Son House - Death Letter Blues (1960's Color Film)

I haven't seen this footage here on youtube yet, so I thought I should upload it. Son house does a particularly good (though short) rendition of his Death Letter blues. He also has a nice Colonel Sanders tie. Includes an awesome close up on his hand and the (brass?) slide he is using.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• Son
• House
• death
• letter
• delta
• blues
• slide
• dobro
• resonator
• acoustic
• national
• vintage
• guitar
• 1960's
• color
• film

[rocktenniscat]

Remembering the great Son House today. Died October 19th, 1988

[terser]

@rocktenniscat - Ah, Son House and I were alive at the same time for only 26 days.

[bilrux]

Heard Son House do this, up close, at an afternoon blues workshop at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival (the film might be from that performance). Powerful stuff. I have his old LP with this track, titled "I Do Not Play no Rock and Roll." The great Skip James was also on the program.

The guy pulling the old 78 at the beginning is a devoted preservationist in Frederick, MD. I'm not sure if he's still around, but the clip is from an indie documentary about him.

[HanumanDas420]

Namaste. Right to my Bhakti Heart. Sigh. Namaste.

[d820m]

@Slickdapj wouldn't surprise me if John Tefteller was the one who had that copy.......on one other note, according to one source is that even if you found a clean near mint copy of a lot of Son House, or Charley Patton Paramount records, you would still hear a lot of surface noise due to the poor quality of materials used...(something about they were used to line chicken coops or something like that)

[Hoglegvid]

1:29 RANDOM DOG OUTTA NOWHERE

[JazzmanJeff]

Pretty awesome!

[TheUnchainedMind]

You would probably get partnered by youtube if you just removed this one video who's copyright you don't own(at least I believe you don't). Of course I don't know if you might be interested in that.

Great videos btw :)

[metalltier]

I thought he got out of the game just before color film was mainstream shows what I know

[karenhunter58]

What a wonderful upload -- thank you so much for sharing it.

[rogerw117]

I saw him in 1967 in London - frail, led on by two young guys, was carefully sat down, made some incoherent sounds then a few seconds silence then WOW into Death Letter and one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. 44 years ago and I still remember it clearly.

[Slickdapj]

"Walkin Blues" and "Mississippi Farm County Blues" surfaced not long ago, after all this time! A collector had a copy, and the two songs are available. I downloaded them from Amazon. It was probably the holy grail of lost blues records. Scratchy? You bet, but the power and majesty of Son House pours off the songs.