In 1966, Cream recorded “I’m So Glad.” It became one of the band’s signature songs — Eric Clapton’s guitar work is celebrated, Ginger Baker’s drumming is ferocious, Jack Bruce’s bass is thunderous. It reached millions of people who had never heard the original.
The original was recorded in 1931 by a man named Nehemiah Curtis James, in Grafton, Wisconsin, for the Paramount label. He recorded it in a hotel room with a portable recording setup, playing a guitar he’d tuned to an unusual open minor tuning he called “cross-note.” The recording sold poorly. The Depression arrived. Skip James went back to Mississippi and didn’t record again for thirty-three years.
When Cream’s version made “I’m So Glad” famous, Skip James received the composer royalties. He used them to pay his medical bills. He was dying of cancer. The royalties arrived in time to matter.
The specific chain of events — a 1931 recording session in a Wisconsin hotel, the specific tuning that made it sound like nothing else in the blues tradition, the thirty-three years of obscurity, the Cream cover, the medical bills — is the complete Skip James story in compressed form. The gear within it: one guitar, one tuning nobody else used, one recording setup in a hotel room, and one of the most distinctive musical personalities in the history of American music.
Background: Bentonia, Henry Stuckey, Caribbean Soldiers, and the Tuning That Changed Everything
Nehemiah Curtis James was born June 9, 1902, in Bentonia, Mississippi — a small town in the Yazoo River Delta region that sits outside the main Mississippi Delta geographical area and has developed its own distinctive musical tradition known as Bentonia blues. The Bentonia style is characterised specifically by the cross-note tuning, the minor-key harmonic language, and the specific fingerpicking approach that James exemplified and that subsequent Bentonia musicians have maintained.
His primary musical mentor was Henry Stuckey — a local musician who had served in France during World War I and, during his military service, encountered Black soldiers from the Caribbean (specifically from the Bahamas or Jamaica, according to blues musicologist Gayle Dean Wardlow’s research). These soldiers had their own guitar tuning and style. Stuckey absorbed it. He brought it back to Bentonia. Skip James learned it from Stuckey.
This chain of transmission — from Caribbean musical tradition to Black World War I soldiers to Henry Stuckey to Skip James — is one of the more remarkable documented lines of musical influence in blues history. The cross-note tuning that defines James’s most celebrated recordings came from outside the Mississippi blues tradition entirely, arriving in Bentonia by the specific route of military service and cross-cultural musical contact.
James worked various jobs — sharecropping, bootlegging, working at a sawmill — through the 1920s while developing his musical abilities. His 1931 Paramount sessions were his first and, for decades, his only commercial recordings. Paramount Records was already in serious financial difficulty by 1931 and the Depression destroyed whatever commercial potential the recordings might have had. He recorded approximately twenty-six sides for the label; the records sold minimally and disappeared into the collector’s market that would eventually bring him back to recognition.
He returned to Mississippi, became a minister, and largely abandoned secular music for decades. He played occasionally but not professionally. He lived in what he described as deliberate distance from the blues world he had briefly touched.
In 1964, a group of blues revivalists including guitarist and composer John Fahey found James lying sick in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. With their help, he was able to perform at the Newport Folk Festival 1964 — his return to public performance after thirty-three years. He recorded new albums, performed at festivals, and continued recording until his death in 1969. Cream’s recording of “I’m So Glad” had made him one of the most unlikely living beneficiaries of the British blues boom — a dying man in Mississippi receiving royalty checks from a London rock band.
He died October 3, 1969, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at age 67.
Tone note: The cross-note tuning came from Caribbean soldiers in France in World War I, via Henry Stuckey of Bentonia. It arrived in the Mississippi Delta from the Caribbean through a military route. The specific tonal character that makes “Devil Got My Woman” and “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” sound like nothing else in blues music came from outside the blues tradition, arriving by accident of war and musical curiosity across two continents.
The Rig: Skip James’s Guitars, Amps & Gear
James’s gear story is among the least-documented specific gear histories in this series, for the same reasons as the other pre-war blues masters: he worked before the era of gear journalism, he was not interviewed specifically about equipment, and his instruments were not preserved or catalogued. What we know comes from photographs, recordings, and the specific tonal character of the instrument that produced his 1931 Paramount sides.
Guitars: The Unspecified but Tonally Distinctive
The 1931 Paramount Session Instrument
The specific guitar James used for his 1931 Paramount recordings is not documented in historical records. He was in Grafton, Wisconsin — far from his home base in Mississippi — for a recording session with a portable setup in a hotel room. The guitar he used would have been whatever he had with him on that journey, or possibly an instrument provided by or arranged through Paramount’s representatives.
The tonal character of the 1931 recordings — the specific timbre of the instrument audible on “Devil Got My Woman,” “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” and “I’m So Glad” — suggests a steel-string acoustic flat-top in the budget-to-midrange category of the period. The recording technology of 1931, limited as it was, captures the instrument’s specific acoustic character: warm, slightly dry, with a focused midrange that suits the cross-note tuning’s emphasis on the minor third and minor seventh intervals that give the music its characteristic haunting quality.
Based on what was available to a musician of James’s economic circumstances in 1931 Mississippi, instruments that were common in that context include Stella flat-tops (a popular budget brand widely used by Delta blues musicians), National steel guitars (though the recording doesn’t suggest the metal resonator’s distinctive tone), or a basic parlor-style acoustic of unspecified manufacture. The research on his instruments confirms no specific make or model for the 1931 sessions.
Rediscovery Era Instruments (1964–1969)
Photographs from the 1964–1969 rediscovery period show James with acoustic flat-top guitars. He appears with what looks like a standard acoustic flat-top — no specific make or model has been confirmed in available documentation. By the time of the Newport Folk Festival performances and subsequent recordings, he would have had access to more contemporary instruments, possibly arranged by the folk revival musicians and organizers who facilitated his return to performing.
His rediscovery recordings — on Vanguard Records and other folk-era labels — capture the same playing style as the 1931 originals, with somewhat improved recording technology allowing more detail of the specific instrument’s character.
Complete Guitar List
- Unknown acoustic flat-top (1931 Paramount sessions) — Make and model undocumented; used for all 1931 Grafton, Wisconsin sessions; specific tonal character audible in recordings suggests steel-string acoustic in budget-to-midrange range
- Various acoustic flat-tops (1964–1969 rediscovery period) — Undocumented specific models; visible in Newport and other performance photographs; standard acoustic guitar construction
Tone note: The most stylistically original guitar recordings in the Mississippi Delta blues tradition were made on an undocumented guitar in a hotel room in Grafton, Wisconsin. The instrument is unknown. The tuning is famous. The music is permanent. The relationship between the two facts is the entire gear philosophy of the pre-war blues era: what you play matters; what you play it on is much less important.
Amps: None
Skip James was an entirely acoustic performer. No amplifiers, no electric instruments, no signal processing of any kind. Like Mississippi John Hurt, his recordings were made acoustically with microphone capture. Unlike Lightnin’ Hopkins, who eventually adopted the electric guitar with amplification, James remained acoustic throughout his recording career.
The “amplification” in his signal chain was the guitar’s wooden body, the acoustic resonance of whatever room he was in, and the microphone. His 1931 recordings were made with the primitive portable recording equipment that Paramount’s field recording teams used, capturing the guitar’s direct acoustic output.
Pedals: None
Guitar. Room. Microphone. End of signal chain. The haunting, otherworldly quality of Skip James’s recordings comes entirely from the tuning, the technique, and the specific quality of his musical personality — not from any external signal processing.
Strings, Picks & Setup
Strings: Not documented in specific commercial terms. The cross-note tuning he used requires specific consideration for string gauges — the tuning to D minor (D A D F A D) or E minor cross-note reduces string tension on some strings, which affects both feel and tone. Musicians who play in cross-note tuning typically use medium-to-heavy strings to maintain adequate tension and clear, defined string response at the lower pitches.
Picks: James played fingerstyle, without flatpick. His specific right-hand technique was a two-finger approach — thumb on bass strings, index or middle finger on treble strings — somewhat similar to the Piedmont tradition but deployed in the specific context of the cross-note tuning’s harmonic language.
The Cross-Note Tuning — The Most Important Setup Detail:
The defining element of Skip James’s setup — more important than his guitar choice, more important than his strings, more important than any other equipment consideration — is the cross-note tuning. This is the setup that makes Skip James sound like Skip James, and without it, no guitar or playing approach can produce the characteristic musical world of his recordings.
Cross-note tuning in E minor (E B E G B E) — the standard guitar tuning with the third string lowered from G to G, creating an open E minor chord. Cross-note tuning in D minor (D A D F A D) — all strings lowered by a whole step from the E minor version, creating an open D minor chord.
James used the D minor version for most of his 1931 recordings. American Blues Scene confirmed: “Skip James is credited with having dubbed this particular open tuning ‘cross note.’ He used the eerie-sounding tuning to great effect in such spooky recordings as ‘Devil Got my Woman’ and ‘Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.'”
The term “cross-note” refers to the tuning’s ability to cross between major and minor tonalities: fretting the third string at the first fret converts the open minor chord to a major chord. This major/minor ambiguity — easily available in cross-note but unavailable in standard tuning — is the harmonic foundation of the Bentonia blues style’s distinctive tension and release character.
He also used E minor cross-note for some recordings, and standard tuning for others (as documented in the Tom Feldmann instructional DVD’s organisation of his repertoire).
His third tuning: Spanish tuning (Open G, D G D G B D), used for “Special Rider Blues” — his only recording in that configuration according to Feldmann’s analysis.
Tone note: The cross-note tuning was learned from Henry Stuckey, who learned it from Caribbean soldiers in France, who brought it from the Bahamas or Jamaica. The specific tuning that gives “Devil Got My Woman” its supernatural harmonic quality arrived in Bentonia, Mississippi from the Caribbean via World War I. Musical tradition travels strange routes. The result, in James’s hands, was unlike anything else in American music.
Tunings — The Full Documentation
- Cross-note D minor (D A D F A D) — Primary tuning; most 1931 Paramount sides; “Devil Got My Woman,” “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” “Cherry Ball Blues,” “Cypress Grove Blues,” and most of the foundational catalog
- Cross-note E minor (E B E G B E) — Standard tuning with third string lowered; used for a number of recordings; same harmonic character as D minor cross-note, pitched a whole step higher
- Standard E tuning — Used for some songs including “Drunken Spree,” “Crow Jane,” “Worried Blues,” and others in the D and E positions
- Spanish tuning (Open G, D G D G B D) — Used for “Special Rider Blues” only; his single recording in this configuration
The cross-note tuning’s harmonic character: the open strings produce a minor chord. Moving a slide or barring across the neck at any fret produces a minor chord. Adding the first finger to the third string only converts the minor to major. This gives the Bentonia style its specific major/minor ambiguity — moving between the minor darkness of the open chord and the briefly major brightness of the fretted chord.
Playing Style & Tone Philosophy: The Haunted Guitar
Skip James’s playing style is, as the research consistently confirms, “perhaps the most stylistically original of the blues performers from the Mississippi River Delta region.” This is the complete guitar assessment — not a comparative evaluation placing him above or below other players, but a recognition that his specific approach has no clear predecessor and created no clear successors in the immediate tradition. He is a singular voice.
The Cross-Note Technique
In cross-note tuning, James’s fingerpicking approach created what Acoustic Guitar described as “insistently repeating musical motifs, often based on just one or two chords, for hypnotic effect.” The cross-note tuning’s minor harmonic character, combined with the specific repetitive motifs he developed and the falsetto vocal delivery, produces a music that is simultaneously ancient-sounding and immediately unsettling.
Premier Guitar described the Bentonia style’s technical core: “Most of the music from Bentonia is played in crossnote, with the first finger generally fretting the 3rd string at the 1st fret to form a major chord. A variation of the minor tonic is also played between the 7th and 9th frets and the minor V7 is played as an open chord. Melodic improvisations come from the Dorian mode.”
The Dorian mode — a natural minor scale with a raised sixth — provides the specific quality of melodic lines that distinguishes Bentonia blues from Delta blues played in standard pentatonic minor vocabulary. The raised sixth of Dorian gives phrases a slightly more complex, ambiguous harmonic colour than the pure minor pentatonic, which contributes to the “haunting” quality that every description of James’s music invokes.
Tone note: Dorian mode over a cross-note open minor tuning. That’s the harmonic language of “Devil Got My Woman.” It produces the specific “eerie” quality that makes the song sound like it’s coming from somewhere outside normal musical space. The tuning isn’t a convenience — it’s a specific harmonic choice that enables a specific emotional effect unavailable in standard tuning.
The Falsetto Vocal
James’s guitar playing cannot be separated from his vocal approach. The haunting falsetto — a high, keening vocal quality that sits above normal male vocal range — interacts with the cross-note minor tuning to produce a combined sound of exceptional emotional intensity. The guitar’s minor-key drone and the falsetto’s urgent, slightly unstable pitch produce a music that listeners consistently describe using words like “haunting,” “eerie,” “supernatural,” and “distressing.”
This vocal-guitar integration means that approximating James’s sound requires not just his tuning and technique but something of his specific vocal personality — something that, by definition, no other musician possesses. The guitar can be tuned to cross-note D minor and the fingerpicking patterns can be learned, but without the specific quality of his voice, the result will be an approximation of the external characteristics rather than the full experience.
The Hypnotic Repetition
James’s compositional approach relies heavily on repetition — “insistently repeating musical motifs” over limited harmonic movement. This repetitive quality, which can initially seem like structural simplicity, is actually a sophisticated psychological tool: the repetition creates hypnotic expectation, and the small variations within it create constant surprise. The listener is caught between the comfort of the returning pattern and the disruption of its variation.
This approach to repetition and variation — derived from the blues tradition’s general use of the repetitive blues form but pushed to a more extreme and deliberate place by James — anticipates the drone-based minimalist music of the 1960s and 1970s by decades. John Fahey, who was part of the group that rediscovered James and who developed a specific form of instrumental drone-and-repetition guitar music, was clearly influenced by what he found in that Mississippi hospital.
The Cream Connection
Eric Clapton’s absorption of James’s specific guitar vocabulary runs through Cream’s “I’m So Glad” but extends beyond that specific cover. The haunting minor-key quality of certain Clapton moments — particularly in his more atmospheric, less technically demonstrative playing — has James ancestry. Clapton has acknowledged the Delta blues masters as primary influences; James represents the most unusual and most personally idiosyncratic corner of that tradition.
The royalties from “I’m So Glad” arriving in time to pay James’s medical bills is one of blues music’s more poignant financial stories. It joins the tradition of belated recognition and inadequate compensation that runs through the careers of virtually every blues originator in this series — but in this case, at least, the money arrived while the originator could use it.
How to Sound Like Skip James: Entering the Cross-Note World
Skip James’s sound is both accessible and impossible in a specific way: the tuning and technique are learnable; the specific emotional quality is his and cannot be replicated. What can be achieved is the harmonic world of the cross-note tuning and a functional understanding of the Bentonia style’s technical vocabulary.
The Guitar
Any steel-string acoustic flat-top will work. The specific instrument matters less than the tuning — cross-note tuning’s distinctive harmonic character is primarily a function of the open strings’ minor relationship, not of the specific guitar’s construction. A parlor-sized acoustic or a standard small-body flat-top produces the most authentic character, though a dreadnought works.
- Any acoustic flat-top — The tuning is the thing; specific guitar construction is secondary
- Parlor or small-body acoustic — The historical context suggests this body size; the focused midrange suits the cross-note minor character
- Medium-gauge steel strings — Adequate tension for the lowered cross-note pitches
The Cross-Note Tuning Setup
The most important gear decision in approaching Skip James is not a guitar or amp purchase — it’s tuning the guitar to cross-note:
Cross-note D minor (D A D F A D):
- 6th string (low E): tune down to D
- 5th string (A): keep as A
- 4th string (D): keep as D
- 3rd string (G): tune down to F
- 2nd string (B): tune up to A (or keep as B depending on the specific open chord you want)
- 1st string (high E): tune down to D
Result: strumming open strings produces a D minor chord (D A D F A D — root, fifth, root, minor third, fifth, root).
Cross-note E minor (E B E G B E):
- Standard tuning with only the 3rd string lowered from G to G — wait, this produces E minor (E B E G B E), same as standard tuning except the G on the 3rd string gives you the minor third of an E minor chord when open
- Result: strumming open strings produces an E minor chord
The magic of the cross-note minor tuning: fretting the 3rd string at the first fret (F to F# in D minor cross-note, or G to G# in E minor cross-note) converts the minor chord to major. This one-finger modification to the open minor chord produces the major/minor ambiguity that is the harmonic character of all Bentonia blues.
Tone note: Tune to cross-note D minor. Strum the open strings. That sound — the open D minor chord resonating without any fretting — is the harmonic foundation of Skip James’s entire musical world. It took fifteen seconds to set up. It took a career to use it the way he used it.
No Amp, No Effects
Entirely acoustic. This is the third consecutive artist in this series for whom the complete signal chain is: guitar, fingers, air, microphone. The cross-note tuning produces its haunting quality acoustically; amplification adds nothing essential to the character and potentially dilutes the intimacy that is part of the music’s emotional effect.
Budget vs Authentic
Budget:
- Guitar: Any acoustic flat-top; parlor size preferred
- Strings: D’Addario EJ16 medium (.013–.056)
- Tuning: Cross-note D minor (D A D F A D)
- Picks: None — bare fingers
Authentic:
- Guitar: Martin 00-18 or similar small-body acoustic
- Strings: Medium gauge phosphor bronze
- Tuning: Cross-note D minor or E minor
- Picks: None
The entire cost of authentically replicating Skip James’s setup: the cost of any acoustic guitar plus the time to retune the strings to cross-note. No pedals. No amp. No additional purchases beyond the guitar itself.
The Technique
In cross-note D minor tuning, begin with the open chord. Let it ring. Hear the minor quality — the F note on the 3rd string is the minor third of the D minor chord, producing that specific quality of unresolved melancholy. Now fret just the 3rd string at the first fret (F to F#). The chord becomes D major — a brightening, a moment of resolution. Release it. Back to minor. This movement — minor to major and back — is the harmonic heart of the Bentonia style.
The fingerpicking pattern: thumb on the bass strings (low D and A), index or middle finger on the treble strings (high D, A, D). Maintain a steady pulse with the thumb while the fingers navigate the melodic variations. The thumb provides rhythmic regularity; the melody departs from and returns to it.
Learn “Devil Got My Woman” in cross-note D minor. Learn the repeating motif that Acoustic Guitar documented — the insistently returning figure that creates hypnotic expectation. Then learn to vary it minimally. The variation within repetition is the compositional intelligence. The repetition itself is the foundation.
And: try the falsetto. Not James’s specific voice — your own falsetto, whatever it is. The register match between falsetto and the cross-note minor guitar is part of the music’s character that tablature cannot fully capture. The voice and the instrument are tuned to each other.
Influence & Legacy: The Supernatural Corner of Delta Blues
Skip James’s influence is both specific and pervasive — specific in the musicians who directly absorbed his approach, pervasive in the sense that the “eerie,” “haunting,” “supernatural” corner of blues music that his work represents runs through a wide strand of American and British music that may not know its source.
The direct influences:
- Cream — “I’m So Glad” became one of their signature songs and introduced Skip James to a global audience that had no idea who he was; the royalties from the cover paid his medical bills at the end of his life
- John Fahey — Was part of the rediscovery group that found James in a Mississippi hospital; Fahey’s own drone-based, repetitive instrumental guitar style has obvious James ancestry
- The Bentonia tradition — Jimmy “Duck” Holmes and Jack Owens maintained the Bentonia style in Mississippi after James’s death; the tradition continues today at the Blue Front Café in Bentonia
- Eric Clapton — Beyond “I’m So Glad,” the specific minor-key emotional intensity of certain Clapton moments carries James ancestry
The broader cultural influence: the “haunting,” “supernatural” quality that journalists use to describe James’s music is the quality that recurs in the psychedelic era’s attempt to find music that sounds genuinely otherworldly. The cross-note minor tuning’s specific harmonic character, James’s falsetto, and the hypnotic repetition all anticipate the drone-based music that would emerge in the 1960s. His rediscovery arrived just as that music was forming, and musicians who were at the folk revival events where James performed absorbed something of that quality into their own developing aesthetic.
The royalties from “I’m So Glad” arrived in time. That specific fact — that a British rock band’s cover of a 1931 blues recording provided medical care to a dying man — is one of the more specific instances of the global transmission of American blues culture producing delayed but real consequences for its originators.
He died in 1969. Thirty-eight years after his first recordings. Thirty-three of those years were obscurity. Five were recognition — Newport performances, Vanguard recordings, royalty checks from London.
“I sure wish I’d been rediscovered sooner,” he might have said. He didn’t say it on the record, but the circumstances justify the sentiment. The music was there, in Bentonia, waiting. The tuning was there. The falsetto was there. The insistently repeating motifs, built on two chords in open D minor, that produced one of the most singular musical personalities in American history — all there, in Mississippi, for thirty-three years while the rest of the world recorded around it.
Tone note: A 1931 hotel recording in Grafton, Wisconsin. A Caribbean tuning that arrived via World War I soldiers. A falsetto that sounds like it’s coming from another plane of existence. Cream covered it. The royalties paid the medical bills. That’s the complete story. The guitar’s make and model is unknown. The music is permanent.
In Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1931, a man from Bentonia, Mississippi sat in a hotel room with a portable recording setup and played his guitar in a tuning he called cross-note. The tuning had come to him from Henry Stuckey, who had gotten it from Caribbean soldiers in France, who had brought it from islands in the Caribbean where it was simply the way certain people played the guitar.
He recorded “Devil Got My Woman” and “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” and “I’m So Glad” and twenty-three other sides. The records sold poorly. The Depression arrived. He went home.
Thirty-three years later, John Fahey found him in a hospital. Eric Clapton put “I’m So Glad” on a Cream record. The royalties arrived.
The tuning is still there. D A D F A D. Minor third open. Major third with one finger. The haunted half-step between them is the entire harmonic world of Bentonia, Mississippi, carried from the Caribbean through France through Henry Stuckey’s hands into a hotel room in Wisconsin in 1931 and out again into everything that followed.
Tune your guitar to cross-note and play the open strings. That’s the sound. That’s where it starts. What you do with it is your own.
If Skip James’s cross-note minor tuning and Bentonia style have you exploring the supernatural corner of Delta blues, check out our complete guide to Robert Johnson’s guitars and gear — another Delta blues master who recorded in 1936-37 under similarly mysterious circumstances and produced recordings that shaped the entire tradition of blues guitar.
And for the guitarist who was part of the group that rediscovered Skip James and whose own instrumental guitar work absorbed the drone-and-repetition quality of Bentonia blues, check our coverage of the acoustic guitar tradition that John Fahey helped establish — traceable ultimately back to the haunted hotel room recordings of 1931.
FAQ: Skip James Guitars & Gear
- What is cross-note tuning and how did Skip James use it?
- Cross-note tuning is an open minor tuning — the guitar’s open strings produce a minor chord. The most common version is D minor (D A D F A D, low to high), which Skip James used for the majority of his 1931 Paramount recordings. He coined the term “cross-note” for this tuning’s ability to cross between minor and major tonalities — fretting just the 3rd string at the first fret converts the open minor chord to major. This minor/major ambiguity is the harmonic foundation of the Bentonia blues style. James learned the tuning from local musician Henry Stuckey, who had picked it up from Caribbean soldiers while serving in France during World War I.
- What guitar did Skip James play on his 1931 Paramount recordings?
- Unknown. His 1931 Paramount sessions were recorded in a hotel room in Grafton, Wisconsin, with portable equipment. The specific guitar he used is not documented in historical records. Based on the economic circumstances of a Mississippi blues musician in 1931 and the tonal character audible in the recordings, the instrument was likely a steel-string acoustic flat-top in the budget-to-midrange category of the period — possibly a Stella or similar widely-available budget brand. The make and model was never recorded and the instrument was not preserved.
- How did Cream’s recording of “I’m So Glad” affect Skip James?
- Cream recorded Skip James’s 1931 composition “I’m So Glad” for their debut album Fresh Cream (1966) and performed it live extensively. The cover introduced James to a global audience unaware of the original. As composer, James received royalty payments from the Cream recording. He was in declining health at the time of his rediscovery (1964) and died of cancer in 1969. The royalty payments from the Cream cover arrived in time to contribute to his medical care in his final years — one of the more poignant instances of a blues originator receiving belated financial benefit from his work.
- What tunings did Skip James use?
- Four documented tunings: cross-note D minor (D A D F A D) — his primary tuning used for most 1931 Paramount recordings including “Devil Got My Woman,” “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” and “Cypress Grove Blues”; cross-note E minor (E B E G B E) — standard tuning with the 3rd string lowered, used for some recordings; standard E tuning — used for some songs including “Crow Jane,” “Worried Blues,” and others; Spanish tuning (Open G, D G D G B D) — used only for “Special Rider Blues,” his single recording in this configuration.
- Who influenced Skip James and who did he influence?
- His primary mentor was Henry Stuckey of Bentonia, Mississippi, who taught him the cross-note tuning. He learned from the general blues tradition of the early twentieth century. His direct influences include Cream (who covered “I’m So Glad,” providing him royalties for his medical care), John Fahey (who was part of the 1964 rediscovery group and whose own drone-guitar work shows James ancestry), Eric Clapton, and the ongoing Bentonia blues tradition maintained by Jimmy “Duck” Holmes and Jack Owens. His specific stylistic influence — the cross-note minor tuning and Bentonia style — is most directly traceable through musicians who studied his recordings during the folk revival.
- How do I set up a guitar for Skip James’s cross-note tuning?
- For cross-note D minor (D A D F A D): tune the 6th string down from E to D; keep the 5th string at A; keep the 4th string at D; tune the 3rd string down from G to F; keep the 2nd string at B (some variants change this to A); tune the 1st string down from E to D. The result is an open D minor chord when all strings are strummed open. Fretting just the 3rd string at the first fret converts the chord from minor to major — this single-finger major/minor conversion is the harmonic core of the Bentonia blues style. Use medium-gauge strings (.013–.056 or similar) to maintain adequate tension at the lowered pitches.
- How do I learn to play like Skip James?
- Tune to cross-note D minor (D A D F A D) and begin with the open chord. Let it ring and hear the minor quality. Fret the 3rd string at the first fret and hear it convert to major. Release and return to minor. This minor/major movement is the foundation. For fingerpicking: thumb maintains a bass pulse on the low D and A strings; index or middle finger provides melodic notes on the treble strings. Learn “Devil Got My Woman” from a recording or transcription in cross-note D minor — specifically the repeating melodic motif that the song is built on. The Dorian mode (natural minor with a raised sixth) provides the melodic vocabulary. No picks, no amp — entirely acoustic fingerpicking.
