Legend of bluesman Son House lives on

It's impossible to underestimate the impact Son House has had on modern American music.\nAlong with a small handful of other bluesmen, House embodied the blues of the Mississippi Delta during the first third of the 20th century. \nIt was the Delta blues that eventually morphed into rock and roll; the early bluesmen firmly cemented the 12-bar format into folk and popular music and injected the music with the type of raw passion and feeling that fed the rock explosions of the 1950s and '60s.\nHouse was also renowned for his guitar work. He revolutionized the sliding bottleneck technique, turning it into his own specialty. Blues historian William Barlow writes that by the time House retired, "The classic Delta bottleneck guitar style he was so instrumental in developing had become inseparable from the rural blues culture indigenous to the region and would prove to be the seminal influence on the music of younger Mississippi Delta blues giants like Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Muddy Waters and Elmore James."\nBorn in 1902 on a farm near Clarksdale, Miss., Eddie "Son" House spent his formative years soaking up the culture and music of the Delta. Inspired by a local bluesman, House started playing guitar-based blues in the 1920s. He also experienced the type of hard, harrowing life typical of so many blues originals. In 1928 he claimed self-defense after killing a man at a party; he eventually served two years on a prison work farm.\nHouse traveled throughout the South, playing wherever and whenever he could until 1943, when he moved to Rochester, N.Y. (this columnist's hometown), eventually retiring in 1957. Up until that time, he toiled in relative obscurity; his only recording sessions came in 1941-42, when legendary folklorist Alan Lomax made several field recordings for the Library of Congress.\nBut a landmark performance at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival led to a concert at Carnegie Hall, several documentaries and studio sessions at Columbia. The product of those 1965 sessions is Father of the Delta Blues, a stark and stunning double-CD collection that crackles with emotional electricity and guitar virtuosity.\nThe original single album has nine tracks, including the harrowing "Death Letter," in which the singer learns that his love has died: "I walked up right close, looked down in her face / The girl's gone, gonna lay out for Judgement Day." In the a cappella "Grinnin' in Your Face," he bewails the fact that "a true friend is hard to find: Don't you mind people grinnin' in your face / You know your mother will talk about you, your sisters and brothers too / It don't count how you're tryin' to live, they'll talk about you still."\nThe disc concludes with "Levee Camp Moan," a duet with harmonica player Al Wilson about sexual frustration and heartbreak that grabs the reader by the throat and holds on for more than nine intense minutes.\nFather of the Blues is an amazing document of musical genius. It captures the soul of vintage Delta blues in a modern recording; there are no hisses or pops that dotted blues discs in the 1920s and '30s. The collection is, quite simply, essential blues listening.\nHouse died in 1988 at the age of 86, but not before he influenced countless numbers of musicians, black and white, blues and rock. His remarkable guitar playing and raw, searing vocals established a standard that still stands today.