Listening to Prestige 612: Homesick James

LISTEN TO ONE: Crawlin'

 This is another of Prestige Bluesville's presentations of lesser-known Chicago blues figures, as they prepared to close down their subsidiary labels: Bluesville, Swingville and Moodsville. All three of them, but especially Bluesville and Swingville, were hugely important in their documenting of musicians who would otherwise have remained undocumented in midcentury America--and in many cases giving them the finest producing and sound engineering they had ever received.

Homesick James, like Billy Boy Arnold before him, was recorded in Chicago by pioneering blues folklorist Samuel Charters. Arnold was recorded first,

but James's album was released first, so it gets the title Blues on the South Side, and Arnold's album became More Blues on the South Side.

Also like Arnold, James was a veteran of the Chicago blues scene who had scuffled, and stayed on the scene, without ever quite managing to break through. He was born in Tennessee and learned his trade all over the South, where he may have played with a number of the blues greats of the early part of the century--his history is basically untraceable--and may have known Robert Johnson.

Arriving in Chicago in 1932, he found work in that city's music community, including some recording sessions-- even a couple under his own name in 1952 for Chance Records, one of Chicago's early independent labels. One of them, "Homesick," gave him the name he would use for the rest of his life. He worked with Sonny Boy Williamson II and with Elmore James, whom he claimed as his cousin.

As with the Billy Boy Arnold session, Samuel Charters called on the cream of Chicago's commercial rhythm and blues scene to back up James. Lafayette Leake was back again. Clifton James (no relation--he was a native Chicagoan) was Bo Diddley's drummer, and in the eyes of many, the true innovator of the Bo Diddley beat. Eddie "Big Town Playboy" Taylor, as a young man in Mississippi, taught his younger friend Jimmy Reed to play the guitar, and later, when they had both made the Great Migration, worked in Reed's band. Equally adept on both guitar and bass. he also worked with John Lee Hooker, Big Walter Horton, Sam Lay and others.

James was an interesting anomaly in 1964, with as much of the Delta in him as the South Side. His most

significant modern influence was probably John Lee Hooker, the most primitive of the rhythm and blues modernists. When he essays a number like Robert Johnson's "Stones in My Passway," he's recalling Johnson's era, at a time when his cousin Elmore was reinterpreting Johnson's music through the new dynamic of Sweet Home Chicago in the 1950s, and British guitarists like Eric Clapton were reinterpreting it for yet a newer generation. Even with modernists like Leake and Clifton James, Homesick James is who he is.

It was an honest sound, and if it didn't make James rich, it still served him well. He continued to play blues festivals, and make records, into the 21st century. But Blues on the South Side, with Prestige's distribution and a later CD reissue on Original Blues Classics, remained his best known recording.

Although Bluesville still existed, this series of Charters-produced Chicago blues recordings were issued on Prestige in album form. They they were, however, released as Bluesville 45s-- "The Woman I'm Lovin'" and "Crawlin'" from this session. "Crawin'" is one of three instrumental tracks from the session, and features some nice interplay between James and Leake.