sudden appearance of these fans in fact, he seemed perturbed that they hadn’t come sooner to pay him homage. They’d found Skip James in a Mississippi hospital, long forgotten by his own community. It was the summer of 1964, and three California college students-led by Washington-born John Fahey-had ventured into the Deep South not as civil rights activists, but as blues fanatics in search of their hero.

#SKIP JAMES HARD TIME KILLING FLOOR BLUES TAB DRIVER#

The driver soon realized that this was how the old man was accustomed to traveling, that Nehemiah “Skip” James gauged his location using bodies of water, just as sailors navigate by the stars. He received each answer with a nod of recognition. “What is that body of water there?” he would ask as the car raced over a rickety bridge. Please reload the page and try again.Īt first, as the car barreled north toward Washington, D.C., the old blues singer pestered the driver with questions, demanding to know the name of every river, creek, and lake they crossed.

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Skip james hard time killing floor blues tab