| I'm so glad, and I am glad I am glad, I am glad I don't know what to do Don't know what to do I don't know what to do I'm tired of weepin', tired of moanin' Tired of groanin' for you And I'm so glad, I am glad I am glad, I'm glad I'm tired of weepin', tired of moanin' Tired of groanin' for you And I'm so glad and I am glad I am glad, I'm glad |
I'm so tired of moanin', tired of groanin' Tired of moanin' for you I'm so glad, I am glad I am glad, I'm glad I don't know what to do Don't know what to do I don't know what to do I'm so tired, indeed I am tired I am tired And I'm so glad, I am glad I am glad, I'm glad I don't know what to do Don't know what to do I don't know what to do I'm tired of weepin', tired of moanin' Tired of groanin' for you And I'm so glad, I am glad I am glad, I'm glad |
I'm so tired, I am tired I'm tired I'm tired of weepin', tired of moanin' Tired of groanin' for you I'm so glad, I am glad I'm glad, I'm glad Don't know what to do Don't know what to do Don't know what to do |
Take away Skip James' guitar playing and his unforgettable voice, and it would be surprising if these lyrics made you pause. Yet hear it … and marvel. No wonder Guy Blakeslee (Entrance) covers it, and no wonder it caught the attention of Cream way back in '66 (on the album, 'Fresh Cream'). In Wim Wenders' film, The Soul of a Man (Wim Wenders' own site has this page about it and there's some further background/detail here), part of the Martin Scorsese series, The Blues, Beck plays a cover version. (I came across coversproject.com in the course of looking up references online to James. What a good idea. I hope it sees the light of day again.)
I've read:
"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." memorable tv
Memorable tv also has a good, short résumé of Skip James' life: it's not a happy story. (There's a little more detail at roadhouseblues.) There's a long essay online about Skip James by Matt Lohr at The Blue Highway. It's at The Blue Highway that I found links to many essays about the Blues, and this map:
Matt Lohr writes (and I'll quote this at length as the argument is quite dense at this point; but there's much more to be read at the link above):
As Stephen Calt emphasizes in I'd Rather Be The Devil, James' music deviated from both the formal standards of blues and the idiosyncratic style of his native state in several ways. The most overtly atypical tool utilized by James in the creation of his sound was the "Bentonia tuning". According to Calt, James learned this tuning, which came to bear the name of his hometown, from an itinerant musician named Henry Stuckey, who had himself picked it up from black soldiers, likely from the Bahamas, whom he met while stationed in France during World War I. In "concert pitch tuning" for blues guitar, the strings are tuned in a E-A-D-G-B-E pattern, creating a natural C tonality considered "standard" by most blues musicians. When a guitar is tuned in the open-string "Bentonia" style, the resulting pattern is E-B-E-G-B-E, which, provided the G string is not raised to G sharp, creates an E minor tonality. The result of this "cross-note" tuning (a term coined by James) is an off-center sound with an unmistakably dark undercurrent, a sound that can be heard most vividly in the bottom-scraping bass notes and chilling ascending treble figures of James' "Devil Got My Woman". Though James used this tuning sparingly (only two songs from the 1931 sessions, "Devil" and "Hard Times Killing Floor Blues", were performed in this minor-key tuning), the strikingly ethereal sadness it produced is so unique within the blues repertoire that he has become inextricably associated with it. The "Bentonia tuning" is Skip's, and Skip's alone.
In addition to the E-minor melancholia of the "Bentonia tuning", James created other haunting musical effects through idiosyncratic utilization of the blues musician's more quotidian tools and techniques. In his original compositions, James forsook both the "rapping" (strumming) guitar style popular during his youth and the telltale sound of Mississippi blues, with its strangulated vocals and thumping, heavily rhythmic musical accompaniment. Instead, James developed a finger-picking style similar to that of classical guitarists, plucking the strings with his fingernails instead of thumping them with the fleshy pads of the fingers themselves and thus achieving what Giles Oakley describes as an "icy precision" by prominently isolating individual notes, rather than blending them into the rhythmic melange commonly found in Mississippi blues. This separation of notes had various effects on James' tunes: in his 1960s recording of "Hard Times Killing Floor Blues", the sparse arrangement of notes within the playing imparts a stark quality to the music that reflects the desolate lives of the characters foregrounded by the song's lyrics, while the rapid-fire 1931 recording of "I'm So Glad" achieves its considerable tension primarily because we can hear literally every note that James is whirling through in this display of instrumental virtuosity. Interestingly, there are several songs within the James repertoire, the bulk of them recorded after the rediscovery, which adhere to a more traditional style of playing. The most notable of these is "Drunken Spree", which James learned in his youth from Henry Stuckey and which he played in a style not far removed from the "rapping" fashion in which he had originally heard it performed. Rather than detracting from the power and importance of James' stylistic diversions, these more traditional tunes are in fact crucial to appreciating the singularities of the James oeurve, for they demonstrate that James possessed considerable knowledge of and facility with the more common styles of blues and folk music, and thus illustrate that the bizarre stylistic decisions that informed the creation of James' sound were not the result of blind luck or musical ignorance, but were consciously considered artistic choices …
James' disturbing guitar sound was matched, and at times surpassed, by his distinctive and bizarre style on the piano. His keyboard work is distinguished by its almost avant-garde utilization of irregularly spaced breaks, helping to create within the music a gripping fits-and-starts tension, and his 1931 piano recordings possess a heavily percussive quality thanks to his complex, syncopated foot pounding, which was picked up by the primitive recording equipment … James was also skilled at using runs, fills, crescendo, and diminuendo to create musical power within his piano pieces, whether he was performing elaborate treble-to-bass runs on "Little Cow and Calf Is Gonna Die Blues" or creating the gut-shot effect of thudding rapid-fire bullet hits on "22-20 Blues". Despite the obvious effects of these outre stylistics, James' playing is nonetheless marked by a sense of classicism which lends his pieces a certain formal sophistication. He was one of the few blues multi-instrumentalists regarded as possessing equal technical facility on both of his chosen instruments, and whereas most bluesmen used their vocals primarily as an embellishment for their instrumental work, or vice versa, James' songs, whether performed on guitar or piano, are unmatched in the synergy achieved by the music and vocals. This reinforces the "art music" feel of James' work and allows the songs to achieve a cohesive, concrete power.
James' vocals strengthen the unnerving atmospheric bedrock laid down by his instrumentation. He does not sing in the growling, raw-throated style favored by such Mississippi contemporaries as Charley Patton and Son House. Instead, James' vocals are delivered in either a pure, keening falsetto or a flat, affectless tenor, both tones almost supernatural in their melancholic detachment and both expertly complementing the chillingly pristine tone of his guitar playing. This voice, eerily ethereal even on the 1931 Yazoo sides, had become even more high-pitched and ghostly by the time of the rediscovery-era recordings; the singing on the 1960s tracks conjures nothing so much as the wailing of a tormented Deep Southern banshee. James' vocal and instrumental affectations frequently render it difficult for the listener to become involved in the music on a direct emotional level, as one does when listening to a recording by Son House or Robert Johnson. James once stated that his music should "deaden the minds" of those who heard it, and indeed, the spiky instrumental techniques and frigid, disembodied voice displayed on his recordings create in the listener feelings of disquiet that linger like unsavory thoughts long after the music has come to a close.
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And there's this from pbs.org:
James developed a style quite unlike that of the Mississippi Delta near which he lived. … Few styles so efficiently convey a feeling of unease or haunted despair, making many of James' recorded performances, both in the 1920s and 1960s, some of the most harrowing in the blues, and some of the most evocative of the oppressive societal conditions in which he long lived.
PBS offers plenty of resources for the student (and teacher) of the Blues: secondary material in print and on the web; links to Blues compilation albums and films (the Scorsese cycle); links to US Blues societies. I'll be using the two essays, 'What is the Blues' and 'Understanding the 12-Bar Blues' in the classroom, and there's a raft of lesson plans that look as if they might provide some leads. There's even a lesson about Skip James (and Robert Johnson), which evidently builds upon the same material as Lohr used for his extended essay. (Discovering all of which led me to find out more about PBS — quite something — and this led me, in turn, to the European Blues Association.)
The sleeve notes to Document Records' Complete 1931 Paramount Recordings can be found on the old eyeneer site and the album is reviewed briefly here (Rambles). James' discography looks to be pretty well catalogued here. There are some Real Audio clips here. Wikipedia here.
Stephen Calt's I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (see above) is clearly a contentious work (and a very expensive, hard to find, out of print title). Browse the net and you'll find pro and contrary views about Calt's work. Ken Ficara's review is worth looking up. (These last three links came via the skipjames.info site, which has a number of other useful links as well as further information.) I'm very late in coming to Skip James and I'd really welcome anyone who knows or cares about Skip James chipping in here with their take on him, Calt's book, the Blues …
