Son House | Artist

Eddie James "Son" House, Jr. was an American delta blues singer and guitarist, born 1902 in Lyon, Mississippi. He was noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing, and he was a formative influence on fellow bluesman Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson. After years of hostility to secular music, as a preacher and for a few years also as a church pastor, he turned to blues performance at the age of 25. In a short career interrupted by a spell in Parchman Farm penitentiary, House developed to the point that Charley Patton, the foremost blues artist of the Mississippi Delta region, invited him to share engagements and to accompany him to a 1930 recording session for Paramount Records. In 1941-42, House and his band were recorded by Alan Lomax for the US Library of Congress and Fisk University. The following year, he left the Delta for Rochester, New York, and gave up music. In 1964, a group of young record collectors discovered House, whom they knew of from his records issued by Paramount and by the Library of Congress. With their encouragement, he relearned his repertoire and established a career as an entertainer, performing for young, mostly white audiences in coffeehouses, at folk festivals and on concert tours during the American folk music revival. Like other early bluesmen, most of House's album releases are posthumous archival collections and compilations. Standout albums include Blues From the Mississippi Delta, with J.D. Short, Father of Folk Blues, The Legendary 1941-42 Recordings, and the compilation Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Son House, from the TV series "Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues".

Artist Website: wikipedia/Son_House

Featured Albums: Son House

Related Artists: Skip James, Charley Patton