Son House Grinnin' In Your Face

A beautiful example of the precursor to the mass-recording era, this limited 7” pressing of blues legend Son House provides a rare glimpse into real American folk music. Before every facet of our musical world was commodified and marketable, working people’s lives were predominately narrated by song, the central nerve center of consciousness, history & culture. Haunted by slavery, segregation and racial hatred, black communities of the South nurtured the blues into existence from a deep psychic pain that demanded an especially rigorous cultural processing, using song as a positive affirmation of existence and power. These prototypical recordings of Son House’s weathered, sorrowful blues standards, sung without instrumentation, are two of the most stunning examples of the urgent imperative of early blues music. Tinged with a tangible sadness and the knowledge of a veritable sage, these songs testify to the cathartic power of a music created for far more than the decadent superficialities of modern industrial societies, providing a historical document of the foundations of so much American music to follow and suggesting that the infinite possibilities provided by technology have not expanded on the basic purpose of music and artistic expression.