Skip James: Today! (Bluesville Acoustic Sounds series) [CRAFT]

Why you'll love it

This Bluesville Acoustic Sounds series reissue is pressed on 180g vinyl, with all-analog lacquers cut from the original session tapes, a paper-wrapped jacket and an obi with notes by Scott Billington. AllMusic calls it essential.

This edition

• Bluesville Acoustic Sounds series
• 180g vinyl
• All-analog (AAA) mastering
• Obi strip with notes
• Stereo mix

About the album

Skip James cut a handful of extraordinary 78s in 1931 and then, for most of three decades, the music world lost track of him. When record collectors found him again in the 1960s folk blues revival, the question was whether that eerie falsetto and those strange minor-key tunings had survived. Today! answered it. A group of young blues fans had tracked him down in a Mississippi hospital in 1964.

He recorded it at Vanguard's New York studio on January 9 and 10, 1966, alone on guitar and piano except for "How Long," where Russ Savakus joins on bass. "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" and "Cypress Grove" revisit his 1931 classics, "Washington D.C. Hospital Center Blues" turns a hospital stay into a song, "Crow Jane" and "Special Rider Blues" stretch out, and "I'm So Glad" is the tune Cream would soon take to rock audiences. "Look Down The Road" and "My Gal" round it out.

That Cream cover sent royalty cheques his way. It's the best kind of comeback: a chap picks up where he left off thirty-five years earlier, and nobody can tell the difference.

Also at Kops: more Skip James on vinyl · browse Blues

Tracklist

Listen

On Vanguard / Craft Recordings (cat# CR00744), a reissue of the 1966 album.