Every Friday around 11 a.m. Central, it’s time for Classic Americana on Radio Heartland. We pull a special track from the archives or from deep in the shelves to spotlight a particular artist or song.

Son House is a foundational artist in the development of the blues. Born in 1902 in the very cradle of blues music — the Mississippi Delta — Son House (whose full name was Edward James House, Jr., hence his nickname “Son”) was an expert at slide guitar, often using a polished bottleneck or piece of copper pipe to find those minute scale intervals, lending a weepy, twangy sound to his guitar playing.

Son House moved to New Orleans for a time in his early adulthood where he played primarily church music, then returned to Mississippi in 1927, where he returned to playing the blues, often alongside another foundational blues artist, Charley Patton. House also was a guitar instructor; among his students was none other than the legendary Robert Johnson. In fact, it was a joking comment by Son House that started the legend that Robert Johnson had “sold his soul to the devil” (in fact Johnson had just practiced a lot).

In 1930, Son House accompanied Charley Patton to Grafton, Wisconsin, where the two recorded a number of tracks, both as a duo and as solo artists, for the Paramount label, one of the first to record rural blues music. In the early 1940s, Son House was recorded by the esteemed ethnomusicologist John Lomax for the Library of Congress.

By the mid-1940s, however, House, like many Black Americans living in the South at that time, followed the Great Migration to northern cities. House settled in Rochester, New York, where he worked as a railroad porter, largely setting aside music.

But it was the folk revival of the 1960s that rekindled interest in the music of Son House and his contemporaries. House spent much of the next 10 years performing concerts and festivals across North America and Europe; many of House’s 1930s and ‘40s recordings were resurfaced and reissued, and he recorded some new tracks, including “Dead Letter Blues,” recorded in Boston in 1965 when House was 63 years old.

Deteriorating health dictated House’s retirement from performing in 1974. He moved to Detroit and remained there until his death in 1988 at age 86.

External Links

Son House – Mississippi Blues Trail

Son House – Lower Mississippi Delta Region (National Park Service)