I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues [Kindle Edition]

Calt has a fantastic understanding of pre-war blues, based largely upon a series of interviews he conducted with James himself. Whereas most blues writers rely upon myth and hearsay, Calt employs direct quotation - often followed by critical interpretation. Skip James always seemed - and sounded - mysterious, so Calt's reinvention of him as a rather tawdry figure is a revelation. Like Elijah Wald's book on Robert Johnson, Calt positions blues as essentially a pop music from the early C20th rather than a mythical folk movement. Like Wald's book, it provides a fascinating insight into the world which created the performers and their music.

So why only 4 stars for such a great book?

Whereas Wald's book dissected the myths and closet racism surrounding some white blues appreciation in order to present a personally dearly loved music with clarity and respect, Calt pours spleen over everything. James was clearly a "bad man" in Calt's eyes, and this infects his appreciation of the music. Blues itself is seen as a severely limited art form (which it obviously is, in some ways) unworthy of consideration beyond Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and Skip James - and Skip James only produced about three songs of any lasting worth in Calt's eyes. Blues enthusiasts are universally presented as idiots, charlatans or exploitative businessmen - despite the fact that this reviewer, and probably you reading this, would never have come across Johnson, James, Patton, House etc. if there hadn't been a revival of interest in the 1960s.

(The roll call of insult is pretty extraordinary: Son House is hapless and simple-minded; Robert Pete Williams is semi-psychotic; Jesse Fuller is a bitter loner; Fred McDowell has a bleating voice and a deranged wife; Robert Wilkins is a bore; Muddy Waters is a has-been; Mississippi John Hurt dull and simple; Al Wilson (Canned Heat) is an ugly nerd; John Cephas is a poor guitarist; Cream/Clapton - a bit crap; Alan Lomax is ridiculous; John Hammond is narrow-minded; John Fahey is machiavellian; Dick Waterman ignorant and dishonest (he REALLY hates the last two!). I could go on... He particularly saves up his rancour for "an obnoxious blues guitarist" who he slanders but leaves unnamed - though most readers would put the fairly obvious clues together and assume it's Stefan Grossman. I'm not suggesting that biographies have to be filled with love, and part of the book's purpose is to expose what the author sees as the fraud of the blues revival, but at times it turns into score-settling with nobody but Calt capable of sincerity or intelligence.)

This book is definitely worth reading if you're interested in blues - it's far and away the most detailed account of a single performer I've come across. However, there's a strange paradox at its centre: it ridicules blues enthusiasts for culturing a love for this music purely out of a desire to be seen as experts in an authentic, obscure art formed out of a socially deprived, musically primitive context - but Calt counters their approach by arguing that James was EVEN more obscure than we might think, EVEN more deprived, EVEN more primitive. He doesn't actually argue against the idea of biographical authenticity, as an irrelevant idea in creative art, he just argues that his authenticity is better than anyone else's. Well, maybe it is...

Given the lyrics of James' songs, it wasn't a surprise to find that he was a pretty unpleasant guy, bitter and self-important - but I was surprised to feel the same way about the author! Calt and Wald have made me wonder why I'm so attracted to pre-war blues (but not to modern, less romanticised forms like rap etc.); however, I still think that it's possible for great music to appear DESPITE its context rather than simply because of it. By the end of Wald's book, I listened to Robert Johnson's music with a new ear. by the end of the Calt book, the challenge was to return to the music with the same level of enjoyment as I had felt prior to reading it (surely an odd response from a book about music!). Who would win: the music or Calt's demolition?

(Skip James won.)

In this book, Stephen Calt uses Skip James as a case-study to show the guts of the popular music industry from completely new angle. In the 1960s, a generation of British musicians suddenly became Blues aficionados after hearing that music on records. The recordings they heard were new reissues of old forgotten 78rpm discs from the 1920s and 1930s. Calt traces the story of how the reissued records came to be, and the new market they ultimately created. The story is not a pretty one. For fans of most popular music--especially the line which runs through the Stones, Clapton, and Led Zeppelin--this is fascinating and disturbing stuff. Skip James, the unlikely intellectual with many moral faults of his own, turns out to be a perfect lens through which to view the ugly business of some incredible music.

Calt is often accused of being "mean spirited" and pompous and such. Any writer whose purpose it is to shatter baseless myths is certain to ruffle some feathers. And that is the point.

Stephen Calt's biography is a scathing reflection of the folk-blues boom of the mid-sixties and of one of its most challenging figures - Skip James. Calt shatters the illusion that the veneration of re-discovered performers was justified. He portrays them as artistically and physically decrepit, ravaged by time and in Son House's case alcohol. You can almost feel Calt cringe as he describes how the wet-brained alcoholic had to be taught his own songs by one of his adorin white acolytes Al Wilson. Calt holds many of the white enthusiasts "blues nerds" who scrabbled in the Delta mud to unearth long lost careers with barely concealed contempt. (It would be fair to say that Calt emerges as nerd to some degree - the chapters on James' song construction and guitar tuning shows that he has analysed those scratchy 78's with a level of detail that is almost clinical)

And then there's James. Calt probably got closer to James than anybody, certainly any white person and the emerging portrait is not an attractive one. James was cold, emotionally remote and mean-spirited; a seemingly bottomless well of contradiction; for example he portrayed himself as a victim of women who wished to bring him down, while he himself had used women in the most cynical sense by working as a pimp.

Calt knew James for the last five years of his life, by which time the brilliant musician of the 30's had become a bitter, ailing old man. When you read this book you will begin to get a better understanding of his music. The high, wailing voice and haunting guitar runs that are the perfect vessels for James to express his deep dissatisfaction of the way life's cards were dealt to him.

While not uplifting, this is an important book which any fan of the blues should read.