In the early to mid-'60s, blues collectors discovered that a surprising number of the long-lost country blues artists who recorded in the 1920s and '30s were still alive and capable of performing, and for a while finding lost legends of the Mississippi Delta seemingly became a cottage industry.
Son House was one of the Delta bluesmen who enjoyed a second career in the '60s and '70s. He cut some superb 78s for Paramount Records in 1930 and 1931 and powerful field recordings for the Library of Congress in the early '40s, but he hadn't performed in nearly two decades when some amateur blues archaeologists found him living in Rochester, New York, in 1964, when he was 62 years old.
House went on to make several new albums and toured regularly until failing health forced him to retire in 1976, but initially he'd gone so long without playing guitar that
Alan Wilson (who would later co-found
Canned Heat) had to teach him how to play his own songs.
House was still getting up to speed, with comeback gigs and record dates in the future, when
Dick Waterman, who would become his manager and handler, recorded a handful of casual sessions for his archives. After being refurbished by
Dan Auerbach of
the Black Keys, some of
Waterman's tapes are seeing public release for the first time on 2022's
Forever on My Mind. Though
Auerbach has cleaned up the audio, these tracks are still thrillingly spare, just
House's voice and guitar as he makes his way through eight classic songs, often in versions considerably longer than would have fit on a 78 in 1931. Much of the time, he sounds as if he's barely aware that anyone is listening; the tapes lack a sense of theatricality, as if
House simply strolled into the room, saw a guitar, and decided to play a few tunes. The intimacy of the recordings is electrifying, and if his vocals lack a bit of the power he summoned as a younger man, his phrasing and sense of storytelling is all there, and audible without the noise common to the few surviving copies of his Paramount recordings. One of the few drawbacks to
Forever on My Mind is that
House doesn't seem especially concerned when his guitar goes out of tune, and if his vocals retained their spectral power, he wasn't back to full strength as a guitarist. Despite that, the unforced naturalism of
Dick Waterman's tapes demonstrates why
Son House had one of the strongest post-rediscovery bodies of work during the era of the blues revival. This is the kind of music only a tiny handful of people are ever fortunate enough to witness, and
Forever on My Mind allows us to share that rare privilege. ~ Mark Deming