Skip James' 1968 Bloomington concert remembered by fans

When Nehemiah "Skip" James took the stage at IU's Whittenberger Auditorium March 30, 1968, the blues legend knew he had terminal cancer. It had put him in the hospital before, and seven months after his IU concert he was bedridden. He died Oct. 3, 1969 at the age of 67.\nBut that early spring night in Bloomington, nobody else in the Auditorium -- not even folklore graduate student Peter Narváez, who picked James up from the Indianapolis airport and welcomed James into his house for two days -- was aware James was dying. Aside from frequent naps, James showed no sign of ill health.\nIn fact, if James wasn't feeling well, he put on a very good face; in a set of 1998 liner notes Narváez said he "found James to be a cheerful, informative conversationalist and guest." (James even jammed with Narváez at his house, the bluesman on guitar and the grad student on harmonica.) Such a description is somewhat contrary to the general belief James was a gloomy, dour man -- a belief that was fueled partially by James' rough and sometimes violent past and a James biography by Stephen Calt that some say painted James in an unfairly negative light.\n"He was a perfect gentleman," Narváez said today. "He was an extremely sophisticated person."\nRegardless of personality, James' place in the history of American folk and popular music is secure. In the 1920s, he began to play professionally, and in the early '30s, he made some of the most crucial and influential blues recordings ever, highlighted by the haunting, immortal classic, "Devil Got My Woman." In doing so, James influenced countless blues, folk and rock artists, and became a guiding light for subsequent blues greats, including Robert Johnson. \n"Coupling an oddball guitar tuning set against eerie, falsetto vocals," writes musician Cub Koda, "James's early recordings could make the hair stand up on the back of your neck."\nDespite his age, James had, by early 1968, performed numerous times in front of largely white audiences that were just beginning to open their minds to the blues and to the frequently-punishing life of the average Southern black person that the blues laid bare with painstaking detail. In the early 1960s, white folkies started to get hip to rural country blues, a trend that led to a renaissance of sorts for artists like James, Son House and John Hurt. By the late '60s, rock groups -- especially British ones like the Rolling Stones, Cream and Led Zeppelin -- were electrifying the blues and blasting it at top volume. \nBut while that particular black-white cultural amalgamation proceeded fairly smoothly, other encounters between the races in the late '60s didn't go so well. On college campuses across the country, increasingly militant young black students were becoming frustrated by what they perceived as foot-dragging by white student leaders and campus administrators who were hesitant to enact many of the civil rights and equality demands put forth by black (and sympathetic white) protesters.\nIU was no exception. Scheduled for March 30, 1968 -- the same day as James' concert -- was a debate between Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon William Chaney and IU graduate student Kas Kovalchek. The event, sponsored by the IU Department of Speech and Theater, was canceled at the request of IU President Elvis Stahr, who told the Indiana Daily Student Chaney's presence would have been a "direct affront to many members of the Bloomington and University communities, especially the Negro community." Stahr added the administration "has been working to eliminate all semblance of discrimination within the University."\nWise words, considering at the same time, a group of about 200 black students were meeting to plan a non-violent protest in front of Stahr's home and to draw up a list of demands to present to the president. The group eventually arranged a meeting with Stahr April 2 -- the purpose of the meeting, according to the IDS, was "to take concrete action concerning discriminatory practices on the campus." \nIt was into this background that Skip James, a 66-year-old black man from Bentonia, Miss., who for his whole life suffered through the indignities of Jim Crow -- arrived in Bloomington.\nNaváez said the night of the concert, the auditorium in the school union was almost filled to capacity. Except for a few international students, the crowd was entirely white. There was a mixing of undergrads, grad students and Bloomington residents, many of whom were folkies who Narváez said had little knowledge of the blues but were eager "to hear somebody who was an authentic, older African American from Mississippi. They were polite," he added of the crowd, "but they were also fascinated."\nThe Auditorium was dimmed for the show, but, thanks to a non-smoking regulation, the room lacked the smoky haze of the clubs at which many bluesmen played for their new white disciples. With bright spotlights on the stage, Narváez stood at the microphones to introduce the man of the hour. \n"We have one of the greatest stylists and blues singers with us today," he told the crowd, then ceded the spotlight to the aging bluesman as the crowd clapped and cheered.\nThe applause heightened when James walked out in front of the crowd -- alone and armed with his guitar -- and sat in a chair on an otherwise bare stage. A somewhat diminutive man, James was dressed in a gray suit -- his graying hair betraying his age. Two microphones were positioned in front of him, one set up by Narváez, who was recording the show on a reel-to-reel with James' permission. \n"Thank you, and good evening everyone," he told the audience before tuning his guitar for a minute or so and warming up to the crowd. "As a rule," he said, "I always usually open my program with a spiritual. I always like to put him in first place, because without him, it's a failure to start with. An honest man can hit a straight lick with a cooked stick. That's how we're created."\nNeither sickness nor age nor alcohol seemed to affect his performance, and the auditorium's acoustics augmented the sparse but riveting playing of a man who had played such an instrumental role in the development of American folk and pop music. \n"The sound was fabulous," Narváez said. "There was a really big sound. You could hear every one of his licks very nicely."\nWith his dulcet falsetto and guitar tuned in his famous Bentonia style, James rendered 21 songs, including many of his classic compositions -- "I'm So Glad," "Cherry Ball Blues," "Hard Luck Child and "Drunken Spree," among others. In simple terms, James was on that night. Narváez said James' voice was "very, very good" and "his playing was great. He hadn't lost his chops at all."\nExuding an infectious charm, James also interacted with the audience after almost every song. He took a request for "Illinois Blues," and he frequently coaxed the audience into laughter. When introducing "Devil Got My Woman," James explained he wrote the song after his first wife, who had an ingratiating ability to exasperate him. \n"So I decided to give her to a man that could handle her," he said as the audience tittered with laughter, "and that was the devil."\nRevealing his storytelling abilities, James also offered background to several of his songs. He found inspiration for "Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues," for example, in the economic bleakness of the late 1920s and early '30s.\n"I was in Dallas, Texas, at that time, in the soup line," he said matter-of-factly, recalling a period in his life -- and the lives of millions of other Americans -- that was smothered by with abject poverty. "I couldn't get no work to do, couldn't get nothin' to eat hardly but that. I got some good ideas from that experience."\nAfter roughly two hours, he brought the concert full circle by closing with another sacred song, "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning." He plucked the last chord, then said a quiet "thank you" as the crowd offered up a rousing ovation. About a year and a half later, the blues lost him to cancer.\nNarváez eventually offered his tapes to Document Records, a European label that was trying to collect and release live recordings of several early bluesmen. "Skip James: The Complete Bloomington Concert" was released on two CDs in 1998. Today Narváez holds a Ph.D. in folklore from IU and works as a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. He also remains a fierce Skip James fan who's proud of the concert and of the CDs that resulted from it.\n"It turned out to be the best, well-recorded concert Skip James ever made," Narváez said.\nThe fact that such a pristine, powerful recording could be made by a man knocking on death's door is essentially astounding. The Bloomington concert only enhanced James' legend and showed how brilliant and driven James was as an artist -- and as a person. \n"That's why I know how to compose a song as I do or as I did," he said proudly, "because I had gone through that experience, and quite naturally I could talk about it"