![]() ![]() The term “Great Depression” was only popularized years later, when things were booming again. “Hard TimeS” is what the worldwide economic bust was known as while it was happening, to the people living through it. It was released as “Hard Time (without the s) Killing Floor Blues”, which of course would suggest a song about a prison sentence rather than The Great Depression. Finally, for this song they got the title wrong by just one letter, but it was a significant one: Then, Skip’s version of Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell’s “How Long Blues” was released as “How Long Buck”. He was known as “Skippy James” until his 1931 recording session. The name of this song is just one of three record company mistakes (that have endured through the ages) from Skip’s first recording session that indicate just how nonchalant things were in the early days of recording at Paramount Records’ “New York Recording Laboratories” of Port Washington, Wisconsin.įirst of all, they got his name wrong. It is entirely possible that if Skip James had not been rediscovered, or if he had succumbed to his cancer just a few years earlier, this song may have disappeared from the blues repertoire entirely.Įven after Skip’s timely reappearance, this song never became popular with later generations of blues musicians, perhaps because it is played in Skip’s idiosyncratic Open Dm/D-Crossnote/DADFAD tuning or perhaps because of his intricate picking technique, until it was resurrected by Chris Thomas King for the movie. It was not reissued on an LP until after his rediscovery in 1964, over 30 years later. It is thought that the number of surviving copies of this recording number in the low single-digits, making it one of the rarest of all early blues records among collectors. ![]() Paramount Records would no longer exist just a few years later. Only a few thousand copies of Skip’s records from the 1931 session were ever produced and they famously hit the market just as the depth of the Depression was gripping the U.S. And so that’s where VintageBlues4K comes in. Or even when rock supergroup Cream covered one of his songs.īut today the Skip James-style way of playing this piece is still as lost and forgotten as it ever was. Or as a pillar of the 1960s blues revival. The movie has brought this Skip James composition a level of exposure and popularity well beyond anything he enjoyed during his lifetime - certainly beyond the popularity he achieved in his original foray as a recording artist in 1931. He did such a fine job however that we now have a situation where the Chris Thomas King version is invariably the way that people learn to play the song these days. He slowed down the tempo, sang a dark and emotional lyrical delivery, and adapted Skip’s musical theme to his own picking style. Singer, guitar player, and actor Chris Thomas King did a truly wonderful job of adapting his new version of Skip’s classic song to fit the scene: a dark, spooky night around the campfire in Depression-era Mississippi. The soundtrack won two Grammys and its popularity spawned a concert tour. The Coen Brothers’ 2000 film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? put a lot of ol’-timey music back on the map for 21st-century listeners. until perhaps 70 years later, when a new version was featured in a Hollywood film. that became a blues standard in the hands of someone else.īut first, in this episode we feature a song that (like the rest of Skip James’ early 1931 recordings) was never really popular or considered a blues standard. ![]() In the next episode we’ll feature Robert Johnson’s most significant contribution to the blues repertoire and one of the most covered blues songs of all time. After going through some hard times, and bouncing back up off the floor, I’m finally back with a pair of early blues guitar masterpieces whose original versions were nearly lost and forgotten. ![]() Ramblin’ Bob back again with more VintageBlues4K after another long absence. Episode 05: “Hard Times Killing Floor Blues” by Skip James (1931) Intro ![]()
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