Skip James (June 21, 1902 - October 3, 1969) was an American blues singer,
guitarist, pianist and songwriter.
He was born Nehemiah Curtis James near Bentonia, Mississippi. As a youth he
heard local musicians such as Henry Stuckey and the brothers Charlie and Jesse
Sims, and began playing the organ in his teens. He worked on road construction
and levee-building crews in his native Mississippi in the early 1920s, and wrote
what is perhaps his earliest song, "Illinois Blues," about his experiences as a
laborer. Later in the '20s he sharecropped, and made bootleg whiskey in the
Bentonia area. He began playing guitar in open E-minor tuning and developed a
three-finger picking technique that he would use to great effect on his
recordings. In addition, he began to practice piano-playing, drawing inspiration
from the Mississippi blues pianist Little Brother Montgomery.
In early 1931 James auditioned for the Jackson, Mississippi record-shop owner
and talent scout H. C. Speir, who placed blues performers with a variety of
record labels, including Paramount Records. On the strength of this audition,
Skip James traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin to record for Paramount.
These recordings are among the most famous and idiosyncratic ever made in the
blues idiom. "I'm So Glad" was derived from a 1927 song by Art Sizemore and George A.
Little entitled "So Tired," which had been recorded by both Gene Austin and, as
"I'm Tired of Livin' All Alone," by Lonnie Johnson. But, as James' biographer,
Stephen Calt, maintains, the finished product was totally original, "one of the
most extraordinary examples of fingerpicking found in guitar music." The other
pieces recorded at Grafton, such as "Devil Got My Woman," "Special Rider Blues,"
and "22-20," were of similarly high quality both vocally and instrumentally, and
are the recordings upon which James' subsequent reputation lay. There are only a
very few copies known to exist of James' Paramount 78s.
For the next thirty years James recorded nothing, and drifted in and out of
music. He was virtually unknown to listeners until about 1960. In 1964 blues
enthusiasts John Fahey, Bill Barth and Harry Vestine found him in Tunica,
Mississippi. According to Calt, the "rediscovery" of both Skip James and of Son
House at virtually the same moment was the start of the "blues revival" in
America. In July 1964 James, along with other blues performers, appeared at the
Newport Folk Festival. He recorded for the Takoma, Melodeon and Vanguard labels,
and played engagements throughout the remainder of the decade. Cream recorded a
version of "I'm So Glad," providing James the only windfall of his career.
(Cream based their version on James' simplifed '60s recording, not on the
original 1931 recording.) He died in Philadelphia in 1969.
Skip James has often been called one of the exponents of the Bentonia School of
blues playing, which was later carried on by a guitarist and singer named Jack
Owens. Calt, in his 1994 biography of James, I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James
and the Blues, maintains that there was indeed no style of blues that originated
in Bentonia, and that this is simply a notion of later blues writers who
overestimated the provinciality of Mississippi during the early twentieth
century, when railways linked small towns, and who failed to see that, in the
case of Owens, "the 'tradition' he bore primarily consisted of musical scraps
from James' table." Whatever the truth is regarding the origins of James' style,
or of the "Bentonia School," he certainly stands as one of the most original of
all blues performers.
