Biography
A Virginia-born musician proficient on both banjo and guitar, Jimmie Strothers committed fifteen selections to tape for Alan Lomax and Harold Spivacke during 1936. Limited information survives about his earlier life, yet he appears to have performed for a period as a medicine-show entertainer before taking employment in the mines; an underground blast cost him his sight and left him no option but to perform on the streets. His circumstances grew still more severe after a murder conviction for killing his wife with an axe, resulting in incarceration at the state penitentiary in Lynn, Virginia, the very facility where Lomax and Spivacke encountered him while conducting a Library of Congress field-recording expedition.
Across two days—13 and 14 June 1936—Strothers captured thirteen songs together with alternate renditions of “Jaybird” and “Poontang Little, Poontang Small,” frequently assisted by fellow inmate Joe Lee on vocals and guitar. In a possible holdover from his medicine-show experience, the pair simultaneously played a single guitar on “Do, Lord, Remember Me.” The material alternated secular numbers with pared-down sacred hymns, all rooted in post-Reconstruction rural Black culture; what stands out is the breadth of forms Strothers commanded and the unsettling intensity he brought to both voice and banjo.
The first piece he set down, the peculiar “Keep Away from the Bloodstained Banders,” reworks an 1800s hymn by John Adam Granade titled “Let Thy Kingdom, Blessed Savior.” At the opposite extreme, two versions of the risqué “Poontang Little, Poontang Small” received a “Delta check” designation for erotic content upon entry into the Library of Congress files. “I Used to Work on the Tractor” offers a biting indictment of an exploitative boss, while the six-minute “Goin’ to Richmond” unfolds as an extended blues. On the second day Strothers also supplied “Thought I Heard My Banjo Say,” an expanded treatment of the usually fragmentary “Cripple Creek.” In that brief span he produced a sharp, distinctive, and compelling body of work that tests the line separating the sacred from the profane.
Across two days—13 and 14 June 1936—Strothers captured thirteen songs together with alternate renditions of “Jaybird” and “Poontang Little, Poontang Small,” frequently assisted by fellow inmate Joe Lee on vocals and guitar. In a possible holdover from his medicine-show experience, the pair simultaneously played a single guitar on “Do, Lord, Remember Me.” The material alternated secular numbers with pared-down sacred hymns, all rooted in post-Reconstruction rural Black culture; what stands out is the breadth of forms Strothers commanded and the unsettling intensity he brought to both voice and banjo.
The first piece he set down, the peculiar “Keep Away from the Bloodstained Banders,” reworks an 1800s hymn by John Adam Granade titled “Let Thy Kingdom, Blessed Savior.” At the opposite extreme, two versions of the risqué “Poontang Little, Poontang Small” received a “Delta check” designation for erotic content upon entry into the Library of Congress files. “I Used to Work on the Tractor” offers a biting indictment of an exploitative boss, while the six-minute “Goin’ to Richmond” unfolds as an extended blues. On the second day Strothers also supplied “Thought I Heard My Banjo Say,” an expanded treatment of the usually fragmentary “Cripple Creek.” In that brief span he produced a sharp, distinctive, and compelling body of work that tests the line separating the sacred from the profane.