Tips for Playing Guitar like Skip James

(1) Study the Recordings
Skip James’s recording career consists of two parts, the 1930s and the 1960s. Dick Waterman tells the story of seeing James perform at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. In Waterman’s words, James seemed to have stepped directly out of the 1930s into 1964. made his first recordings for the Paramount Record Label in 1931. He followed the same trajectory that many Mississippi bluesmen followed in the early 1930s. He auditioned for H.C Speir in Jackson, Mississippi. Speir was a white businessman and record store owner who made demo recordings and used the demos to land a record deal for record labels that were interested in making race records. James was signed to a record deal with Paramount on the strength of the demo recordings. The recordings were made in Grafton Wisconsin. The Paramount recordings included all James’s classic songs such as Devil Got My Woman, Cypress Grove Blues and Hard Time Killin’ Floor. James would revisit these songs upon his discovery in the 1960s folk and blues revival. Skip James never received payment for the 1931 recordings, the Depression soon followed, and James abandoned his musical career for the next thirty years.

(2)The Bentonia Style
James’s guitar style is very idiosyncratic and it set him apart from the other Delta Bluesmen. James style of playing is referred to as the Bentonia-style. James was from Bentonia, Mississippi and Bentonia is credited with its own style of guitar players. Jimmie Duck Holmes is a contemporary Mississippi blues player that still plays the Bentonia style. James timing, rhythm, finger-style technique and his own peculiar tuning have little in common with Robert Johnson or Son House. There is some similarity to Mississippi John Hurt in terms of their sophisticated fingerpicking techniques. John Hurt and Son House’s 1960s recordings lack the subtly and finesse of their original recordings from the 1930s (Hurt) and ’40s (House) but Comparing the original 1931 recordings with the recordings from the 1960s shoes that James’s guitar style remained remarkably consistent. The first step in getting a grip on James’s unique guitar style is to listening carefully and painstakingly the recordings. There are also several videos of live performances, including the Newport festival, available on youtube.com. Pay special attention to his right hand.

(3) James’s Guitar Tuning
One of the characteristics that distinguished James from the other Mississippi blues players was his choice of tuning. Open tunings, such as open E and open G, were commonly by used by Johnson and Son House as well as many others but James used a minor tuning rather than a major tuning. He turned his guitar to open D minor, DADFAD. The result is a darker and more melancholy sound than the major opening tunings produce. James also sang in a high falsetto voice that added to the ethereal and other worldly sound of his music. Another significant difference between James and his contemporaries was how he used the open tunings. Opening tunings were primarily used in order to facilitate slide guitar but James didn’t play slide guitar. He used to the open D minor tuning to play his own version of finger-style guitar. The result was a droning-like effect that dissimilar to some styles of African and even Middle-east style forms of music. The origins of James’s tuning is not certain but one story is that he learned from an local guitar player named Henry Stuckey. Stuckey claims he picked up the tuning from soldiers from the Bahamas during World War I.

(4) James’s Chords and Finger Technique
James was a gifted piano player as well as a guitarist and his piano technique certainly influenced his guitar playing. In addition to his thumb, he plucked the strings with his index, middle, and ring finger of his right hand. His technique has more in common with classical guitar technique than with his the blues technique of his contemporaries. Another interesting feature of James’s sound is that he tended to syat away from the IV chord and relied primarily on the I and V chords. This added a more primitive sound that a typical 12 bar blues that cycles though the I, IV, and V chords. James also used his own unique chord forms that work well in the open D minor tuning. He used as many open strings as possible when playing chords. Since his songs were all in D minor, he could play the root of I chord on the 6th or 4th string and the root of the V chord on the 5th string. He moved up and down the fretboard playing different inversions of the chord in combination with the open strings.


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