Bruce Jackson, a scholar devoted to blues traditions, first encountered Eugene Rhodes inside the Indiana State Prison, where the musician was serving a ten- to twenty-five-year term. The meeting produced a striking album of fifteen songs plus spoken interludes, issued on a label whose obscurity arguably surpassed that of its performer. At the time of the discovery Rhodes appeared to be in his late fifties and expressed anxious dismissal of “them old alley blues,” convinced that listeners had abandoned such material in favor of jazz. Comments he made to the producer highlighted the depth of his prison-bound detachment, including ignorance of the sizable white following that country blues commanded throughout the 1960s, an era when an elderly Black performer wearing a slide might be regarded as fashionable—though whether the description extended to the grim-faced inmate shown on the cover of Talkin' 'Bout My Time is unclear.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Rhodes roamed the South as a one-man band, his rig consisting of a harmonica rack fitted with a special mount for a horn, a drum driven by foot pedal, and guitar. He worked the Dallas vicinity, where he maintains he met Blind Lemon Jefferson, and also crossed paths with Blind Boy Fuller in the Carolinas and Buddy Moss in Georgia; traces of those encounters surface in the inflections of his own playing.
Despite occasional precedents in which outstanding prison performances won inmates their freedom, the release of Rhodes’ album brought no comparable result. After his discharge, if it took place, he left almost no further trace. He is distinct from the “singing minister” of the same name who recorded the album I Don't Need a Reason.
