He recorded 18 sides for Paramount in 1931 and then vanished for 33 years. No recordings, no performances. When the folk revival tracked him down in a Tunica, Mississippi hospital in 1964, he was dying of cancer. He didn't tell them. He just picked up a guitar and played "Devil Got My Woman" like the decades hadn't passed.
He performed at the Newport Folk Festival that year. A ghost summoned back to the stage, playing songs he'd written when Calvin Coolidge was president. The recordings from those comeback sessions are miraculous: the falsetto thinner but more haunting, the guitar fingerpicking more deliberate. He died in 1969.
Skip James was the strangest of the Delta bluesmen. Minor-key tunings nobody else used. A ghostly falsetto. Rediscovered after 33 years of silence, he walked back onto a stage and proved the music had never left him.
