Featured Musician: Son House, Father of the Delta Blues

     Companions of the Garden is in part a rumination on what it means to be American. It takes acute fascination in American culture in general, and Southern culture in particular, of which music is an inextricable part.
     In this regard, I’m launching a weekly “featured musician” posting, where I explore an American artist whose work has in some way informed our national identity.
     Eddie J. House, Jr., known commonly as Son House, is the perfect place to start.  Heralded as the “Father of Delta Blues,” his music offers a stunning encapsulation of the magic of the Deep South, raising to its zenith what could well be my favorite musical genre, a sound inextricably linked with the culture of his native Mississippi.   
     House made his initial recordings in the 1930s and 40s, including for the Library of Congress in 1941. He then disappeared from the public eye for much of the two decades that followed, to be rediscovered by blues enthusiasts and coaxed from de facto retirement in the mid-1960s for a renewed series of recordings and performances.
     Blues critic Tony Russell, in connection with the Sony collection "Mojo Workin’: Blues for the Next Generation," writes that “many blues artists make music that is personal and individual, yet at the same time implies the history that lies behind and around it.  Listening to Son House is not simply listening to a man singing with a guitar, but hearing, through him and in the air about him, other voices and other guitars, so that we can reconstruct in our imagination the landscape of a vanished South, the world of the first blues singers.”
     I cite Son House directly in Companions of the Garden. He provides musical undertone to one of the novel’s occasional stream-of-consciousness passages, which takes place as the characters drive through the forests of western Mississippi: 

“Half-waltz, half-roll.  The skin of a dead monarchal gator animated with riverboat grease dancing on the surface of an ocean of sweat and blood and runoff and atop it the man and his slide guitar, the high notes tear inducing and saliva coaxing in the same amorous breath.  High chords on “Pearline” like a loving slap from the vengeful, interspersed with melody.  Blastchord-tune-blastchord-tune-blastchord-deltadawn wetness flooding runoff swamp dust cotton choke cotton choke. . . . A studio and a river inside it.  Oh, Pearline.”

     Long story short: the man is amazing.