Hard Time Killing Floor Blues

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Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" (download until 2/21/09), from "The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James."

I remember reading when I was a kid, about 17 or so, some book about Delta blues, I think Robert Palmer the critic's "Deep Blues," or possibly it was Elijah Wald's "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues," or something like that, but I kept getting these impressions of Skip James as someone too hip and mysterious even for me to connect to. At least, that might explain why I didn't actually hear Skip James until I was 35. Nobody I knew had a Skip James record, even though his praises were sung in every single book I'd ever read about blues of any sort.

I got into Delta blues because a friend had gone from Clapton to Robert Johnson--this was back when it was cool to think that Clapton was actually serious, and anyway we were only in high school--and told me that I absolutely had to listen to Robert Johnson. I did, and was of course bowled over, though I still expected a type of virtuosity from "blues" that Robert Johnson didn't actually provide. Fast guitar licks like the white players play, etc. But that said I had ears enough to know beauty when I heard it, and while it took me years to really connect to what Robert Johnson had to offer, and especially what distinguished him from so many other players--it's his writing and arranging, how he creates structures as solid as Ellington's using just guitar and voice--I certainly loved his music from the start.

So when I say like so many hipster cognoscenti that my favorite Delta blues player is Skip James, I really want to stress that I came to this conclusion in a very un-hipsterish way and I take nothing away from any other players in the process. It's more about taste than quality, and it took me almost 20 years to actually hear Skip James from when I started listening to Delta blues. Not cool.

I got the Skip James record while in the middle of reading the aforementioned Elijah Wald book, on his recommendation. He sounded intriguing--a bit off his rocker given what were described as two completely different styles of blues on guitar and piano. Indeed, it is remarkable that he took such different approaches on the two instruments, but I'd be hard pressed to imagine that there are many people who prefer his piano work to his guitar work. I certainly don't, and while I don't skip the piano tracks when I listen to him, I wouldn't listen to him if all there were were the piano tracks. It's not entirely an accident that when he got "rediscovered" (what a pernicious term) in the 1960's, he got gigs as a guitarist rather than a pianist.

It's on pieces like this one that seem to me of such high quality that one can't describe them--I'll try in some way--but that they simply exist. I have never come across a more elegant and well-put lyric in my entire life. Worth including in their entirety:

Hard time here and everywhere you go
Times is harder than ever been before

And the people are driftin' from door to door
Can't find no heaven, I don't care where they go

Hear me tell you people, just before I go
These hard times will kill you just dry long so

Well, you hear me singin' my lonesome song
These hard times can last us so very long

If I ever get off this killin' floor
I'll never get down this low no more
No-no, no-no, I'll never get down this low no more

And you say you had money, you better be sure
'Cause these hard times will drive you from door to door

Sing this song and I ain't gonna sing no more
Sing this song and I ain't gonna sing no more
These hard times will drive you from door to door

I think much of the talk about Skip James' mysteriousness is a reflection of his work rather than his actual life, even if he hesitated to give too much biographical detail to people. I imagine, as I'm sure many people do, ghosts, like Buddhist wandering ghosts, drifting door to door, finding no heaven, when he sings that line. Find me a more powerful couplet in any music you choose and I'll buy the beer.

What nails it is that this is a completely concrete tune. He wrote this in 1930, and it's about current events, and I imagine that this tune pops into my head so often these days because of the historical resonance of the Great Depression with its current sequel. It takes a powerful mind to perceive in one's immediate world--surely James in describing people wandering door to door saw a lot of that in daily life, because it was happening all the time in 1930. It's more than seeing the transcendental in the mundane. Seeing the transcendental in the mundane is a very false kind of depth, or rather its not depth at all, only smugness. Skip James knows there's no mundane and there's no transcendental at all. Things are just there and he finds the words to pass them on.