Son House is where the tree forks. Robert Johnson learned to play guitar by watching him at plantation dances in Robinsonville, Mississippi. Muddy Waters, who grew up on Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale in the same Delta soil, later credited House directly for his bottleneck technique, telling interviewers he had been digging Son House since his teenage years. Two of the most mythologized figures in American music, both tracing their lines back to the same preacher-turned-bluesman from Coahoma County. The proof is sitting right there in a single song.
"My Black Mama" started life as a Son House guitar part recorded at Paramount's studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1930 and released the following February on Paramount 13042. It sold poorly, as did everything Paramount put out at the start of the Depression, but the music itself was extraordinary: House's fierce bottleneck slide, his declamatory vocal style, the rhythmic intensity that felt more like a physical force than a technique. In November 1936, Robert Johnson recorded his own version of the same song in room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, cutting it on November 27 as "Walking Blues" during his first session for producer Don Law. Johnson accelerated the tempo and added his own lyrical variations, but the debt was unmistakable. Musicologist Edward Komara, comparing the two recordings, noted that Johnson's guitar "retains many of House's features, including the thumbed strum on the lower strings, the fingerpicking on the treble strings, and in a later chorus the snapped beat during the IV chord." Then in August 1941, Alan Lomax drove out to Stovall Plantation for a Library of Congress field recording session and captured Muddy Waters playing the same song, catalogued as "Country Blues." Waters took the melody to Chess Records in 1948 as "(I Feel Like) Going Home," and recorded a version with lyrics closer to House's and Johnson's for his first Chess single in 1950. One song, three men, twenty years, one unbroken line.
The story gets stranger when you account for where House was while his students were becoming legends. He had moved to Rochester, New York in 1943, taken work as a railroad porter for the New York Central Railroad, and effectively disappeared from the music world. By the time Johnson's recordings were being passed around among white jazz collectors and British rock musicians as sacred texts, House was working in upstate New York. The man who taught Johnson the slide guitar technique that would eventually reach Eric Clapton and Keith Richards had no idea any of it was happening.
On June 21, 1964, Dick Waterman, Nick Perls, and Phil Spiro tracked House down in Rochester after a search that had taken them from Cambridge, Massachusetts down into the Mississippi Delta and back north again. House had not played seriously in years. After his rediscovery, he signed with Columbia Records and recorded "Father of Folk Blues" in 1965, but the comeback required something unusual: producer John Hammond enlisted Alan Wilson of Canned Heat, then 22 years old, to help House relearn his own style, since the long layoff had dulled his muscle memory. A man who had taught Robert Johnson how to play the Delta blues had to be taught it back by a young blues scholar from the Cambridge folk scene. Blues history is full of ironies, but that one is hard to top.
What the House-Johnson-Waters lineage actually shows is that the mythology around Robert Johnson, the crossroads, the supernatural transformation, the genius arriving from nowhere, has always been a distortion. House was there and saw what happened. He watched Johnson fail badly at guitar, then disappear for a stretch, then come back playing at a level that shook him. House later gave interviews in the 1960s that fed the devil-at-the-crossroads legend, but the cleaner explanation is that Johnson left Robinsonville, worked hard under other influences including Isaiah "Ike" Zimmerman, and returned transformed. The myth required Johnson to have no teacher. The reality is that he had at least one very good one, and that teacher also taught Muddy Waters, who built Chicago blues on the same foundation.
Son House recorded "Preachin' the Blues" and "My Black Mama" for Paramount in 1930, was captured by Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1941 and 1942, and then vanished for two decades while the music he made rippled outward into everything. His style, the fierce bottleneck slide, the gospel-preacher vocal attack, the rhythmic intensity, was the original signal. Johnson amplified it and died at 27. Waters carried it to Chicago and electrified it into something that changed the world. House outlived both of them, dying in Detroit on October 19, 1988, having watched his own sound travel farther than he probably ever imagined when he was playing juke joints in Coahoma County. The line from "My Black Mama" to "Hoochie Coochie Man" runs through one man who spent twenty years not knowing it existed.
