Beaumont Uncovers 'The Life & Times of Son House'

If the blues is the foundation of American music, then Son House is one of the builders' greatest stones. The acclaimed Mississippi Delta guitarist embodied the tension between fundamentalist religiosity and secular hedonism felt in some of the music's most outstanding recordings. He's also a poster man for the strange process by which the blues was “rediscovered” by white Northern intellectuals in the 1960s.

British scholar Daniel Beaumont brings a touch of the traveler's wonder to the world he uncovers in Preachin' the Blues: The Life & Times of Son House (Oxford University Press). With exemplary concern for accuracy and a writer's eye for telling details, Beaumont identifies the running theme of House's life as escape—from women who might tie him down and, more importantly, the life of a field hand on the great cotton plantations spread like shag carpets across the Mississippi flatlands. He found an alternative income and an outlet for his fervor as a Southern Baptist preacher, but he couldn't contain himself within the religion's strictures on alcohol and sex. The eerie sound of the bottleneck guitar was the piper's call leading him across the tracks into a bluesman's life.

House had stopped playing for many years before the diligent detectives of the first generation of blues scholars tracked him to Rochester, N.Y., and put him on the festival circuit. The gap between those earnest young men with their romantic ideas of unearthing American folk culture and the shrewd old man they located is fascinating. Of local interest is one of House's seminal sessions for Paramount Records, a 1930 date recorded at a barn in Grafton, Wis.