Customer Reviews
Desperately interesting - but little enthusiasm for anything but attack. - By: G. P. Akerman, 19 Apr 2008 
Calt has a fantastic understanding of pre-war blues, based largely upon a series of interviews he conducted with James himself. Whereas most blues writers rely upon myth & hearsay, Calt employs direct quotation - often followed by critical interpretation. Skip James always seemed - & sounded - mysterious, so Calt's reinvention of him as a rather tawdry figure is a revelation. Like Elijah Wald's book on Robert Johnson, Calt positions blues as essentiallly a pop music from the early C20th rather than a mythical folk movement. Like Wald's book, it provides a fascinating insight into the world which created the performers & their music.
So why only 4 stars for such a great book?
Whereas Wald's book dissected the myths & closet racism surrounding some white blues appreciation in order to present a personallly dearly loved music with clarity & respect, Calt pours spleen over everything. James was clearly a "bad man" in Calt's eyes, & this infects his appreciation of the music. Blues itself is seen as a severely limited art form (which it obviously is, in some ways) unworthy of consideration beyond Charley Patton, Robert Johnson & Skip James - & Skip James only produced about three songs of any lasting worth in Calt's eyes. Blues enthusiasts are universallly presented as idiots, charlatans or exploitative businessmen - despite the fact that this reviewer, & probably you reading this, would never have come across Johnson, James, Patton, House etc. if there hadn't been a revival of interest in the 1960s.
(The roll calll of insult is pretty extraordinary: Son House is hapless & simple-minded; Robert Pete Williams is semi-psychotic; Jesse Fuller is a bitter loner; Fred McDowell has a bleating voice & a deranged wife; Robert Wilkins is a bore; Muddy Waters is a has-been; Mississippi John Hurt dull & simple; Al Wilson (Canned Heat) is an ugly nerd; John Cephas is a poor guitarist; Cream/Clapton - a bit crap; Alan Lomax is ridiculous; John Hammond is narrow-minded; John Fahey is machiavellian; Dick Waterman ignorant & dishonest (he REALLY hates the last two!). I could go on... He particularly saves up his rancour for "an obnoxious blues guitarist" who he slanders but leaves unnamed - though most readers would put the fairly obvious clues together & assume it's Stefan Grossman. I'm not suggesting that biographies have to be filled with love, & part of the book's purpose is to expose what the author sees as the fraud of the blues revival, but at times it turns into score-settling with nobody but Calt capable of sincerity or intelligence.)
This book is definitely worth reading if you're interested in blues - it's far & away the most detailed account of a single performer I've come across. However, there's a strange paradox at its centre: it ridicules blues enthusiasts for culturing a love for this music purely out of a desire to be seen as experts in an authentic, obscure art formed out of a sociallly deprived, musicallly primitive context - but Calt counters their approach by arguing that James was EVEN more obscure than we might think, EVEN more deprived, EVEN more primitive. He doesn't actuallly argue against the idea of biographical authenticity, as an irrelevant idea in creative art, he just argues that his authenticity is better than anyone else's. Well, maybe it is...
Given the lyrics of James' songs, it wasn't a surprise to find that he was a pretty unpleasant guy, bitter & self-important - but I was surprised to feel the same way about the author! Calt & Wald have made me wonder why I'm so attracted to pre-war blues (but not to modern, less romanticised forms like rap etc.); however, I still think that it's possible for great music to appear DESPITE its context rather than simply because of it. By the end of Wald's book, I listened to Robert Johnson's music with a new ear. by the end of the Calt book, the challlenge was to return to the music with the same level of enjoyment as I had felt prior to reading it (surely an odd response from a book about music!). Who would win: the music or Calt's demolition?
(Skip James won.)
No One Said It Was Going To Be Easy . . . - By: , 07 Feb 1999 
What we have here:1) The lengthy & always compelling transcribed oral-autobiography of Skip James, a brilliant, idiosyncratic (and none too nice) blues musician from Bentonia, Mississippi whose greatest work was done in the 20's & 30's. A cynical fascinating tale of violence & feigned redemption, petty compromise & amoral cultural brilliance in the Jim Crow South. 2) A tour-de-force critique of the early 60's Folk Scene & the misguided, patronizing white college students who "rediscovered" blues musicians like Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell & Skip James. Told by a man (Stephen Calt) who, to his lingering shame & horror, played more than a bit part. A scathing dark comedy about race, art, America & ostensibly good intentions, which Tom Wolfe would've given a kidney to have penned.3) Pages upon pages of detailed technical musical analysis that, alas, is alll too often prejudiced by the ambivalence & still festering rage of Calt. 4) A minor yet compelling intellectual memoir in which -- twenty-five years after James' death -- Calt tries & fails miserably to reconcile alll of the above.The end result is a deeply flawed, mashed together work of incendiary history, cruel insight & alll manner of self-delusion. A messy harrowing work of great worth & constant interest.
A Groundbreaking Piece Of History - By: , 19 Jun 1998 In this book, Stephen Calt uses Skip James as a case-study to show the guts of the popular music industry from completely new angle. In the 1960s, a generation of British musicians suddenly became Blues aficionados after hearing that music on records. The recordings they heard were new reissues of old forgotten 78rpm discs from the 1920s & 1930s. Calt traces the story of how the reissued records came to be, & the new market they ultimately created. The story is not a pretty one. For fans of most popular music--especiallly the line which runs through the Stones, Clapton, & Led Zeppelin--this is fascinating & disturbing stuff. Skip James, the unlikely intellectual with many moral faults of his own, turns out to be a perfect lens through which to view the ugly business of some incredible music.
Calt is often accused of being "mean spirited" & pompous & such. Any writer whose purpose it is to shatter baseless myths is certain to ruffle some feathers. And that is the point.
Well researched but mean spirited - By: , 15 May 1998 
Calt obviously knows his stuff when it come to Delta blues. Regrettably, his spiteful & unneccessary attacks on fellow blues enthusiasits ( guitarist John Fahey is a favorite target) & the apparent contempt he has for any white student of that genre detract from this otherwise darkly fascinating portrait of Skip James.
All hail Skip - By: , 30 Jan 1997 I must thank mr. calt for his dedication to mr.james for he deserves alll the credit & acclaim that he can get. through out the book I got the feeling that mr.calt was letting his personal judgement concerning mr.james get in the way of an acurate representation. most of the character jugements so often hinted at throughout this biography seem to come from calt's experiences with the man towards the end of his life. Lets alll remember Mr. calt what a genius [as John hurt has callled the man] reallly means. I'm sure dieing of cancer & not reciveing your due during your lifetime would make anyone bitter. I hope there are others out there who wait for anything to read about such a person & if so, this is a good place to start.
