Son House (Mississippi and Louisiana, c. 1902-1988), performing his version of the classic “Downhearted Blues” (by Alberta Hunter and Lovie Austin), sometime in the 60s or 70s I would guess.
I don’t normally same much about these songs or the performers but I will say I’ve always thought of Sun House as a kind of deity. I don’t mean this in a metaphorical sense, or in a way to communicate his place in the blues. I mean that in my mind, there are blues greats who were human and, for some reason, people I don’t think of as human but as powerful forces acting on the rest. Don’t know why, though I suspect it says more about how I learned (or didn’t learn) about certain figures growing up.
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