Devil Got My Woman

The movie Ghost World tells us that people who are obsessed with old blues records are creeps, but also that old blues records are worth being obsessed with. There’s a pivotal scene where Enid, the young protagonist, hears “Devil Got My Woman” by Skip James, and reacts to it in much the same way that I do.

“There are no other records like that.” No, there really aren’t. Here’s the full song from 1931.

Here’s my transcription of the tune. Assume that all F’s and F-sharps are bent by varying degrees, as are many of the C’s. Also, take my chord symbols with a grain of salt. Skip James doesn’t play any full chords, and he may not have been thinking in terms of chords at all, just melodies over drones. Listen to the recording for the real truth. I will try to verbalize why I think the tune is so wonderful below, but for now, just sit with it.

Skip James’ records didn’t sell during the Depression, and he gave up on his music career quickly. However, during the 1960s folk revival, young people got interested in his music, and after a three-decade pause, he suddenly found himself with a new following. He made a few more records in the years before his death. Here’s the version of “Devil Got My Woman” he recorded in 1968, 37 years after the original.

I don’t know which version I love more. The 1931 recording sounds like it’s ten thousand years old. The 1968 recording is more delicate, has more string bends, and is more metrically asymmetrical. It’s still a haunting performance, but it sounds like James has a sly smile on his face as he’s singing.

Here’s a live performance of the tune from 1966, at a much faster tempo. It would be nice if the camera operator had zoomed in on James’ hands so we could see what he’s doing.

Like many Delta blues musicians, James is playing in an open tuning, but rather than the usual open G or open D, he’s using open D minor tuning: D A D F A D.  He uses some of the same riffs in “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues”, which I first heard on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.

If you want to learn to play “Devil Got My Woman”, this tutorial is a pretty good one.

There are a few covers out there, most of which are too fast and too big. Bonnie Raitt finds the right vibe.

“Devil Got My Woman” is a strange tune. It doesn’t follow the conventional blues form or chord changes. Each verse has two or three phrases interspersed with guitar breaks of no fixed length. It feels more like one continuous hypnotic drone than a song with discrete sections.

There is not much musicological work on “Devil Got My Woman”, or on Skip James’ music generally. I found a lot of articles about his lyrics, and about his life story. The best biographical reference is I’d Rather Be The Devil: Skip James and the Blues by Stephen Calt. Sometimes articles about Ghost World mention the role that “Devil Got My Woman” plays. However, there is hardly anything in print about the song as a song. The only musical analysis I can find is a book chapter by Gerhard Kubik called “Bourdon, Blue Notes, and Pentatonism in the Blues: An Africanist Perspective”, in the book Ramblin’ on My Mind: New Perspectives on the Blues, edited by David Evans. It’s a very difficult read, but I’ll do my best to unpack it.

Kubik uses his analysis of “Devil Got My Woman” to advance his theory of blues tonality’s origins in West and Central African traditional tuning systems based on the natural overtone series. He thinks that the characteristic pitch collection of the blues comes from the natural harmonics of notes tuned a perfect fourth apart. In “Devil Got My Woman”, those notes would be D and G.

• The harmonics of D produce the pitches D, A, (somewhat flat) F-sharp, (very flat) C, and E.
• The harmonics of G produce the pitches G, D, (somewhat flat) B, (very flat) F, and A.

You can organize these pitches into a D “blues scale”: D, E, F, F-sharp, G, A, B, C. It’s like Dorian mode with a flexible third. You can’t produce harmonics-based pitches on a fretted instrument, and Kubik thinks that blues musicians use string bends to reach those pitches. How well does this theory explain “Devil Got My Woman”? James does indeed use these notes, and he groups and sequences them in a way that suggests a basis in natural harmonics. Kubik’s explanation doesn’t account for the C-sharps at the end of the tune, but that’s a detail.

As an example of an African antecedent for this pitch collection, listen to a recording Kubik made in 1964 of a young Tikar woman from Cameroon singing and grinding grain.

 

Kubik does not want readers to come away with the idea that he is explaining “the roots of the blues.” In this interview with Afropop Worldwide, he cautions against the concept of any music having a single origin point.

The roots concept also has an ideological undertone. It implies that you can study at one culture with the light of history, while the other cultures are just “roots” to the former, a repository of stagnant, centuries-old tradition. The concept insinuates that one continent is a provider of musical raw material to be processed somewhere else.

Kubik also cautions that theories about the early history of the blues are inherently speculative, because there is so little direct evidence to work with.

Delta blues music has a high incidence of Arabic-Islamic style characteristics, which came to the United States with people deported from Mali, Niger, Mauritania, and other places in the 18th century. A problem with such comparisons, however, is that our basic recorded blues sampled just cover the 1920s to the 1940s, and our West African savanna recordings sample only begins more or less in the 1950s. We don’t really know what was there before, so our conclusions are all based on influences, assuming that certain characteristics of style such as melisma, declamatory vocal practice, total patterns, etc., would tend to be resistant to change.

Maybe it’s colonialist to even want a theoretical explanation of this music. I don’t see any harm in wanting to know blues history, but there is potential harm in trying to abstract it down to a mathematical theory of overtones. We also don’t want to get carried away with broad cultural explanations for individual creativity. Skip James was a creative artist with an idiosyncratic personal style. He was influenced by the music around him, but his music doesn’t reduce to those influences any more than any other musician’s does. Maybe the best approach to his music is just to inhabit the mystery of it.