“Devil Got My Woman” - Skip James (1931)
Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James was probably one of the most influential of the early American blues recording artists. His style of guitar playing would go on to be emulated by many other blues guitarists and his songs would later be covered by such artists as Cream and Beck among many others.
Skip James was born near Bentonia, Mississippi on June 21, 1902. His father was a converted bootlegger turned preacher. As a youth, James heard local musicians such as Henry Stuckey and brothers Charlie and Jesse Sims and began playing the organ in his teens. He worked on road construction and levee-building crews in his native Mississippi in the early 1920s, and wrote what is perhaps his earliest song, “Illinois Blues”, about his experiences as a laborer. Later in the ’20s he sharecropped and made bootleg whiskey in the Bentonia area. He began playing guitar in open D-minor tuning and developed a three-finger picking technique that he would use to great effect on his recordings. In addition, he began to practice piano-playing, drawing inspiration from the Mississippi blues pianist Little Brother Montgomery.
James was a very good pianist and the one and only session that James recorded before his “rediscovery” in 1964 saw him playing piano as well as guitar. He played piano in a blues/barrelhouse style. James’ biggest piano mentor was a middle aged whorehouse pianist named Will Crabtree. James met Crabtree around 1918 or so and soon began playing the piano in the whorehouse himself during Crabtree’s intermissions. Later, in the late 1920’s, James would again work as a whorehouse pianist in Memphis for $1 an hour. Throughout his life James was known to have regarded women with suspicious contempt and perhaps this contempt originated from his time working in whorehouses. I don’t know.
Skip James was also, in my opinion, one of the most colorful personalities in a profession full of colorful personalities. Besides being somewhat mistrustful of women he was known as a extremely cynical and secretive man who intensely disliked associating with other people. As quoted in the Yazoo Record collection of his early recordings: “He was seemingly wary of the entire human race, several members of which he had coolly eliminated in shoot-outs. He was mistrustful of merriment: once he passed a caravan of cars departing from a wedding. When he heard the honking, he said, with no attempt at humor: “Bet you won’t hear that when they get divorced”“.
As mentioned earlier James recorded only one recording session for Paramount Records before his rediscovery in 1964. The session consisted of 26 songs and took place at Paramount’s studio in Grafton, Wisconsin sometime in 1931. Unfortunately for James his records hit the market just as the Great Depression was starting to really affect the recording industry. He gave up music and became an ordained minister in both the Baptist and Methodist denominations.
It was the “rediscovery” of both Skip James and Son House around the same time that lead to the “Blues Revival” movement of the early 1960’s. In July 1964 James, along with other rediscovered performers, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. Throughout the remainder of the decade, he recorded for the Takoma, Melodeon, and Vanguard labels and played various engagements until his death on October 3, 1969 from cancer.
“Devil Got My Woman” was later covered by Beck on his “Jackass” CD Single. Beck also covered Skip James’ “He’s A Mighty Good Leader” on his album “One Foot In The Grave”.
