Seeking Son House…

When
the Beatles first visited America and were met at the airport by the media
hordes, they were asked what their plans were. Paul McCartney’s answer
included, “I’d like to see Muddy Waters.”

         A reporter asked, “Where’s
that?”

         McCartney responded, “Don’t you
even know who your own famous people are?”

         This apparent ignorance may seem hard
to understand. We now know a lot more about the roots of our popular music.
Rock music was still emerging at that time, and the reporter, like many people,
wasn’t aware that much of British Rock, in fact rock music in general, was
heavily influenced by old American blues singers.

         Shortly before he was murdered at age
29 — leaving a total estate of one well-worn guitar — blues legend Robert
Johnson recorded “Love In Vain” and “Walkin’ Blues.” These two blues classics
have since been recorded by the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, and Eric Clapton.

         McKinley Morganfield abandoned virtual
slave labor in Mississippi for the blues guitar, reverted to his childhood
nickname Muddy Waters, came north to the streets of Chicago, and penned the
song “Rollin’ Stone” in 1950, when Mick and the boys were still in grammar
school.

         The list goes on, of old black blues
men inspiring young white musicians.

         We can take this question of
inspirational hierarchy another step: If rock music on both sides of the
Atlantic was influenced by the likes of Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, who
influenced Muddy and Robert? Was there someone before them?

In 1981 I was asking myself this very question. I was a newly divorced
housepainter-freelance writer. My life was, in many ways, the living blues:
unpredictable weather, regular rejection slips, and a steady diet of blues
music. I not only listened to the blues, I hosted a weekly blues program on
WGMC 90.1 and 105.1 FM. This validated my infatuation with this whole genre of
hurting musicians.

         I dug through forgotten shelves in the
public library, ferreting out old blues recordings for my show. I perused album
liner notes, and pored over old music magazines on the microfiche until my head
hurt.

         There were, indeed, musicians who
represented the pre-Johnson-Waters wave of blues. One — identified by writers
across the board — drove home the point that I didn’t even know who my own famous people were.

         The man continually hailed as a
forerunner in the blues-to-rock evolution, through his influence on pre-World
War II musicians like Johnson and Waters, was Eddie J. “Son” House, Jr. What
was remarkable to me was that he had lived just across the river from my
Gregory Street apartment, in Corn Hill, a thousand miles from the Mississippi
plantation where he’d first picked up a guitar.

         In a 1950s Down Beat magazine interview, Muddy Waters stated that the biggest
musical influence in his life was Son House. As a teenager in the 1920s, Waters
would go to hear House sing and play in the roadside juke joints of
Mississippi. He approached Son one night between sets and asked if he could
join him on stage. House, more than 10 years his senior, told him to come back
when he was older.

         Robert Johnson also grew up in the
shadow of Son House. In his book, Searching
for Robert Johnson, Peter Guralnick identifies House as Johnson’s closest
influence. Johnson made it relatively big, recording in Dallas and performing
across the South. He played the open-tuned guitar, like House, and popularized
the “walking bass” style of guitar playing, now recognized as the
musical hook that drove early rock ‘n’ roll.

         Johnson was poisoned in 1938 by a
jealous husband, but Muddy Waters, with his House-style open-tuned electric
guitar, lived to achieve world fame in his own lifetime, in an age when radio
and mass-produced albums precipitated worldwide emulation by white rockers.

         Son House, a singing legend but not a
professional visionary, remained in the Yazoo River Delta region of
Mississippi, playing at rent parties and chicken barbecues, occasionally
recording for the limited “race market.” During this time, he was discovered by
John Lomax, who was conducting field recordings of authentic American musicians
for the Library of Congress.

         Then, right around 1940, Son House dropped
out of sight.

         A generation later, in 1964, college
student and blues aficionado Dick Waterman, captivated by recordings of Son
House’s poignant lyrics and powerful voice, wondered indeed: What did happen to
Son House? After his final exams, Waterman jumped in his Volkswagen and headed
south for Mississippi, where he drove dirt roads and walked plowed fields,
talking to farm workers in search of Son. He uncovered people who had known
Son, but no Son House.

         Waterman eventually found Son, not in
Mississippi, or even the South, but back up north in Rochester’s riverfront
Corn Hill neighborhood. After driving thousands of miles chasing false leads,
Waterman pulled up to 61 Greig Street in Rochester.

         In the liner notes for the album Son House: Father of Folk Blues,
Waterman describes that 1964 day as a warm, spring afternoon. He walked up to a
man sprawled on the front stoop who’d obviously spent much of his life living
the blues.

         Waterman eyed him hesitatingly,
“I’m looking for Son House.”

         The man worked himself upright, staring
at Waterman, and answered in almost question-like form, “I’m him.”

         Waterman was ecstatic. It’s not clear
how long it had been since Son had played, but Waterman worked with Son until
he was cranking out the blues with a youthful vigor and a matured voice. He
arranged for Son to appear at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1965, produced Son’s
Father of Folk Blues album, and set
Son up on a US-Canadian-European tour with Canned Heat.

         Then, following the hoopla of Son’s
rediscovery and a couple of years playing clubs and universities, the story of
Son House seems to end again, this time in the mid-’70s. He just up and
disappeared.

I’d purchased or taped virtually every recording of Son House’s spine-chillingly
deep baritone voice and had compiled a pretty complete picture of his life from
album jackets and books on music. But nowhere did I find the answer to the
question: “What happened to Son House?”

         Besides the library, I haunted record
stores for blues records to play during my radio show. The manager at Play It
Again Sam told me she thought Son House was dead. I assumed she was right, and,
distracted by a streak of good weather and several back-to-back painting jobs,
I let the question go.

         But one night on my blues show,
listening to my closing theme music — Son House’s a cappella chant, “Grinnin’
in Your Face” — I realized it would be sacrilegious to continue playing this
song without knowing what became of this man. I decided to find his house in
Corn Hill. There might be a clue there — papers left behind, an address….

         The next morning found me staring at
the empty lot at 61 Greig Street. Son’s house was gone. Then I remembered
something else the manager at Play It Again Sam told me: John Mooney, a young
blues singer from Honeoye Falls, had once been real close with Son. I’d chosen
to ignore this information, having ambivalent feelings about younger white men
interested in old black blues singers.

         I found the John Mooney Blues Band
playing 40 miles south of Rochester, in the Naples Hotel, where I cornered
Mooney between sets. He was pretty sure Son was alive and, last he knew, living
in Detroit. He pulled an address book from his guitar case and gave me Son’s
phone number.

         Two days elapsed before I mustered up
the courage to make the call. Son had likely died since he gave this number to
Mooney. If not, he wouldn’t want to bother with some guy from Rochester. I
waited for my housemates to leave before I placed the call, so they wouldn’t
witness my disappointment or rejection. I paced in the empty kitchen while I
listened to the phone ringing in Detroit. A woman answered, in a tone that said
she’d already seen and heard it all.

         Yes, she was Son’s wife. And yes, he
was alive. She consented to let me come and interview the then-79-year-old Son
for Upstate Magazine, the Democrat & Chronicle‘s old Sunday
supplement. She reluctantly agreed on a date. I said “Good-bye,” but
instead of responding with her own farewell, she yelled in the phone,
“…and they don’t allow no geetar playin’ here!”

Mark Sampson, introduced to me by a mutual acquaintance, was the only
other Rochesterian I’d found who shared my curiosity over the whereabouts of
Son House. Mark was a portrait photographer and a student of the blues. He also
owned two steel-bodied slide guitars, the type that Son played. Together we
headed out one Saturday at dawn with a full tank of gas, a hundred dollars, and
enough photographic equipment to shoot “The Complete History of the
Blues.”

         Nine hours later we were rolling down
Second Avenue in Detroit. The marquis of an old theater said the Bus Boys —
America’s only all-black rock band — were playing there. We parked in front
of a housing project and made our way across the front lawn.

         The whole world could probably see what
was on our minds. Mark’s well over six feet tall, and probably closer to seven
with his cowboy boots and hat. Carrying a shiny red metal guitar, camera, and
tripod, he was no small spectacle as he went first down the sidewalk and into
the lobby of the high-rise. I followed with another guitar and all that
mysterious stuff that goes with cameras.

         We squeezed onto the crowded elevator
where our co-riders — mostly very old and very short — were damned if they
were going to give an inch.

         We reached the fifth floor and backed
out of the elevator nodding our apologies to silent, staring faces. The
elevator door slid shut and we stood there in the quiet hallway. There it was:
right opposite the elevator, number 518, Son House’s door.

         We looked at each other.

         Mark said, “Well?”

         I knocked. Through the space under the
door I could see the shadow of feet approach the other side of the door and
stop. I straightened myself. This was my very last moment to imagine meeting
Son House, the man who’d already been discovered more times than America.

         The door opened and his wife, Evie,
placed herself in the open doorway. “What’s in it fer him?” she shot
at us, before we could even say “Hello.” Her arms were folded in
front of her chest, in a tone that said she already suspected the answer,
“nothing.”

         Not prepared for outright hostility, it
took me a moment to sputter “recognition.” Over her unmoving
shoulders I could see into the apartment. Son House sat facing us in a La-Z-Boy
chair, hair slicked down, hands resting perfectly on the arms of the chair,
shirt pressed, grinning in almost childlike anticipation.

         After listening to a few more of my
patronizing observations regarding the value of our visit, his wife saw there
was no way out and let us in on the condition we be brief.

The Son House who faced us that day did not have the strong, athletic veins
that once stood out in his forehead and his neck when he sang, as I’d seen in
documentary videos. He didn’t seem to be looking inside himself like he did on
stage. Nor did he look out and beyond us, his audience of two — like he did
when talking to a crowd, as if talking to someone not in the concert hall but
beyond, perhaps back on the Stovall Plantation in Mississippi.

         He was thin, his cheeks drawn in, and
he looked directly at us as if wanting very much to make human contact. The Son
House who faced us that day could barely speak, yet I could see in his
twinkling eyes the man who’d jammed with pre-war blues singers Charley Patton
and Willie Brown, toured two continents in the ’60s with Canned Heat, and
jammed again in Rochester in the ’70s, with musicians like Joe Beard, John
Mooney, Rockin’ Red Palmer, Aleks Disljenkovic, Ted Mosher, and others.

         This was clearly the man whose
penetrating baritone voice was known from Chicago, to London, to Rochester’s
Regular Restaurant at the Genesee Co-op. The man who for years had no address;
the man who didn’t discriminate between the components of the living blues:
singing, imbibing, panhandling, even pawning his guitar.

         That overcast Saturday, the man who
once told Muddy Waters to go away and come back in a few years struggled for
answers to my questions. Even words. I asked him which countries he’d played
in. He said, “Uh, ‘A’… it starts with ‘A’… uh, Africa.”

         “Austria,” his wife
corrected.

         A guitar made its way into his hands.
Determined to please us, his whole body stiffened in one mighty effort to
strike a chord. He shoved his feet straight out in front of him as if he were
slamming on the brakes of a car. But the only sound that came from the guitar
was a discordant clunk. As his left fingers became jammed between neck and the
strings, he winced in pain.

         Mark and I were both going to step
around the coffee table to his rescue when a small tremor shook his body, like
a dying cat I once saw, and a long gob of spit drooled down from the corner of
his mouth and splashed off the front of the shiny metal guitar.

         Evie, who’d sat quietly on the
sidelines like a mother watching a child go through a painful but necessary
medical procedure, intervened and now the guitars sat silently on the floor,
like ships out of water. No longer musical instruments, but painful indicators
of how our self-serving idealism had gone 180 degrees: undoing, rather than
summing up Son House’s power.

         The room fell silent. Mark had already
taken pictures. I could hear through the thin walls a toilet flush in the next
apartment. The handwriting was on all four walls: our long-awaited meeting with
Son House was over.

         I was trying to couch a proper goodbye
when Son slowly squeaked forward on the worn vinyl, mustered up some strength,
and strung together seven words in a rich and powerful a cappella:
“Don’tcha my-yind people grinnin’ in yo-ho faaace!” — lines from
the very chant I used to open and close my blues program.

         I recalled at that moment something
John Mooney had told me: “Son didn’t sing or play in the house — his wife
wouldn’t allow it.” Son had just crossed the line for us.

That evening Mark and I crossed the bridge from Detroit into Windsor, Ontario, to
take the shortcut through Canada, back to Buffalo, and home again to Rochester.

         Mark stuffed a tape in the deck, turned
it way up, and proceeded to fall sound asleep. Neil Young was wailing,
“Hey, hey, my, my, rock and roll will never die… it’s better to burn
out, than it is to rust…”

         I decided to pull over and sleep for a
while. As I clicked my seat back my last thoughts were about Son House. In the
words of Rochester blues guitarist Aleks Disljenkovic, Son House’s voice was so
powerful, “He didn’t need a PA system, his voice would pin you to the wall.”

         I imagined how he might still be
singing in that voice, laying down 12-bar blues riffs on his National
steel-bodied acoustic slide guitar, laying down rows of goose bumps on the
flesh of men and women alike, if he hadn’t ruined his life with booze.

         We’d wanted to raise Son up out of
obscurity and give him the recognition he deserved from the citizens of
Rochester, where he lived almost invisibly for three decades. We could do that
now. We could tell his story.

         We’d also driven to Detroit to show him
our appreciation and admiration. I’d selfishly thought if only I could meet Son
House and speak to him, I would somehow be rescued from my own life, be more
savvy of the world he and I both struggled with. I would have peace.

         My needs blinded me from the
possibility that he needed me as much as I him. He was one of the most powerful
people I’d met. And he was also one of the littlest. That day I reached a new
understanding of the blues.

         Seven years later, on October 19, 1988,
Eddie James “Son” House, Jr. disappeared for the last time, quietly,
in his sleep, in Detroit’s Harper Hospital. Estimates of his birth date vary,
but the most often cited year is 1902. This would have made him 86. He outlived
his two notable protégés, Robert Johnson (1911 to 1938) and Muddy Waters (1915
to 1983), and one Beatle, John Lennon (1940 to 1980).

         The spirit of Son House is still very
much alive. The Corn Hill house Son lived in when discovered by Dick Waterman
back in 1964 was across the street from Joe Beard, another Mississippian who
came north to find work.

         Joe Beard is now a bluesman in his own
right. Joe’s son, Chris Beard, is a recent Handy Award nominee for Best New
Blues Artist. John Mooney, who gave me Son’s phone number, lives in New
Orleans, where he fronts the Bluesiana Band and is a recent Handy Award nominee
for Best Acoustic Blues. Aleks Disljenkovic is a guitarist, and Ted Mosher a
bassist, in local blues bands including The White Hots, The Trendsetters, and
The Beale Street Blues Band.

For
readers who haven’t yet discovered Son House, Jeff Harris and Gary Reinhardt
will play House’s music on their Bad Dog Blues show, WITR 89.7 FM, on Sunday,
February 1, starting at 1 p.m.

This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 3, 2004.