Son House: The Delta Preacher Who Defined Raw Blues
In May 1930, a Paramount Records producer traveled to Lula, Mississippi, looking for Charley Patton. He found Patton — and he found Son House. What he heard that day was a voice that sounded like it had been dragged out of the earth, paired with a slide guitar played hard enough to beat the devil out of every string. Weeks later, Son House was in a studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, cutting records that would reshape the course of American music. However, those records sold almost nothing. The Great Depression swallowed them whole. And Son House, likely the most powerful voice the Delta blues ever produced, walked away from recording for thirty-five years.
Indeed, his story is one of the wildest arcs in blues history — a preacher who turned to the blues, a recording artist who vanished into factory work, and a legend found sitting on the front steps of a Rochester, New York apartment in 1964. He didn’t just play the Delta blues. In essence, he was the Delta blues — the raw, sacred-and-profane heart of a tradition that would fuel rock and roll, the British Invasion, and wave after wave of players who never stopped chasing the sound he made.
Son House: Early Life in the Mississippi Delta
Eddie James House Jr. was born on March 21, 1902, near Lyon, Mississippi, deep in the cotton country between Clarksdale and the river. His father played tuba in a family band and also picked up a guitar now and then, but the household was firmly rooted in the Baptist church. As a result, the blues — the music of juke joints and Saturday nights — was not welcome in the House home.
When his parents split around 1909, his mother took him and his two brothers across the river to Tallulah, Louisiana. In his early teens, the family then moved to Algiers, in New Orleans. Through all these moves, the young House took in music at church — singing, but never touching an instrument. Remarkably, he was openly hostile toward the blues on religious grounds, a position that would make his eventual conversion all the more striking.
The Preacher Years
At fifteen, still living in Algiers, House experienced a religious conversion and began preaching sermons. He proved good at it — very good — and was taken on as a paid pastor, first in the Baptist Church and then in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. For nearly a decade, preaching was his life. He had the voice, the fire, and the rhythmic command that Baptist crowds demanded. Ultimately, those skills would carry over in ways he never saw coming.
The Conversion to Blues
Around 1927, in a small hamlet south of Clarksdale, House’s life changed for good. A drinking buddy — he named James McCoy in some accounts, Willie Wilson in others — was playing slide guitar with a bottleneck. He had never heard the sound before. It hit him, he later said, with the same force as his first brush with religion a decade earlier.
He was twenty-five years old. Most blues players started as children. Instead, House threw himself into learning guitar with a drive that bordered on obsession. McCoy became his main teacher, showing him how to tune by ear and playing through the songs that would become two of his best-known pieces: “My Black Mama” and “Preachin’ the Blues.” Additionally, slide player Rubin Lacy also shaped his growing feel for bottleneck work.
Sacred Versus Secular
The shift from preacher to bluesman was not clean. House drank, chased women, and played juke joints on Saturday nights — then preached on Sunday mornings. In other words, he lived two lives at once. In fact, the Baptist Church threw him out of the pulpit around 1934 for playing blues at parties. Yet he never fully gave up the sacred. When the spirit moved him, he preached. When the night called, he played. That tension between saving grace and sin would become the engine behind his most powerful work.
The 1930 Paramount Sessions
House’s first recordings remain among the most vital documents in Delta blues history. On May 28, 1930, he rode north to Grafton, Wisconsin, with Charley Patton, Willie Brown, and pianist Louise Johnson to cut sides for Paramount Records under Art Laibly.
He cut nine songs that day. Eight came out as singles, specifically “My Black Mama” (Parts 1 and 2), “Preachin’ the Blues” (Parts 1 and 2), and “Dry Spell Blues” (Parts 1 and 2). Notably, he nailed both parts of “Preachin’ the Blues” in single takes. A ninth track, “Walking Blues,” was also cut but never put out by Paramount — it lived on only as a test pressing found in 1989.
Commercial Failure, Artistic Triumph
These sides caught him at the peak of his powers. His voice — urgent, hard-hitting, soaked in the rhythms of the pulpit — sat atop guitar work that was at once crude and stunning. Nevertheless, the timing was awful. The records came out at the start of the Great Depression. They sold next to nothing.
As a result, the failure crushed House. He gave up on making records and went back to hard labor in the Delta, driving tractors on farms around Robinsonville and Lake Cormorant. Despite the poor sales, however, he and Willie Brown still held their standing as the top players in Coahoma County, Mississippi. The records had flopped, but the music itself was too good to deny.
Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress Recordings
In August 1941, folklorist Alan Lomax showed up in Mississippi with a 300-pound disc-cutting machine, doing field work for the Library of Congress and Fisk University. He tracked House down in Robinsonville, where the bluesman was still making a living driving tractors.
Lomax set up at Klack’s Store near Lake Cormorant, with Willie Brown on second guitar, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin on mandolin, and Leroy Williams on harmonica. A second session then followed on July 17, 1942, in Robinsonville. The store sat close to a rail line, and train noise bled into some tracks, but the playing was stunning. Indeed, Lomax later wrote that these sessions gave him the most memorable blues he ever caught on tape.
Among the songs were “Death Letter Blues” and “Walking Blues” — tracks that would become touchstones for blues fans and players for decades. Moreover, these field cuts caught something the Paramount sides had only hinted at: House’s full, raw force in a setting closer to the juke joints where he really played.
The Lost Decades: Rochester, New York
In 1943, Son House and his girlfriend left Mississippi for Rochester, New York. A friend who had already moved north helped him find work at a foundry. He then worked for the New York Central Railroad, then as a cook, then at various other jobs around the state. He married a woman named Evie and accordingly settled into a quiet working-class life.
For twenty-one years, he all but ceased to exist as a player. He made no records, gave no shows, and owned neither a guitar nor a phone. Willie Brown died during this stretch, in turn cutting his last direct tie to the Delta blues scene. Meanwhile, the folk music revival of the 1950s and early 1960s was picking up steam across America — and record hunters were starting to search for the old-time figures whose 78 RPM discs had become collectors’ gold.
Son House’s Musical Style
Son House played with a force that bordered on violence. In particular, his bottleneck slide guitar style was percussive and mean — he didn’t so much play the strings as attack them. The sound was raw, driving, and deeply physical.
Tuning and Technique
House liked open tunings, specifically open G (D-G-D-G-B-D) and open D. He wore a sawed-off bottle neck on his third finger, holding the slide at a sharp angle that sometimes made notes ring slightly off-pitch — a trait that, remarkably, only made the music hit harder. His right hand popped and struck the strings in rhythm, therefore giving his solo shows a weight that sounded like more than one man with one guitar.
The Preacher’s Voice
What truly set him apart, above all, was his voice. He brought the full weight of Baptist preaching to the blues — the rhythmic push, the rising heat, the deep belief that could pin a listener in place. His singing didn’t just ride along with the guitar; instead, it wrestled with it. On cuts like “Death Letter Blues,” for instance, you can hear the preacher and the bluesman fighting for control of the same throat, and neither one wins.
His lyrics dealt in betrayal, loss, hardship, and the pull between saving grace and earthly want. There was nothing fancy about his writing. In essence, every line hit home.
Son House’s Influence on Blues Legends
Robert Johnson
The story of Robert Johnson following House around as a teenager is one of the best-known tales in blues history. House first met Johnson around 1930 in Robinsonville, when the younger man could blow a harmonica well enough but played guitar so badly that crowds begged him to stop.
Then Johnson dropped out of sight for about two years. When he came back, he sat down and played for House and Willie Brown — and, as House told it, their jaws dropped. The change was stunning. Johnson had clearly spent those years woodshedding, likely roaming the Delta and soaking up everything he heard, including House’s own licks. The crossroads legend grew from that wild jump in skill, but the truth was simpler and also more striking: Johnson had worked like a man possessed, with House’s style as one of his main guides.
Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters named House as his single biggest influence in a 1950s talk with Down Beat. Waters heard him play in the Clarksdale area during the 1930s, and the mark was lasting. When Waters later cut sides for the Library of Congress and then for Chess Records in Chicago, his vocal phrasing and slide work consequently carried House’s DNA straight into the plugged-in Chicago blues that would fuel rock and roll.
The Wider Legacy
Son House’s reach, furthermore, went far beyond his peers. Howlin’ Wolf took cues from his raw vocal power. Elmore James similarly built a whole career on electric slide ideas that House had laid down on acoustic. Eric Clapton named him alongside Robert Johnson as the deepest root of blues guitar. The British blues wave that gave rise to the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Fleetwood Mac ultimately traced a straight line back through Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson to House’s front porch in Coahoma County.
Rediscovery in 1964
On the evening of June 23, 1964, three young blues fans — Nick Perls, Dick Waterman, and Phil Spiro — pulled up to 61 Greig Street in Rochester, New York, in a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. They had spent weeks combing the Deep South before learning that House had moved north decades before. Remarkably, they found him sitting on the front steps of his building. He was in his early sixties, out of work, and didn’t even own a guitar.
The timing carried a terrible weight. As Waterman later recalled, the day they learned House was in Rochester was the same day three civil rights workers — Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner — were murdered in Mississippi. Two days later, they were knocking on House’s door.
The Comeback
With help from Waterman, who became his manager, House began relearning his own songs. A young player named Alan Wilson — who would later co-found Canned Heat — also proved key to this process, in effect teaching House his own music. The irony was sharp: a twenty-something white kid helping a sixty-something Delta blues master recall the songs he had made three decades before.
By 1965, Son House was playing the Newport Folk Festival and cutting tracks for Columbia Records. The sessions, run by the great John Hammond, gave up twenty-one songs. Nine came out that year as “The Legendary Son House: Father of the Delta Blues” (Columbia CS 9217). The other twelve takes and unheard cuts, however, didn’t surface until 1992 as “Father of Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions.” He also played Carnegie Hall that year — a stage hard to picture from the cotton fields and juke joints where he had first played.
Son House’s Key Recordings
Understanding Son House means hearing the recordings across the three clear phases of his career:
The 1930 Paramount sides — in particular “My Black Mama” and “Preachin’ the Blues” — catch a young man at full vocal and bodily power. These are fierce, tight songs that pack a huge range of feeling into three-minute 78 RPM sides.
The 1941-1942 Library of Congress cuts, by contrast, offer a looser, more open player. Freed from the clock of paid studio time, he stretches out. “Death Letter Blues” from these sessions is, without question, among the most powerful solo blues takes ever put on tape.
The 1965 Columbia sessions, in turn, show an older, sometimes shaky House finding his way back to his own gifts. The playing lacks the raw body power of the early sides, yet it gains something else — a worn-in weight, the feel of a man who has lived every word he sings.
Honors, Later Years, and Death
Son House was inducted into the Blues Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, recognizing his foundational importance to the genre. Furthermore, in 2017, his composition “Preachin’ the Blues” received its own Hall of Fame induction.
House’s last public performance took place in Toronto in 1974. He then moved from Rochester to Detroit in 1976 and spent his final years struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. He died of laryngeal cancer on October 19, 1988, in Detroit, at eighty-six years old.
Essential Listening
For newcomers, start with the 1965 Columbia album. “Father of the Delta Blues” is the easiest way in. It’s also the record that brought him back. Then work backward to the Library of Congress sessions. Those 1941-1942 field cuts are raw and unfiltered. They represent his artistic peak. After that, seek out the 1930 Paramount sides. Various compilations carry them. “Death Letter Blues” is, above all, essential. Add “Preachin’ the Blues” and “My Black Mama” from there.
Son House Discography
1930 Paramount Recordings
Paramount Records, 1930 — includes “My Black Mama,” “Preachin’ the Blues,” and “Dry Spell Blues” (each released in two parts)
Library of Congress Field Recordings
The Complete Library of Congress Sessions, 1941-1942 — Recorded by Alan Lomax; released by Travelin’ Man Records, 2000
Columbia Records
The Legendary Son House: Father of the Delta Blues — Columbia CS 9217, 1965
Father of Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions — Columbia, 1992 (2-CD reissue with 12 previously unreleased tracks)
Live Recordings
Forever on My Mind — Recorded November 23, 1964, Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana
Son House At Home: The Legendary 1969 Rochester Sessions
Notable Compilations
Raw Delta Blues: The Very Best of the Delta Blues Master
Delta Blues and Spirituals — Originally recorded 1941-1942
Various appearances on blues anthology collections including Vanguard’s Newport Folk Festival recordings
