Skip James — Today! (2024 Bluesville Remaster)
Qobuz reissue review (June 2024)
The mid-20th century blues revival seems to have become largely identified with the style and personality of just a few major artists, primarily those that took their Mississippi Delta blues and evolved it into the “city blues” of Chicago and New York. As it was that style that would, in turn, provide a catalyst for the British blues-rock scene that spawned the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, as well as homegrown practitioners like Canned Heat, it is often thought of as capital-B blues. However, there was a large swath of enormously influential players that exemplified the more traditional, acoustic-oriented country blues of the Delta.
While many of those musicians have been largely relegated to footnotes and archived field recordings, a handful of them got swept up in the fervor of the early/mid-’60s fervor for “real blues,” and were able to record albums that were as revelatory musically as they were important historically, like Today! by Skip James. James, an all-but-forgotten player from Bentonia, Mississippi (home of the legendary Blue Front Cafe), had a brief run in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with a clutch of 78s on Paramount released in 1931 the only markers of his moderate commercial success. Despite not making much of an impact sales-wise, those records were nonetheless influential over the decades, thanks to James’ minor-key tuning, and accomplished fingerpicking playing style. With the country in the midst of the Great Depression, James abandoned the notion of being a professional blues musician and became a choir director in his father’s church, all but disappearing from the public eye for nearly three decades.
Today! is one of two albums James recorded in the mid-’60s for Vanguard, after being tracked down in a Mississippi hospital by John Fahey and invited to perform at the 1964 Newport Blues Festival. Although James would record material that year for Fahey’s Takoma label, as well as for the Melodeon label, these 1966 sessions for Vanguard are impressive both for the quality of the material — much of which is reprised from his 1931 Paramount sides — but also the fidelity. While James is clearly a much older man than the young-gun player he was three decades prior, the emotive complexity of his fingerpicking and the way his voice glides between a beseeching falsetto and a wistful whisper is a knockout combination here, rendered in the sort of hi-fi clarity that was de rigueur in this era. Although his harmonically rich, sometimes near-delicate guitar style is somewhat at odds with the rough-and-tumble rawness sometimes associated with Delta blues, his minor key playing perfectly straddles the line between pensive and mournful. A number like “Crow Jane” combines gentle yet complex guitar figures with dark, violent storytelling, and “Cherryball” is as lonely of a love song as one is likely to ever hear. James swaps out his trademark guitar style for a bit of barroom piano playing on “How Long” and “All Night Long,” giving Today! a brief bit of sonic variety.
