Skip James & the ‘Old, Weird America’

By David Ross. I wonder how much of my sensibility is traceable to the 1982 edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide, edited by Dave Marsh and John Swenson. I was a twelve year old oddly drawn to what Greil Marcus calls the “old, weird America,” and the guide pointed toward an American shadow culture of the swamps, the back roads, the cotton fields, the mountains, the bordellos, the late-night clubs on the wrong side of the tracks. The music was important to me, but even more important  was the writing of critics like Marsh, Marcus, and Lester Bangs, which seemed to model a nerdy cool that was not entirely beyond my powers of imitation and which excitingly presupposed an American vitality and mysteriousness invisible to the teenage suburban eye.

With the guide in hand, I felt sure that the Brit-boy synth pop then dominating the charts – remember the Human League’s massively annoying “Don’t You Want Me”? – represented a momentary masochistic derangement (rather like communism) and not the human norm. This notion turned out to be only partially true – the great age of American music really was over – but it allowed me to grit my teeth and get through sixth grade.

I particularly remember the guide’s entry on Skip James (1902-1969), a Mississippi bluesman whose music had a strange ethereality and almost modernist abstraction, reversing the usual earthiness of the blues and turning it into something elegant and almost formal. These days his music puts me in mind of paintings from Picasso’s blue period. Wrote Marcus: “James’ high, ghostly voice pierces the night air – it always seems like night when these albums are playing – and his guitar shadows the moon.” This line thrilled me as a kind of poetry, and Skip James became – and remains – one of my touchstones. It really does seem like night when his albums play; his guitar really does seem to shadow the moon.

Here is the best of what little footage exists of James, from the film Devil Got My Woman: Blues at Newport 1966. And Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World pays homage to James here.

Posted on January 11th, 2011 at 2:20pm.