Background information
Birth name	Edward James House Jr.
Born	March 21, 1902^[1] Lyon, Mississippi, U.S.^[2]
Died	(aged 86) Detroit, Michigan
Genres	Delta blues
Occupation(s)	Musician
Instruments	Guitar vocals
Years active	1930–1943, 1964–1974
Labels

Son House The Original Delta Blues
Son House The Original Delta Blues Rare Earth
Son House The Original Delta Blues Rare
Son House The Original Delta Blues Rarest

Edward James 'Son' House Jr. (March 21, 1902^[1] – October 19, 1988) was an American delta blues singer and guitarist, noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing.

After years of hostility to secular music, as a preacher and for a few years also working as a church pastor, he turned to blues performance at the age of 25. He quickly developed a unique style by applying the rhythmic drive, vocal power and emotional intensity of his preaching to the newly learned idiom. In a short career interrupted by a spell in Parchman Farm penitentiary, he developed his musicianship to the point that Charley Patton, the foremost blues artist of the Mississippi Delta region, invited him to share engagements and to accompany him to a 1930 recording session for Paramount Records.

Issued at the start of the Great Depression, the records did not sell and did not lead to national recognition. Locally, House remained popular, and in the 1930s, together with Patton's associate Willie Brown, he was the leading musician of Coahoma County. There he was a formative influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. In 1941 and 1942, House and the members of his band were recorded by Alan Lomax and John W. Work for the Library of Congress and Fisk University. The following year, he left the Delta for Rochester, New York, and gave up music.

In 1964, a group of young record collectors discovered House, whom they knew of from his records issued by Paramount and by the Library of Congress. With their encouragement, he relearned his repertoire and established a career as an entertainer, performing for young, mostly white audiences in coffeehouses, at folk festivals and on concert tours during the American folk music revival, billed as a 'folk blues' singer. He recorded several albums, and some informally taped concerts have also been issued as albums. House died in 1988.^[3] In 2017, his single 'Preachin' the Blues' was inducted in to the Blues Hall of Fame.^[4]

Lowdown Dirty Dog Blues (1941 & 1942) 2000. Blues CD Son House About Product Images This image is a general representation of the item and the actual product may differ slightly in terms of color shading, logo.

Biography[edit]

Early life[edit]

Mississippi State Penitentiary, where House was confined

House was born in the hamlet of Lyon, north of Clarksdale, Mississippi,^[5] the second of three brothers, and lived in the rural Mississippi Delta until his parents separated, when he was about seven or eight years old. His father, Eddie House, Sr., was a musician, playing the tuba in a band with his brothers and sometimes playing the guitar. He was a church member but also a drinker; he left the church for a time, on account of his drinking, but then gave up alcohol and became a Baptist deacon. Young Eddie House adopted the family commitment to religion and churchgoing. He also absorbed the family love of music but confined himself to singing, showing no interest in the family instrumental band, and hostile to the blues on religious grounds.^[6]

When House's parents separated, his mother took him to Tallulah, Louisiana, across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg, Mississippi. When he was in his early teens, they moved to Algiers, New Orleans. Recalling these years, he would later speak of his hatred of blues and his passion for churchgoing (he described himself as 'churchy' and 'churchified'). At fifteen, probably while living in Algiers, he began preaching sermons.^[7]

At the age of nineteen, while living in the Delta, he married Carrie Martin, an older woman from New Orleans. This was a significant step for House; he married in church and against family opposition. The couple moved to her hometown of Centerville, Louisiana, to help run her father's farm. After a couple of years, feeling used and disillusioned, House recalled, 'I left her hanging on the gatepost, with her father tellin' me to come back so we could plow some more.' Around the same time, probably 1922, House's mother died. In later years, he was still angry about his marriage and said of Carrie, 'She wasn't nothin' but one of them New Orleans whores'.^[8]

House's resentment of farming extended to the many menial jobs he took as a young adult. He moved frequently, on one occasion taking off to East Saint Louis to work in a steel plant. The one job he enjoyed was on a Louisiana horse ranch, which later he celebrated by wearing a cowboy hat in his performances.^[9] He found an escape from manual labor when, following a conversion experience ('getting religion') in his early twenties, he was accepted as a paid pastor, first in the Baptist Church and then in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. However, he fell into habits which conflicted with his calling—drinking like his father and probably also womanizing. This led him after several years of conflict to leave the church, ceasing his full-time commitment, although he continued to preach sermons from time to time.^[10]

Blues performer[edit]

In 1927, at the age of 25, House underwent a change of musical perspective as rapid and dramatic as a religious conversion. In a hamlet south of Clarksdale, he heard one of his drinking companions, either James McCoy or Willie Wilson (his recollections differed), playing bottleneck guitar, a style he had never heard before. He immediately changed his attitude about the blues, bought a guitar from a musician called Frank Hoskins, and within weeks was playing with Hoskins, McCoy and Wilson. Two songs he learned from McCoy would later be among his best known: 'My Black Mama' and 'Preachin' the Blues'. Another source of inspiration was Rube Lacey,^[11] a much better known performer who had recorded for Columbia Records in 1927 (no titles were released) and for Paramount Records in 1928 (two titles were released). In an astonishingly short time, with only these four musicians as models, House developed to a professional standard a blues style based on his religious singing and simple bottleneck guitar style.^[12]

Around 1927 or 1928, he had been playing in a juke joint when a man went on a shooting spree, wounding House in the leg, and he allegedly shot the man dead.^[13] House received a 15-year sentence at the Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman Farm), of which he served two years between 1928 and 1929.^[14] He credited his re-examination and release to an appeal by his family, but also spoke of the intervention by the influential white planter for whom they worked.^[15] The date of the killing and the duration of his sentence are unclear; House gave different accounts to different interviewers, and searches by his biographer Daniel Beaumont found no details in the court records of Coahoma County or in the archive of the Mississippi Department of Corrections.^[16]

Upon his release in 1929 or early 1930, House was strongly advised to leave Clarksdale and stay away.^[17] He walked to Jonestown and caught a train to the small town of Lula, Mississippi, sixteen miles north of Clarksdale and eight miles from the blues hub of Helena, Arkansas. Coincidentally, the great star of Delta blues, Charley Patton, was also in virtual exile in Lula,^[17] having been expelled from his base on the Dockery Plantation. With his partner Willie Brown, Patton dominated the local market for professional blues performance. Patton watched House busking when he arrived penniless at Lula station, but did not approach him. He observed House's showmanship attracting a crowd to the café and bootleg whisk

Son House The Original Delta Blues Rar