His early work is like a beginners' guide to the Delta style: one of those really good beginners’ guides that have cartoons in them. All that stuff I was talking about before: the slide, the pumping rhythm, it’s all there in its most obvious form in Son House’s music. His music also has a really strong rhythmic feel that I can only describe as ‘propulsive’: like he really felt it. It just keeps lurching. He likes to howl too. It’s a real manly howl, not a falsetto or anything. The howl doesn’t sound like Howling Wolf (who I love too), it’s all passionate and primal, like listening to some sort of earth elemental. The other Joe, my co-writer, gets bombarded with a lot of blues, what with knowing me, and he’s kind enough to tolerate most of it, but Son House is the only one he clearly feels in his gut.
And whereas almost every bluesman nods every so often, there’s not a single weak early Son House track. That said, there are only six early Son House tracks.
One of the greatest bluesmen ever had only six tracks to his name. Oh yeah, and of those six, three of them are just continuations of the first: pt 2s (a 78 only allowed you about 3 minutes per track, so having continuing sides is really common). So really, if you want the blues at its most primal, just hit up his three songs, in this order: ‘My Black Mama, pt 1’, ‘Preaching the Blues, pt 1’ and ‘Dry Spell Blues, pt 1’. Actually, when you hear the recordings he made after he was rediscovered, when he could play as long as he liked, you realise that he only really had the one song. It was just him pumping away at his guitar and shouting whatever lyric popped into his head at the time for as long as you gave him. House toured with Patton, which was an interesting combo. Like I said before, Charley was a coked up midget loud mouth who’d do anything for attention. Son House was a different kettle of chitlins. He was tall and scraggly, and pretty gloomy when not in drunk. Legend states that he had been a preacher in his early life, before taking up the blues. Could be true, after all, this was before XBoxs and internet memes, so there wasn’t much to do except for play blues and testify to God. Anyway, at a certain point, he gave up preaching and took up blues, which at this point was considered sinners’ music. He doesn’t sound too torn up about it though (check ‘Preaching the Blues’ for some genuine cynicism). In fact, he gives almost no musical time to God, unlike Patton, who liked to play at being the sinner.
Shortly after taking up the blues full time, he killed a man in some juke joint. ‘Killed a man’ is bad blues journalism for murdered, by the way. Loads of the blues greats were murderers, but it doesn’t do to dwell on it. For some reason in the 60s people felt that bluesmen had valuable life experiences that we could all learn from: that’s why they always dwell on the poverty and the racism that they suffered – it makes it look like these musicians overcame their surroundings to become great souls or some such fuckshit, beatnik nonsense.
That’s why no bluesmen ever ‘murdered’ anyone, they all just ‘killed a man’. For some reason, that's okay. Anyway, Son House killed his man and served time, and when he got out he hoboed round Mississippi, teaming up with Charley Patton and Willie Brown. This was probably pretty lucrative for House, because Patton was a big enough draw to actually sell gig tickets, unlike practically every other Delta bluesman whose function was providing background music in dive bars. They played together for a while, bickering the whole time. Son House got to record his absolutely demonic music off the back of the Patton connection, but the music didn’t really sell. It was too much even for blues fans at the height of the rural boom, back when the blues fans still liked it really raw. Then the depression hit and, if no one was recording Patton, no one would touch House. After Patton’s death, Son House packed it in and disappeared.
In 1964, Son House was unearthed by researchers as part of the blues revival. He was working in New York, and had no idea that anyone was still listening to country blues. He certainly wasn’t at this point.
He claimed to have not touched a guitar in years, but Son House liked to tell stories. When given a guitar, he played a little jump blues, which didn’t impress the researchers. So Alan Wilson from 60s white boy blues band Canned Heat was brought in to teach Son House how Son House really played. Pretty cynical stuff, but unlike every other blues cadaver unearthed in the 60s, Son House’s later work is really good. Death Letter Blues, recorded in 1965, is just about my favourite blues track ever. It’s really a rehash of his earlier three songs, but with actual production and the sort of blundering raggedness that only an elderly alcoholic can really pull off. By this point, he’d really learnt how raw slide guitar can sound. Late-period House is perfect if you’re a John Lee Hooker fan or if you like your blues to sound African. 
House lived for another ten years, during which he had plenty of time to fill researchers’ heads with all kinds of made up nonsense, chiefly about Robert Johnson, whom he’d met once or twice when Johnson was very young. In fact, Son House is the source for the famous myth that Robert Johnson sold his soul at the crossroad in exchange for musical genius.
Where did House get the Johnson/Devil myth? From another Johnson. Tommy Johnson, the third person of the holy trinity of Mississippi Delta blues. Stay put.
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