Hard Time Killing Floor
The Music of Skip James
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The little town of Bentonia is in Yazoo County, Mississippi, near the bottom lands of the Big Black River. It lies not in the famed Mississippi delta, but above it in the Loess Plains. Henry “Son” Stuckey was born on a plantation near Bentonia in the mid-to-late 1890s. Although he never recorded, Stuckey is credited with starting the “Bentonia School” of music. His inspiration came from an indirect route, during his service near the end of the First World War.
“I was driving trucks and ambulances in France and this group of [black] soldiers were playing music at the end of their jobs,” Stuckey explained in a 1965 interview. “I had never heard any guitars sound the way they sounded. I knew it wasn’t natural so I went over and asked them to show me how it was tuned.” Stuckey is referring here to the “natural,” or standard guitar tuning. What he heard that day was an open E minor tuning, in which the instrument is tuned to the minor triad. Because there are three notes in a triad but six strings on a guitar, the tuning results in several octave harmonies.
