Skip James, the forgotten artist Bob Dylan said could blow anyone’s mind
Bob Dylan didn’t get into the business of entertainment.
He wanted to make music that helped open people’s minds up to what was really going on in the world, and even if not every song resonated with the public, Dylan was never going to apologise for speaking his mind. But even he knew there were people out there that were capable of leaving the audience in shambles compared to him.
But Dylan’s music was a far cry from what the other rock and rollers were doing at the time. His version of folk rock was not the same kind of party music that Elvis Presley and Little Richard, and while Dylan certainly had respect for rock and roll at the time, he found his calling following in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie. He knew his songs had the potential to tell a story, and that came from him talking about the real-world issues going on.
If you think about it, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ feels like a musical call to arms more than a song half the time. Dylan wanted everyone to take a good hard look at themselves and see what side of history they were on as the US slowly went through one of the greatest periods of unrest in its history. If there was one thing connecting every genre together, though, it was the blues.
After all, blues has been the beating heart of American music since people first started busking, and even if the earliest bluesmen didn’t have an audience or a place to record, it was better for them to cry out in pain through music than have to roll over and deal with the problems of everyday life. Dylan had a healthy affection for the blues as much as he did folk rock, but Skip James had the kind of swagger that was hard to define.
Whereas most people likened blues artists to people in Chicago with their suits on, James wrote songs that were ripped right out of the Delta. He was singing the kind of music that no one had ever thought of before, and while it wasn’t nearly as lyrically verbose as Dylan, the folk icon realised that there was a mystical spirit about the way that he sang in falsetto on every one of his tracks.
Springsteen had talked about Dylan kicking down the door of people’s minds, but Dylan credits James for doing the same thing to him when he first heard him, saying, “Skip James once said: ‘I don’t want to entertain. What I want to do is impress with skill and deaden the minds of my listeners.’ If you listen to his records — his old records — you know he can do that.” While James did get a little bit of a makeover going into the 1960s, though, there was going to be a few pieces missing.
There were still great songs in his repertoire, but when cleaning his tracks up a little bit, the label inadvertently took a lot of his swagger out of the equation. And even when Dylan started working on his first albums, James seemed to be letting his music take a back seat half the time, usually doing what he thought would turn over the most profit rather than following his heart like he used to do.
He could still play great tunes, but the biggest lesson that Dylan learned from James is that it’s no use trying to make the best music for someone else. It’s about writing the songs that you’re happy with, and as long as you can hear the passion in the singer’s voice, that’s all that really matters.
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