Hard Time Killing Floor - Part Two: The Bentonia Tuning

The Bentonia school was the work of a man named Henry Stuckey, who learned a guitar tuning from Black soldiers in France in 1918 — Bahamian troops, the story goes, who had brought it from somewhere older than themselves — and brought it home to Yazoo County, Mississippi, when the war was over. He never recorded commercially in his lifetime. He played at suppers and field calls and on porches in a thirty-mile radius around the town of Bentonia for fifty years, and he taught the tuning to anyone who came to him asking, and several who did. The two who carried it furthest were Nehemiah "Skip" James and Jack Owens.

The tuning was open D-minor — D A D F A D — and it produced, when played by hands that knew what they were doing with it, a sound nobody outside that thirty-mile radius could quite reproduce. The minor third in the open string gave the chord a permanent unsettled quality, neither resolved nor leaning toward resolution. The right hand played a percussive figure on the upbeat that imitated the falsetto vocal style of the school: high, thin, almost female, almost ghost. The body of the guitar became part of the rhythm. The thing produced did not sound like other Mississippi blues. It sounded like a tradition that had not been able to make peace with itself.

Skip James recorded eighteen sides for Paramount in 1931. Three of them — Devil Got My Woman, Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, and Cypress Grove Blues — were Bentonia school in their bones. The others were piano blues, or flat-tuned guitar, or mixtures. The 1931 Paramount sessions, in retrospect, captured the Bentonia sound at the moment of its commercial introduction to the world, and then nothing further was heard of it for twenty-three years.

When Skip was rediscovered in 1964, the Bentonia tuning had been carried by Henry Stuckey — still alive, still teaching, still uncomfortable in front of microphones — and by Jack Owens, who would record under his own name later. But Skip was the voice the world had recorded, and Skip was the voice the world remembered. When he played his Bentonia material at Newport that July, in a chair on the small stage, his voice already partly gone, the audience was hearing something for the first time that had been alive in a single Mississippi county for forty-six years.

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She did not wear the hat that Wednesday night.

She walked to the Hopbine plain-headed, the SG in its case and the hat shut away in its box on the dresser. She played the residency the way she had played it every Wednesday for two months. Pete bought her her pint after the second set and asked if she was alright. She said she was tired. He nodded and did not press her. He had been bringing her a pint after every second set for two years and had never asked before whether she was alright. She walked home through Battersea in the cold, alone, and did not think about the hat until she was at her door.

Inside, the box was where she had left it. She put the kettle on. She did not open the box. She did not plan to.

She practiced for an hour with the hat still in the box and her playing was the playing it had always been — the slide work she had taught herself from the Patton transcriptions, the slow Memphis blues she sang for Pete because they paid the bills, a Furry Lewis piece she had been working at for months and could nearly do. By eleven she put the SG down. By midnight she was in bed and not asleep, and the box was on the dresser at the foot of the bed, and she was looking at it.

She got up. She lifted the lid. She put the hat on.

She picked up the SG and played for ten minutes — the slide work, the Memphis stuff, the Furry. It was the playing it had always been. She had been waiting, she realized, for it to be something else. She had been waiting for the hat to do what nine pounds and a counterfeit four-pound note did not earn. She took it off. She put it back in the box. She put the box on the dresser. She lay back down.

She could not sleep.

At one-thirty she got back up. She did not put the hat on. She went into the front room and put a record on the gramophone — Skip James, Devil Got My Woman, the 1968 Vanguard, side one. She had owned it for two years. She had played it half a hundred times. She turned the volume low because of the people downstairs. She sat on the floor in front of the speaker. The hat was in its box on the dresser in the bedroom.

The first track was I'm So Glad. She let it play. She knew it. She had sung it for the Combo a few times when Pete had asked her to.

The track ended. The second track began. Devil Got My Woman. She knew this one too. She had sung it for two years.

She wanted the hat.

She got up. She went into the bedroom. She took the hat out of the box and put it on her head.

She went back into the front room. She sat back down on the floor.

The track playing was still Devil Got My Woman. The sound coming out of the speaker was the same sound it had been a minute ago, when she had been in the bedroom putting on a hat. The arrangement was the same. The mix was the same. The room was the same.

Skip's right hand on the upbeat — the percussive thing she had been trying for two years to get on the SG and had never quite gotten — was suddenly transparent to her. She heard the angle of the thumb. She heard the way the middle finger caught the high string in the upstroke. She heard the slight hesitation before the down-beat that gave the figure its push. She had read four different magazine pieces over four years where guitarists tried to explain what Skip was doing on those upbeats. None of them had got it right. She could hear, now, that none of them had got it right.

She lifted the SG out of its case and tuned it down to D-minor without thinking about whether she remembered the tuning, because her fingers were turning the pegs. She played the figure. She got it on the third try.

She took the hat off.

She played the figure. She could not do it. Her fingers went where her fingers had always gone, which was nearly the right place, which was not the right place.

She put the hat on.

She got the figure.

She took it off and lost it. She put it on and got it. She took it off and lost it. She put it on and got it again, perfectly, easily, the way you remember a phone number you have known your whole life.

It was twenty past two in the morning.

She let the record play through. The needle lifted at the end of side one. She got up to flip the record.

The hat was still on her head. She lifted the needle off the spindle. She set it down on side two. The first track on side two was Special Rider Blues. The needle dropped into the lead-in groove. There was a quarter-second of nothing — the silence between the needle landing and the first note, the silence she had heard a hundred times on a hundred records and had never thought about — and in that silence, in her front room, with the gramophone speaker eighteen inches from her ear, she heard a sound.

Faint. Regular. Almost mechanical. A breath, or a clock, or the knock of a knuckle from another room.

The first note of the song hit. The sound stayed underneath. She heard it for the length of the bar, then it was lost in the music, or it was not lost in the music, she could not tell.

She lifted the needle.

The flat was silent. The fishmonger's was closed. The street was empty. There was no sound.

She set the needle down. The lead-in groove crackled. The faint regular thing was there.

She took the hat off.

The crackle was there. The first note hit. The music played. The sound was gone. There was no sound under the music. There had never been any sound under the music.

She put the hat on.

The sound was back.

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She listened to four more records that night. She wrote the results down on the back of a Hopbine handbill she had taken from the bar two Wednesdays ago — initials of the artist, a tick or a dash, in the careful hand she had used for setlists since she was nineteen.

The Patton — Charley Patton: Founder of the Delta Blues on a Yazoo reissue she had bought on Charing Cross Road last spring. She put the needle on Pony Blues. The sound was there. Faint. Regular. Under the music. Tick.

The Robert Johnson — Vocalion, the first take of Cross Road Blues. She had been told once by a man at a record shop that there was reportedly a fly buzzing audibly on the second take. She listened past where the fly might have been. The sound was there. Not a fly. Slower, more regular, more patient than a fly. Tick.

The Bessie Smith — a Columbia reissue from the late forties. The sound was there. Tick.

She tried a Beatles record next. Rubber Soul. She let it play through three songs. Tape hiss. Room tone. No regular thing. Dash.

She tried Beethoven. The Karajan Berlin Philharmonic recording of the Fifth Symphony she had bought because it had been on sale and because she had always meant to listen to more classical. Three movements through. Tape hiss. Nothing. Dash.

She put on the Fred McDowell record — Mississippi Fred McDowell, Vol. 2, Arhoolie, an LP she had bought from Coombes a year ago. McDowell was alive. He had played London the previous autumn. She had not been able to get a ticket.

The sound was there.

It was four-fifteen in the morning.

She lifted the hat off her head and held it on her knee. The sound under the music was gone. She put it back on. The sound returned. She did this three more times. After the third time she became aware of a high thin note in her own ears, present whether the hat was on or off, present whether the record was playing or not — an internal small sound she could not say when she had first started hearing.

She sat on the floor of her front room with the SG on her lap and the hat on her head and the gramophone running through the run-out groove of side two, the needle clicking against itself in the eternal locked groove of the album end, and she did not get up to lift it.

She thought about Pete and the way he had asked her if she was alright.

She thought about the figure she had been trying to play for two years.

She thought about the four-pound note she had given Coombes — which she had been carrying for nine months in her trouser pocket folded in eighths, taken from her brother's old jacket the morning he moved out, knowing what it was, knowing it would not pass in any shop in London if anyone looked at it carefully. She had carried it because it was money she could not spend and could not throw away. Coombes had not looked at it carefully. Or he had looked.

Either way, the hat was on her head, and she had heard a thing under the music that was in the recordings of every blues musician she owned, dead or alive, and not in the recordings of anyone else.

Every record she had played in the last ten years. Every song she had played on the SG in the last ten years. Pete and the men in the pubs who had called her a good blues guitarist, who could be great if she kept at it. What they had heard when they said that. What they had not heard.

She did not take the hat off.

It was four-thirty when she got up to lift the needle from the locked groove. It was five when she finally turned off the gramophone. The hat was still on her head when she lay down on her bed without taking off her clothes and slept for two hours before the fishmonger's opened beneath her at seven and woke her, and the hat was still on her head when she opened her eyes.

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She had Wednesday's gig at the Hopbine in six days. Pete would expect her. The Combo would expect her. The handful of regulars who had started coming on Wednesdays would expect her.

She sat on the edge of her bed with the hat still on her head and looked at the box on the dresser, empty, and at the Hopbine handbill folded once in her hand with seven names down its back and the marks beside them.

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Vote in the comments:

A. Wear it to the Hopbine.

B. Leave it home this once. Find out if what she has heard stays with her.