FILTER REISSUES
A House through time
A previously unreleased performance from 1964: the show of a lifetime and significant historical document of the Delta blues revival. By David Fricke.
Val Wilmer/Redferns/Getty Images
Son House
★★★★
Forever On My Mind
EASY EYE SOUND. CD/DL/LP
IN JUNE 1964, Eddie James House Jr. was 62 years old and retired from his day job as a railroad porter and cook, now passing the time with his wife Evie, television and alcohol in Rochester, New York. He was also a rara avis, hiding in plain sight: as Son House (per the Jr.), a living witness and party to the birth of Delta blues –a primal force of knife-cut guitar, African-American story and human cry – in his native Mississippi in the 1920s. When three young, white, blues fans drove up to his apartment building that summer, keen to bring him back to light, House was decades away from his few, profound recordings: a handful of 78s for the iconic Paramount label in 1930; two sessions for folklorist Alan Lomax in 1941 and ’42, mostly unreleased at the time. He hadn’t touched a guitar in years.