Son House, County Farm Blues I

I don’t like havin favorite artists. They leave no room for anything else to pour in someone’s ears, they tend to be too proeminent, leaving behind their work. I think it’s quite excessive that I can’t listen to anything but blues songs, but this is way over my control. Yet, dispite all these thoughts that were disperately trying to organize my mind, I often faced the danger of procaliming Son House “my favorite” (actually I once did it, while registering on a popular blues forum).
My thoughts aside, let’s step into the analysis of a masterpiece.
About the song
Son House recorded the song in 1942, at a time when he had reached his artistic maturity. The music is well structured (may even seem rigid compared to the exuberance perceived in his early recordings), and the lyrics are surprisingly coherent (there’s no need to look for a deep logic linking Delta formulae).
The song was recorded by Allan Lomax, for the Library of the Congress (Deep River of Song: The Blues Lineage). At the end of the recording, he asked Son House when he made “it”; House answered “About two years ago”, i.e. 1940. Yet the music was older. The initial musical theme was first recorded in 1930, for Paramount. The song was called Mississippi County Farm Blues:

remark: a song means “lyrics”.
Way back in 1940, the recording companies had practically lost interest in country blues, so the blues in the Delta was back to a ‘natural state’. This means thaty the lyrics might have some sociological importance other than related to the blues as it is generally defined by the scholars. The song is quite irrelevant to the understanding of blues as a mass phenomenon, but tells instead a story about the interaction between an itinerant bluesman and his audience.
Dispite the considerations in the paragraph above, the song is not a manifesto.
The coherence in music and lyrics is more likely to be the effect of the massive penetration of radio sets and phonographs in the deep South, durring the 30s. We know Robert Johnson was often listening to the radio (and could play anything he heared), and we can also refer to a verse by Jazz Gillum, “the harmonica king in Mississippi”:

I don’t need a Victrola, no radio in my home (x2),
When I want music, I can make my own.

There is at least as much influence as tradition in the country blues.
On the other hand, the prison theme is an established topos, sowe shouldn’t overinterpret the song’s meaning; we’ll only try to see how did Son House filter it.

The musical structure
From a musical point of view, the song is structured in three distinctive parts:
The intro is kinda narrative, and introduces the istener to the theme. The playing technique is accurate. It seems suggesting a way of life before getting into prison.
The main part, sustaining the four verses, rolls evenly. It might even give a certain sensation of monotony (as stated by some of my friends, whom I forced to listen to the song again and again). The theme is barely declined. I’m tempted to believe that the music describes the monotony of the prison life, with its days rolling alike. Or this might be only a strategy that makes the music fade out and the lyrics pop up.
The final part, which rediscovers the initial theme and adds to it a bitter accent (also supported by a moan, which however may be a relic of the 1930 song), depicts the life after getting out of prison.
The song is played in “Spanish A”, which is open A.
The verse pattern
As you certainly know, the traditional blues verse pattern is AAB (a repeated call and a response), a structure – some scholars argued – bluesmen picked up from Celtic ballads. Unlike the classic structure, County Farm Blues‘ verse pattern is AAAB, which is very common among the prison songs. It was undoubltly the most appropiate manner of adjusting the song’s form to the theme.
That will be all for now. In the next post, I’ll analyze the song’s lyrics. But, before you leave this page, maybe you’d like to listen the song I’m writing about.