Rod Stewart's "Forever Young" is a popular choice for the father-daughter dance. The gift keeps on giving as succeeding generations find inspiration in the emotional and musical roots of the blues.1960s slow dance songs.
The Skip James’s of the world have given us so much beauty, forged as it were in the fire of hardship. Out of the ashes of pain and suffering arises a thing of real beauty – the blues and all that the blues has inspired. They survived and pressed on, and so will we. Some have most assuredly had it worse than us. While we may have appropriated the music borne out of the real sorrow and pain of the past for our present pleasure and entertainment, we should not forget the reality that gave birth to the blues. There is something pure and inspiring about the way the blues connects with the human condition. The sisters capture well the character of the sound and emotion Skip James conveyed with his old acoustic using a modern slide guitar and Fender Stratocaster. Skip James is considered one of the seminal delta blues artists, but his style might be more aptly described as Piedmont blues, featuring fast and clean fingerprinting over heavy bass lines. It’s fitting, perhaps, that these sisters from the Piedmont (Georgia) have channeled such a beautiful rendition of Hard Time Killing Floor. One of the more compelling modern versions of Hard Time Killing Floor is done by the Lovell sisters, going by the band name, Larkin Poe: They plumbed the depth of human emotion that gave birth to the blues and inspired have musical offspring for generations after. We owe them a debt of gratitude for the way they bore up under the oppression of our ancestors.
HARD TIME KILLING FLOOR BLUES LYRICS MOVIE
So it was for the delta blues originators, most of whom would never find the vein of gold they sought from their music. Fortunately for us their music has survived to enrich many generations since.Īlthough the movie is somewhat a spoof of the human condition, roughly inspired by the Iliad and the Odyssey, it is buoyed by a reverent tenderness for the real trials and tribulations of the black plight in the south at the turn of the century. Their unlikely dreams are as real to them as they are certain to remain unfulfilled. Hard Time Killing Floor gained much deserved attention in the composition by Chris Thomas King for the Cohen brother movie, O Brother Where Art Thou.Īs the emotion laden minor chords of Hard Time Killing Floor are playing in the background, representative of the real hard times of the African American laborer in the Jim Crow south, the down-and-out trio of ne’er-do-wells in the movie dream of finding a million dollar bounty of stolen booty in a lonely valley that they don’t realize is soon to be flooded over. If it wasn’t for the rediscovery of his music at the end of the blues and folk revival, just as the electric amp of rock and roll was beginning to drown out its acoustic predecessor, the genius of Skip James may have never been known and appreciated. The tail end of that movement lofted Skip James into the spotlight for a brief, five-year stint before his death. Skip James was rediscovered in the process. Major record labels began catering to the growing folk music crowd at that time began reproducing “race” and “hillbilly” music from the 20’s and 30’s. Not much would likely have survived about Skip James, the musician, if it wasn’t for the blues and folk music revival of the 50’s and early 60’s. His musical career was quashed even as it started. He was ordained into both Baptist and Methodist churches. Skip James turned his attention to directing the choir in his father’s church. Skip’s musical career never got off the ground with the heavy air of the Great Depression flattening out the wind under his wings. Inherent in the plaintive heart of the blues, though, is a sorrowful note of hope, a certain resigned peace and satisfaction in the singing of which hope rises above the pain. A blues song by nature, one might imagine a modern day psalmist pouring his heart out to God, expressing the emotional anguish of the drudgery of life under the sun. The slaughterhouses that employed many black men at the time may have inspired Hard Time Killing Floor, though it isn’t clear whether Skip James ever worked in one. Skip drew influence and style from blues and spirituals, bending genres with original and cover compositions, but the latent emotion and authenticity in his music was the substance of his own life. They paid for his travel to Grafton, Wisconsin in 1931 to record his songs. His talent was recognized by somehow by Paramount. Skip James’s musical prowess was developed early, likely honed in his father’s church.
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