"Devil Got My Woman," by Nehemiah "Skip" James
Added 2022-09-01 14:01:03 +0000 UTCFriends:
This month we'll be discussing my transcription of Skip James' iconic 1931 recording of "Devil Got My Woman."
"Devil Got My Woman" has long been a favorite of mine among the catalog of important blues artists of the 20s and 30s. It was recorded for Paramount records in February of 1931 in Grafton, a little Wisconsin town on the river just about 25 minutes north of downtown Milwaukee. This tune features the open D-minor tuning that has come to be so strongly associated with his music, DADFAD. Notice only a half-step difference on the third sting from what we refer to as open D, a tuning that has been used in several other songs that we have covered here. We have also looked at John Fahey's "Red Pony" which features the same minor tuning, but that's not the only connection that Fahey would end up having with Skip James.
James stayed out of the public eye for roughly 30 years after his 1931 sessions. In 1964 John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine went on a mission to find Skip, ultimately tracking him down in a Mississippi hospital. This combined with a similar "rediscovery" of Son House in the same year ultimately led to a blues revival in the mid 60s.
The rediscovery is good news for us, because video recordings exist of James playing "Devil Got My Woman" in the mid 60s, though it evolved somewhat. We are still able to get a great sense of how his hands worked and additional "forensic" listening revealed many details in the 1931 recording that I have not seen accurately reproduced to date. To better demonstrate what we can gather as fact regarding James' technique, an excerpt of a video taped performance from the 1966 Newport Folk festival has been transcribed and is included here in addition to the 1931 transcription. Please take note that his guitar is tuned a full step higher in this later performance, so technically open E minor.
Because all of the fingerings must be inferred from existing video, the editing in the transcription is only a suggestion, though I stand by the work and feel it is very close to what James would have been doing. I go further into detail regarding the reasoning for some of these choices in the lesson video.
I have also made a few revisions to the transcription since creating the lesson video, and these are every instance of what I describe as a pinched octave on the 6th and 4th string. The first instance in on beat 3 of measure 5. Upon closer, careful listening, I was able to hear the presence of the 5th sting in all instances. These have all been corrected to indicate a brush with the thumb.
An additional element of the piece that is very, very cool, is the way he is changing the rhythm between vocal parts and the small guitar breaks. The way I describe this in the lesson video is he switches back and forth between swinging the eighth notes and swinging the sixteenth notes. An alternative way to think of this is you keep the swung eighths, but switch back and forth between regular time and double time.
My YouTube performance is here. It is important to note I took some of the repetition out of my performance https://youtu.be/2Ibb0sXYOds
The lesson video that covers the piece in its entirety can be accessed here https://youtu.be/Xt6WKVV-wrs
The transcription of the 1931 recording and an excerpt of his 1966 performance are attached below.
Comments
Hey Andy! Can play it through now with the music but constantly fighting the fingering! Will keep at it. Great work on this!
mark blomquist
2022-09-10 18:40:50 +0000 UTCReally good thoughts and discussion here Jon. I’ll look forward to digging deeper into this when I’m able to. I can provide an immediate response to the comment on fingering in the m8 motif. The fingering is taken from how he played it later. This fingering is nice as it also mirrors the chords in 7th position. You would hear the third string sustain if he was holding all four notes at the same time, it’s the rock back and forth from the third and fourth the give this passage a more distinct sound imo.
Andrew Lardner
2022-09-02 14:33:54 +0000 UTCThanks Andy. Always loved this song and it's one of the reasons I picked up the guitar. I am going to use your lesson to try and further finesse what I play. I definitely don't have the rhythmic nuance as subtly handled as you manage in the Dorian section. On the "5th string in the bass in measure 3" issue, which you say may have been a mistake - I think "mistake" is the most plausible explanation. You end up with a "prime dissonance" b9 interval, which doesn't really "belong" in Blues (Blues never has a b2 degree). It has been a while since I read the Skip James biography but I seem to remember the author concluding that certain 1931 takes appear to be semi-improvised, especially a few of the endings. That doesn't mean this song had any improvisational aspects to it but does suggest that given the constraints of studio time (and that he had never before been in a studio, I believe) that a very minor mistake could have crept in, and there was never another take to fix it up. It's possible no one ever noticed! In the measure 8 motif, I have always played this as a four finger chord, which does make it a bit trickier to get into quickly (i.e. you are fretting 2-2-3-2 on the top 4 strings). This is just to facilitate being able to play both the Am chord out of that position and be able to play the 2-0-2 triplet without having to do any movement other than lifting the fretting of the 3rd fret/2nd string. I don't really know if this really counts as more efficient than the way you're playing it. Not sure if you can see any obvious advantages to either way? It does allow me to be a bit "messier" because if I can safely brush through more strings and it will just end up sounding out an extra A, whereas if that string isn't fretted, you end up with a weird sounding G in there. OK so on the cross-note tuning stuff - I have a theory on this tuning which doesn't really have hard evidence but here it is. Cross-note tuning pre-dates Skip James, but other people who used it don't produce music that sounds *anything like* Skip. I think Henry Townsend might be one example. I believe this is because for these other artists, you should look at cross-note as actually a variation on Standard Tuning, rather than a true open-minor tuning. Only two strings are different to standard tuning anyway (DGCFAD vs DADFAD). Whereas Skip treated it as truly like an open minor, and really went to town with creating his "soundscapes". As you alluded to, this is a two-part Blues and I believe that is partly because it's quite hard to play a iv chord (or IV chord) in cross-note tuning. So he ends up naturally creating songs that rock between the i and v chords. That leads to the great unanswered/unanswerable question - WHERE did Ski p James' music come from? The tuning is not uniquely nor originally his - but the SOUND clearly is. Is it sui generis or is there some clear antecedent? Is it almost "pre-Blues"? I don't buy into the "Bentonia School" theory, which I think seems a bit too revisionist and "nice" explanation for things. And finally - Skip really hit the Dorian mode a lot. It's in this song (the cool rhythmic section) and it's also in some of his other classics like Hard Time Killing Floor. I don't know how common this mode really is in Blues but it does give a spooky sound, and Robert Pete Williams used it quite a bit as well. Harmonically, the Dorian would give a major IV chord instead of a iv chord which you usually get in minor. But since cross note doesn't nicely afford any kind of obvious iv/IV chords we never hear that in Skip's music - but it is a very clear aspect of his most famous melodies. Maybe someone with a better ear can tell me whether he is *singing* a major 6th or a minor 6th though?
Jon Tunster
2022-09-02 03:44:45 +0000 UTC
