Son House: John the Revelator

I haven’t been able to get this tune out of my head in recent days. It’s simple, hypnotic, urgent, and beautiful. It’s not a blues, but rather a traditional, call-and-response gospel song, which House sings accompanied only by his own hand-claps. The chorus:

Who’s that writin’?
John the Revelator.
Tell me, who’s that writin’?
John the Revelator
Tell me, who’s that writin’?
John the Revelator wrote the book of the seventh seal.

The verses narrate Adam’s shame, Christ in the Garden of Gesthsemane, and Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the resurrected Christ. Despite the song’s simplicity, the parataxis is theologically sophisticated because it suggests the connection of these moments through salvation history and the eschatology of Revelation.

This song is especially moving if we consider Son House’s profound ambivalence about his blues singing. Though one of the most influential and powerful of the Delta blues singers, he considered the genre sinful, while he spent much of his life in an alcoholic haze, yearning for the life of the church.

One can feel that yearning in the performance of this song… though for the next tune he would inevitably pick up his “devil’s instrument,” the guitar, and sing of more worldly yearnings…

Shout-Out to Alex Ross and Ted Gioia

My heartiest congratulations to Alex Ross! His great book The Rest is Noise has won the Guardian First Book Award.

I’ve lately been thinking about Alex’s book as I have read Ted Gioia’s brilliant account of the Delta Blues. The highest compliment I can give to any writing about music is that it makes me want to listen. Both books by that standard rate as resounding successes… my wallet is considerably lighter from the recordings I’ve bought because of them.

The two books make for interesting comparison because of the radically different yet parallel stories they tell of the twentienth century: one plays across a vast geographical and cultural canvass, while the other narrates the insular and obscure; one gives us music that is relentlessly pushing forward into new terrain (and often, in the process, alienating much of its audience), while the other describes a genre that greets innovation with trepidation and is constantly looking to the past for authenticity. Perhaps most surprising is that one tells the story of music of great refinement and sophisitication, much of which (always with important and significant exceptions) becomes culturally marginalized, while the other relates the emergence of a music that would become culturally dominant and ubiquitous in its influence from the poorest, least educated, and most systematically marginalized regional population of twentieth-century America.

I’ll be writing more about this comparison later. But for now, I’ll just say that both of these books will repay multiple readings and will inspire much thoughtful listening.

Delta Blues

I’m delving into Ted Gioia’s exciting new book on the Delta Blues. A passage:

Put a pin in the map for every early citing of blues music in the United States before 1915, and you find a strange, almost unprecedented pattern. The blues came to life in the poorest parts of the country, in communities almost completely cut off from the hustle and bustle of city life, in groups largely untouched by outside influences. Tracing the early history of the blues takes us to places seldom visited by music historians… to plantations and prisons, and townships so small that even the mapmakers sometimes forgot they existed. (15)