THE ORIGINAL (BANNED) :BLUES BOOKLET:

"I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out."

- Jimi Hendrix

Son House was celebrating his 66th birthday in Rochester on the day Hendrix came to play in '68. House had moved here the year Jimi was born. Of the trip into town Jimi wrote in his diary "Stopped at a highway diner. I mean a real one. Like in the movies." There, The Jimi Hendrix Experience ran into Dick Waterman, manager of Son House. "I went out into the car and they were all bundled up," Waterman recalls, "it was the dead of winter on the New York Thruway."

Jimi played Rochester on the first day of spring and for years afterwards my friends and I observed the anniversary by renting a National Steel from the House of Guitars and dragging it over to the Grieg St. house where Son House lived. Portraits of JFK and Dr. King stared from the walls as Son's bottleneck sermons raised Hell 'n' Brimstone. We'd sit at his feet on tattered rugs and hear Delta tales about Willie Brown, who also once lived in town.

Blues were "born" with Son House in 1902. That year the classic 12-bar song-form was first heard by Jelly Roll Morton. This was the first known sighting of blues. Blues was the lost chord which, when found by a music publisher in 1903, became the Song of the 20th Century. Prior to that breakthrough, blues gestated on the Mississippi Delta during the 1890s. Such a catchy progression could circulate among folk for only so far before a composer's trained ear took note, as was the case with W. C. Handy in 1903. Picasso's "blue period" was peaking when the blues were media born. Blues appeared at the inception of the electrical age, intersecting turn-of-the-century revolutions from Einstein, Freud, Stravinsky, and the Wright Bros.

On Valentines Day 1920, in the year when women won the right to vote, Mamie Smith became the first blues singer to record. Three years later Sylvestor Weaver was the first country bluesman to cut a disk. By the late '20s Son House was learning to play from Delta players of the pre-recorder age. Among the pillars of country bluesmen, House stands with Charly Patton and Robert Johnson as the original Trinity. One day in Rochester I asked Son's opinion of Jimi. "Yeah, he's alright!" was his decree.

"When I re-discovered Son in June of '64," recalls Waterman, "we talked about Robert Johnson, and he was trying to recall Robert. Then his wife, Evie, said, 'Oh Son, you know; Robert Dusty!' And Son perked up and said, 'Oh, Robert Dusty!' And then Son said, 'Man, he was always hanging around with me and Willie Brown, wanting to sit-in and do a song. We let him sit-in and he would up and break a string, and where we gonna get a new string late Saturday night, man? And we had to tie that broken string together and tear up our fingers! We didn't want him to play.'"

It was through the eyes of Son House that the world had a window on the legend of Robert Johnson. Son House and Willie Brown were the elder teachers that teenage Robert approached before he could play. House was the witness who saw Johnson return transformed from the Crossroads. Peter Welding was among the first to interview Son about this. "Welding met Son House in October of '64 in Chicago," states Dick Waterman. In a DownBeat '66 article, Welding quoted House relating how Robert Johnson had "sold his soul to the devil in exchange for learning to play like that." Stories about midnight pacts at a country Crossroads were part of old Delta lore. Tommy Johnson (an unrelated predecessor of Robert) was one of the most influential early country bluesmen, and he claimed that a pact with the devil at a country crossroads was the source of his talent. The story of how this happened was published in a 1971 book (Tommy Johnson) by David Evans. Greil Marcus' 1975 Mystery Train was the first book to explore Robert Johnson's "devil pact" as described by Son House, but it wasn't until Deep Blues by Robert Palmer was published in 1980 that details of the Crossroads legend were presented as part of Robert Johnson's legacy. Through these books the old Delta tale became known to the world.

Robert Johnson recorded Crossroad Blues on Nov. 27, 1936. On that day six years later Hendrix was born. 1942 was the breakthrough year of Blues Radio, that year the juke box business grew to a $65 million industry. Blues music was at the threshold of blanketing the nation, but the vinyl industry was halted by war rationing. In 1942 Muddy Waters was about to leave Mississippi for Chicago, Big Boy Crudup was about to front the first drums/bass blues trio, and the image of Robert Johnson at the Crossroads was about to be echoed by Hendrix.