The Bluesmobile’s C.C. Rider, who spends her life venerating the founding fathers of the blues. She’s walked the crooked highways of this singing country to resurrect the voices of the past. With the dirt of the Delta on her hands, she sleeps in the shadow of the giants on whose shoulders popular music now stands.
Son House
(March 21, 1902 – October 19, 1988)
When young sportswriter and photographer Dick Waterman discovered the man known as Son House on a porch in Rochester, New York in 1964, he had no idea what he would find. No one had heard Son House sing or play his resonator guitar since the few sessions he recorded for the Library of Congress in the 1930s. People thought Son House was dead. But he was alive. Oh yes he was alive.
And he never did it the soft and easy way, he did it with an intensity. When he started a song, his eyes just rolled back, and the sweat broke out on his face, and the slide would come slashing slashing up the neck and he would sing in falsetto, his voice would flare off in falsetto, and the songs went as long as they had to. And when he ended the song his head would come forward and he would slowly come back up in the chairs and you could see he would be blinking and he would come back to you. – Dick Waterman
