If you’ve seen the movie Ghost World–or if you read the inaugural post of my previous blog, Idiom Idiots–then you’re at most one degree of separation away from Skip James’s haunting blues masterpiece “Devil Got My Woman.” Seymour, the movie’s awkward country blues-loving protagonist, extols the record, telling his own devil woman, Enid: “…that’s a masterpiece. There are no other records like that. I actually have the original 78 of it in my collection. It’s one of maybe five known copies.” Enid had become acquainted with the cut via a compilation she purchased from Seymour at a garage sale and found herself playing it over and over on her portable record player. In the context of the film–in which Enid toys with, and inevitably tears apart, Seymour’s heart and life–the song’s ethereal quality is all the more transcendent. This being a music blog, however (for film analysis consult Good Plot), it feels appropriate to focus on the music-related claims Seymour makes about “Devil Got My Woman.”
In one sense, Seymour is correct in claiming that Skip James’s quintessential track is a singular masterpiece. James was very much an atypical bluesman–a proud man whose primary concern was for his own idiosyncratic artistry rather than his audience or the blues tradition to which he sometimes appeared tangential. James’s style, which was marked by disjointed, gloomy guitar licks played on an abnormally tuned guitar, was the product of his musical evolution in the metaphorical island that was his hometown: Bentonia, Mississippi. This was a local sound, however, and it is in that respect that it may be something of a stretch to say that “Devil Got My Woman” is unlike any other record. Enough of a musical community existed among James and his influences–most notably Henry Stuckey, the bluesman who is said to have taught James his signature tuning–that their sound was adopted by other locals such as Jack Owens and Cornelius Bright. The Bentonian school was a unique marvel to be sure–James simply wasn’t the only pupil.
