Seeing the legend that is Son House

I’ve seen a few legends in my lifetime. Music has played a big part in my appreciation of the world.

It was 1967 the height of psychedelia and Acid Rock. I was all geared up with my discovery of Roy Harper and playing Captain Beefheart, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors and Country Joe and the Fish. What a great year.

But it was the new sounds that had grabbed me.

I was eighteen and roaring with a lust for life. I was packed with energy and up for anything. Life was good. I had a motorbike and a new girlfriend. My hormones, endorphins and neurotransmitters were all firing on maximum. The world was glorious.

The motorbike conked out many decades back but the girlfriend is still going strong!

I had been into blues for four years ever since my mate Dick Brunning introduced me to Lightnin’ Hopkins. So it was no surprise that the poster caught my eye. There was a Blues package on at the Hammersmith Odeon. It was Delta Blues. Now I loved Delta blues. Robert Johnson, Skip James and Bukka White. I adored slide guitar. This package had a number of names that I was familiar with from albums I possessed – Skip and Bukka were there, Big Joe Williams, Hound Dog Tayler and Little Walter. It seemed like a dream come true. All I had to do was persuade Liz that it sounded like a fun night out.

That was cool. She was up for most things. We’d only been going out a couple of months. Anywhere was good if we were together. I’d played her some blues and she’d liked it.

On the night we all packed in to Hammersmith Odeon. There were so many on that they were limited to a few numbers each. Skip and Bukka were great. I was so glad I managed to see them before they died. Skip was extremely ill, but was still excellent. Big Joe Williams, who wrote Baby Please Don’t Go (the Them hit), went down so well that they couldn’t get him off the stage. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee were great too though more folk than blues. It was an excellent evening and chance to see the originators. But the stand out act was a complete surprise. It came out of left field.

Most of these Delta blues singers had been performing in the 1930s and 1940s. They had stopped performing during the war and had been dug out of obscurity when the sixties blues boom hit.

This old guy, in his late seventies, struggled out on stage. He was stick thin and frail with someone bringing his guitar in for him. I think everyone in the huge hall wondered what on earth was going on. We’d never heard of Son House. It looked as if this might be a step to far.

Eddie ‘Son’ House sat himself down and adjusted his guitar. He mumbled into the microphone incomprehensibly. It was funny. He sounded like the cartoon character ‘Hillbilly Bear’. A murmur and chuckle went round the auditorium.

Then Son started to play.

It was as if all the years dropped off him. I was hit by the power and driving chords of that guitar. I had not heard anything as forceful as that. His rich voice cut in and it ripped into me. This was the real thing. I had not heard anything like this before. There was such authority in his performance that I wondered how such a frail body could command so much from the audience. It shook everybody. Death Letter Blues was the most incendiary blues I had ever heard. After that first number we were up on our seats shouting for more. The whole hall was baying. Son performed a second number and then straggled off the stage dragging his guitar along the floor behind him. The roof went off the place. They were short of time but there was no way we were going to allow him to get away with that. Eventually he came back out without his guitar and sang a foot stomping John The Revelator. Then he was gone.

I never saw him again.

But I had seen a legend. I found out that Son was the start of it all. This was the man who had taught the great Robert Johnson to play, who had influenced the young Muddy Waters, and provided that impetus into electric blues and rock. You could trace it all back.

Whether it was Roy Harper, Captain Beefheart or Jimi Hendrix, this was where it had begun. Son House had been the flame that lit the touchpaper.

I had seen and heard the man who had started it all.

Son House was a legend.

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