- Hey, I'm Valerie June.

Coming up on Reel South .

In 1964, a band of blues hounds traveled south.

- [Man] I mean, Mississippi, for young white people who might've come from New England or California was really like a new world.

You couldn't imagine it.

- [Valerie] Their one goal, to sniff out early legends of the Mississippi blues.

- [Woman] They had the records, they had the recordings.

But there was still so much we didn't know.

- [Man] If there was any chance of these people still being alive, it was worth whatever effort we had to put in to get them in front of a microphone again.

♪ Freight train, freight train, runnin' so fast ♪ - [Valerie] Hitch a ride on Two Trains Runnin'.

♪ Freight train, freight train, runnin' so fast ♪ Coming up on Reel South.

[laid-back blues music] [musical vocalizing] ♪ [electric blues music] ♪ Well now, there's two ♪ Two trains runnin' ♪ Well they never ♪ Going my way ♪ Well now, one runs at midnight ♪ ♪ The other one just for one day ♪ [laid back blues music] ♪ Well, there's two trains running ♪ ♪ And they're running fast away ♪ ♪ Oh well, there's one leaves at midnight ♪ ♪ The other at the break of day ♪ ♪ Yes, at the break of day ♪ Yes, at the break - [Common] The blues' earliest days are lost to time, and many of those who made the first blues recordings disappeared soon after, leaving only their names to future generations, until, improbably, a few young men decided to go off in search of these legends.

Their quest brought them to Mississippi in the summer of 1964, just as another group, drawn by the civil rights movement, was also venturing south.

Both would awaken America to the value of black life, but at a cost.

There were two trains running that summer, and they would meet one fateful Sunday in June.

- [Announcer] Well, this is, surprisingly enough, Phil Spiro here at last.

This is Folk Side, and we're on WTVS in Cambridge.

[gentle blues music] - [Man] You have some unbridgegable gaps in the world.

Race, I think, is certainly one of them for some people.

The US as a whole was a segregated society at that time.

But I was a prototypical white college kid at MIT.

It didn't really seem to impact me very much.

- [Man] The civil rights movement was very much in the air.

Well, I was conscious of it.

My background was northern, kind of Yankee.

The African-American way of life was very far removed from my world, the world, I think, pretty much of the folk revival.

- [Man] The blues really was not a part of Cambridge.

It was mostly that Irish-English folk song tradition, very little black music.

- I was interested in the old-timey stuff, white and black, that moved me in ways that I still can't really explain.

And before I knew it, my grades were going downhill.

- [Common] Phil Spiro had won a scholarship to MIT, and planned a career in aeronautical engineering.

But with his grades suffering, he dropped out and took an entry-level job programming the world's earliest computers, leaving his nights free to concentrate on what mattered most to him.

[vinyl record crackle] [gentle blues music] [musical vocalizing] ♪ - [Phil] People like Charlie Cotton, Blind Willie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Son House, Skip James.

They were recorded in the '20s and '30s, but these were electrifying cuts.

♪ I got something to tell you, baby ♪ ♪ When I get the chance ♪ I got something to tell you, baby, when I get a chance ♪ ♪ Well, I don't want to marry anybody ♪ - This music that we call delta blues or country blues, to the extent that any record of that existed in the '60s, it was in old 78s, you know, from the 30s, Library of Congress anthologies and so forth, kind of frozen in amber.

- They were these very scratchy jobs that you could barely hear.

But they were so profound and so unearthly, and you thought, man, that's just back in the day when giants walked the earth.

- [Common] Country blues was so obscure, you might say it had disappeared from America.

It'd long since fallen out of favor with African-Americans.

In the 1960s, black audiences were even turning away from electric blues, as soul became more popular.

But as the folk revival gained momentum, a handful of small labels began reissuing the records made during the Depression.

And in college towns like Cambridge, a renewed interest in the country blues sprang up.

- It was like being in a secret society.

You know, now Robert Johnson's been on a postage stamp.

But at that time, it was just, who?

- These guys were obsessed with this sound.

[twanging blues music] It is not easy music to master.

It also spoke to them of another way of life, outside of the kind of kind of deadening post-war suburban life they were born into.

♪ I'm a lonely child, I'm a long way from my home ♪ - [Greg] There was another life that was more expressive, that was more erotic, that was more dangerous.

- And that was it.

I mean, oh God.

I didn't listen to rock and roll for years.

[laughs] [gentle music] - Anywhere that's led me, anywhere the blues led me, I was ready to go.

And at the start, who could ever imagine we'd ever see any of these people?

- I think they really loved that music, wanted to get closer to it.

But the story of the blues is riddled with inaccuracies and all this kind of mythology.

It was all mystery.

- If there was any chance of these people still being alive, it was worth whatever effort we had to put in to get them in front of a microphone again.

- [Amanda] They had the records, they had the recordings, but there was still so much we didn't know.

If you were going on the information that was available to you on 78 RPM records, it's not a lot.

[jaunty blues music] - [Phil] And then, amazingly, Mississippi John Hurt was found by Tom Haskins, because John Hurt recorded a song in the '20s called Avalon Blues.

♪ Avalon, my hometown, always on my mind ♪ - [Common] The reemergence of Mississippi John Hurt was a defining moment in the folk revival.

And as improbable as it was to find a lost blues man through song lyrics, the idea stuck with the brilliant young guitarist in California, John Fahey.

[gentle blues music] - This was a man who knew more about the blues than I ever learned.

No one could even play that stuff on the guitar.

Fahey spent years trying to learn how to play the way that the people played on the records.

- [Common] In 1963, after John Hurt was located, Fahey used a line in the song about Aberdeen, Mississippi, to track down another Depression-era legend, Booker White.

♪ I was headed down to Aberdeen ♪ ♪ With New Orlean on my mind - And by April '64, Booker was playing the folk music circuit.

[jaunty blues music] - Take it up now.

- Booker White had some concerts in Cambridge, and was staying with my friend Alan Wilson and Phil Spiro.

Al and I were interviewing Booker.

We more or less had a list of blues artists that we had heard old records of.

We posed the name Son House, and he knew who Son House was.

He said, "Yeah, a friend of mine saw him "coming out of a movie theater, "or told me that she saw him in Memphis."

- [Common] This was a remarkable thing to hear.

Among adherents of the country blues, Son House was one of the most celebrated figures.

Rumored to have been a preacher, he sang with uncommon intensity, as if the blues was both the source and cure of some unholy cosmic ill.

But his last recordings dated to the years of World War Two, and it was unknown what became of him since.

- I got home and Al said, "The most amazing thing has happened.

"Booker says that a friend of his in Memphis "saw Son House coming out of a theater last year."

We didn't even know he was still alive.

- He was last spotted, so to speak, in 1942 in Robinsonville, Mississippi, and no one, in the folk circles anyway, had any knowledge of whether he was still alive, whether he was in Robinsonville or had moved or what had happened to him in those 22 years.

But on the basis of that, a secondhand report of a sighting of Son House coming out of a movie theater, they wanted to organize an expedition.

[drum beating] - I decided that we had to go look for him, we being Evans and Al and myself.

- I was a student, so I couldn't go.

- [Phil] Al had a gig coming up and couldn't do it.

- Phil, I think, needed somebody with a tape recorder and some money.

- I call Tom Haskins, the guy who had found John Hurt.

He was not interested.

He wouldn't say why, but he probably had better sense than I did.

I asked him if he knew anybody who might be interested, and yes, he knew Nick Perls, who was a record collector.

And Perls had a tape recorder and Perls had a car.

I called him, and yes, he was interested.

We needed a second driver, since I never have driven, and that's somebody who was Dick Waterman.

- I was 29.

I was a sports writer at the time.

I was writing also on the folk music business of Cambridge, at a publication called Broadside.

- Dick was a photographer to boot, and a journalist.

He could write it up.

So I told him that I had a hot lead on Son House.

"Son who?"

he said.

- I knew Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory and Johnny Dodds and Newell and Swing.

I knew all of that, but country blues, uh-uh.

- He hadn't heard of House, but that didn't surprise me, because very few people had.

♪ I'm gonna be a Baptist preacher ♪ ♪ And I don't want to have to work ♪ - This is a man recorded for Paramount in 1930, recorded a few songs for Alan Lomax in Mississippi, '41-'42, and vanished.

Now here we are in '64 and Booker White said I just went to the movies with him, well, I think there's a story there.

So I contacted the National Observer.

They said if you find him, he buy the story.

If you don't find him, no interest.

Well, that's all it took.

♪ If you haven't any hay, get on down that road ♪ - [Common] While Spiro and Waterman prepared to leave Boston, John Fahey was also planning a trip to Mississippi.

Word had come to him of something that might lead to the most mysterious and elusive blues man of all.

♪ If I go Louisiana, mama, Lord knows they'll hang me sure ♪ - [Common] Skip James had recorded in Grafton, Wisconsin for Paramount Records in the early 1930s.

Among blues men of that era, James was special.

He played guitar and piano with equal command, his songs drifting between extreme states of feeling, from jaunty celebrations of life to the most haunting tales of bitterness and desperation.

- A lot of Skip's songs have to do with money problems and the darkness of life, universal themes that have never changed and probably never will.

♪ You know the people all dressed up ♪ ♪ Don't know they can't find no heaven ♪ ♪ I don't care where they go ♪ Oh, oh ♪ Oh, oh ♪ Hear me singing this old lonesome song ♪ ♪ You know these hard times can last for so very long ♪ ♪ Oh, oh ♪ Oh, oh - [Common] Like Son House, Skip James was a phantom.

His birthplace was the subject of debate.

No photographs of him were known to exist, and no one, not even John Fahey, could decipher the tuning in which he composed his songs.

Fahey had searched for James before, with no luck, yet he had reason to believe the summer of 1964 would be different.

- [John] Finally springtime comes, and it's time for me to make my annual journey through the south land, looking for Skip James.

On all these trips, I asked everyone I met about about blues singers.

Nobody I talked to had ever heard of Skip James, but the blues grapevine informed me that Ishmon Bracey had turned up in Jackson, Mississippi.

Bracey had recorded for the same company as James at about the same time.

I set about organizing one more trip.

I asked two friends, Henry Vestine and Bill Barth, to go collect him with me.

- [Common] As Fahey and his friends started for Mississippi, Phil Spiro and Dick Waterman arrived in New York.

They were about to meet the third member of their team.

- [Phil] The situation with Nick Perls was really quite unexpected.

- His family was extremely rich.

The bottom floor was a gallery, an art gallery, the Perls Gallery, and the residence were the four floors over the gallery, literally five stories of fine art.

- [Common] United by the dream of making contact with the blues' mythical origins, both groups of searchers were now on their way.

♪ Goin' down south, I'm goin' down south ♪ ♪ I'm goin' down south, I'm goin' down south ♪ ♪ Chilly wind don't blow - [Dick] We left the second week of June.

Three Jews in a Volkswagen Bug with New York plates.

♪ I'm going with you, babe ♪ I'm going with you, baby ♪ I'm going with you, babe ♪ I'm going with you, baby ♪ Don't care where you go - The thought of getting in a car and kind of pointing it south, and thinking that it would be easy enough to find a performer like Son House, I mean, it's like Bigfoot hunting.

There was so little information for them to go on.

- You look back on it, it's like, I must've been bat [bleep] to do things like that.

- They may have been aware of what was happening in Mississippi, but the absolute danger and violence that was a reality for local black Americans was an abstract notion for the average white college student.

- To go into Mississippi in the summer of 1964, you had to be either very brave, very stupid, or very uninformed.

If I had known what was going on, I sure as hell would not have wanted to go to Mississippi at that point.

- We are not going to permit any outside group to come into this state and to drive the wedge of division and dissension, and to subvert the very foundation pillars of the great government of the state of Mississippi and of her people.

[moody blues music] - It was tense, and we drove into this.

We found a motel, a very modest motel, south of Memphis, just over the line in Mississippi by about a mile or so, and we used that as our headquarters for about 10 days that we were there.

- [Common] To begin, they sought out Lillian Glover, the friend of Booker White's who was said to have seen Son House coming out of a movie theater.

- It turned out to be a total dead end.

There was nothing.

It began and end with her running into Son coming out of a theater a year ago, and she could learn nothing further.

[melancholy blues music] - [Dick] So here we were, we're here.

What do we do now?

♪ Lord, that 61 highway is the longest road I know ♪ ♪ Lord, that 61 highway is the longest road I know ♪ ♪ She run from New York City down the Gulf of Mexico ♪ - [Phil] That was our only lead.

We had no plan B, we had no backup.

We were just three guys who barely knew each other, who were sharing a very harebrained idea of let's go down to Memphis and see what we can learn about Son House.

♪ I said please, please see somebody for me ♪ ♪ I said please, please see somebody for me ♪ - Henry Vestine, Bill Barth, and John Fahey first stopped in Jackson.

Well, they were gonna talk to Bracey.

Basement Bracey was the blues man I had found a year earlier.

- [Common] Gayle Dean Wardlow was a rare thing in 1964, a white Mississippian with a love of the blues.

And while no one in Boston or Berkeley knew it, he had been looking for Son House and Skip James for months.

- I was determined I'm gonna find out where these guys are from, if they're alive or dead.

I learned how to find death certificates, use city directories, courthouse records.

It was like an obsession, I admit it.

- [Common] Along the way, Wardlow had discovered the name of Skip James' hometown, but he could not keep that piece of information to himself.

- I made the mistake of telling Bracey one time when I'd visit him, I found out where Skip James was from, Bentonia.

That's all I said to him.

Henry told me the story later on, Henry V. He said, "We paid him $30, "all our money we had for information.

"And we ask him about where's Skip James from."

And he said, "Go to Bentonia."

- There we were in Memphis, not knowing which end was up, but that we were there and we oughta do something that looked like looking for Son House.

We had almost no information about Son.

The records, such as they were, had information that his name was Eugene, he wore a cowboy hat, and he was fat.

- Son House was last known to have lived in Robinsonville, just below the Mississippi-Tennessee line.

Let's go to Robinsonville.

[jaunty blues music] - Black people who we did speak to were guarded, of course, because we were white and they had no reason at all to trust us.

- Three white kids in their 20s with New York license plates and New York accents, no.

None of the black people were gonna talk to them.

- I mean, Mississippi for young white people who might've come from New England or California was really like a new world.

You couldn't imagine it.

- It doesn't matter if you're looking for blues artists or blues records or if you are trying to register voters.

You are an outside agitator to white segregationists in Mississippi.

- [Common] Since their own investigating had come to nothing, Perls, Spiro, and Waterman appealed to another blues singer from the old days.

- [Dick] Robert Wilkins had been a wonderful, wonderful blues man with a long recording history from the late '20s.

♪ I'm going home, been setting out ♪ ♪ And tell my - Dad had played all over the delta, you know.

He had played all over the Mississippi's areas.

Sang the blues from the hilltop to the bottom, you know.

- Now, he was an ordained minister and had converted many of his best blues cuts into religions songs.

♪ That's no way for me to get along ♪ - He knew a lot of musicians, so he knew just about where they were playing at.

And I think that's how they felt like Daddy should know these guys that were playing in these country tonks and all that kind of stuff.

- [Phil] He remembered Son from the old days, and he agreed to help us.

♪ And that'll be a way to get along ♪ ♪ Where the poor boy at ♪ Got all he had and he started on down the road ♪ ♪ Started on down the road ♪ Got all he had and he started on down the road ♪ ♪ Got all he had and he started on down the road ♪ ♪ And that'll be a way to get along ♪ - [Phil] We went looking through Robinsonville and Lake Cormorant, which the locals call Lake Carmen.

- He would roll down the windows and talk to an older black person about who we were looking for.

So they would speak to us through him.

♪ Got away from home and spent all that he had ♪ ♪ Spent all that he had ♪ Got away from home and spent all that he had ♪ ♪ Got away from home and spent all that he had ♪ ♪ And that's no way to get along ♪ - Can't you imagine?

[laughs] Three white kids and one black guy in a Volkswagen.

[laughs] Yeah, in a Volkswagen.

- He guided us in what to do and what not to do.

And when in doubt, we kept our mouths shut and let him lead.

- He had ideas about where to look and who to talk to that we had no notion.

♪ As far as I see ♪ But I own the road out here as far as I see ♪ ♪ But I own the road out here as far as I see ♪ ♪ And that'll be a way to get along ♪ - Driving around in a New York Bug with a black minister was perhaps not the smartest thing we could've done, but he was willing to do it and so were we.

- There was one episode that's really indelible in my mind.

We were going way out in the field, totally rural, totally rural, just out in the cotton fields, and there was a pickup truck with a couple of white men lounging on the hood.

And Reverend Wilkins said, "Stop here and I'll ask."

We didn't want any part of this, but if he said we're gonna ask, we're gonna ask.

We stopped the car and the Reverend opened the door and got out and said, "I'm looking for such and such a street.

"Can you tell me where it is?"

And they looked at him and then they went back to talking.

And he said to them, "Looky here, I'm talking to you.

"I'm looking for such and such a street."

The silence was palpable.

They looked at him and they said, "Go down the road so far, "take a left and go so far."

And the Reverend touched his hat.

He said, "Thank you, I'm much obliged to you gentlemen."

Nodded his head, got back in the car, drove away.

[guitar string plucking] - [John] We get to Bentonia, we find some of Skip James' relatives who try to help us, but really can't.

Even relatives of James find him hard to pin down.

An aged uncle tells us that James lives in a town or city near Tunica, Mississippi.

The first letter of the name of his town is, he thinks, a D. Dunkirk, Dubbs, Dundee, Denton, but he's really not sure.

Of one thing he is certain, the end of the rainbow is near Tunica.

[tires crunching] - [Common] On Friday, June 19th, after a three-month long filibuster, the Civil Rights Act finally passed the Senate.

Segregation was now illegal in America's restaurants, hotels, and other public spaces.

- We say to Lyndon B. Johnson and all of the Jews and niggers, [audience applauding] that they can take this Civil Rights Act, if they hold onto it long enough, this one or the rest of it, they'll get burned before it's over with.

[crowd cheering] - [Common] Many southerners pledged defiance of the law, and those leaving for Mississippi could expect no help from the government.

- [John] This chase is thoroughly difficult because we do not even comprehend what we are looking for.

There is danger lurking around us.

Something big, growing bigger, the civil rights storm.

Everywhere we go, there are eyes watching.

The hunters are being hunted.

Whitey thinks we're gonna help give the vote to blacks.

We couldn't possibly be looking for old blues singers.

Nobody does that, not even crazy people.

Several times we will be accosted by police, guns drawn and pointing.

"What are you boys doing, fooling around with our Negroes?

"Don't you know you can get in trouble "for fooling around with our Negroes?"

[birds chirping] [car engine humming] 20 miles from Tunica, near Dubbs, we stop at a gas station.

I engage the young black gas pumper in conversation, leading up to the person of my quest.

I had been doing this for years to no avail, but now something very interesting happens.

"I don't know if this is the right guy you're looking for, "but one night I was over "at Benny Simmons' barbershop in Dubbs, "and this crazy drunk old man came over "and started yelling and screaming at us.

"But one of the things he raved about "was that he used to be a famous and great blues singer, "and that he played guitar and piano.

"Said he made all kinds of records in Wisconsin.

"Kept yelling at us, saying he was a genius."

Finally, the key words.

Crazy, genius, guitar and piano, Wisconsin.

It had to be James.

[energetic electric blues music] [car engine revving] - [Common] At the same time, only 30 miles away, the team looking for Son House seemed to have a lead.

Thanks to Reverend Wilkins, they found a man whose ex-wife was believed to be Son House's stepdaughter.

Now she lived in Detroit.

- We called that number and we said, "Your mother is married to Eugene House, the blues singer?"

"No, she's married to a man used to sing the blues, "but it's not Eugene, it's Eddie."

Well, we'll take that.

Okay, now where is he?

"Oh, they lives in Rochester, New York."

- [Phil] We almost gave up at that point.

- So on Sunday, June 21, we spoke to a man named Eddie House.

We had a list there.

Eddie House, they call you Son?

"Yeah, they call me Son."

Did you know Charley Patton and Robert Johnson?

Did you record for Lomax?

Did you go to Grafton, Wisconsin and make records for Paramount?

There was this long pause and he said, "Say, who is this anyway?"

And we said, well, we're just blues fans and we just want to know.

"Yeah, I did them things, I know them fellas."

And we went, ah, we got him, we got him.

- He was as surprised as we were.

Nobody had expressed the slightest interest in his music for over 25 years.

- He said, "I'll put my wife on the phone."

She said, "Oh, he's an old man.

"He don't play no more."

And we said, well, there could be some money in it for him.

He could go back to making records and making money.

And she said, "Well, I suppose we could talk about that."

[laid back electric blues music] - [Common] When John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine, acting on a tip given to them at the gas station, reached Benny Simmons' barbershop that same Sunday, June 21st, they were shown to a house across the street.

On its porch sat Skip James' wife.

She told them that her husband was in Tunica's hospital, recovering from a cancer operation.

- [John] A black nurse takes us to the black ward.

"How you feeling, Mr. James?

"There's some boys here "who want to talk with you about music.

"Is that all right?"

The silent figure nods his head.

- It was Skip James.

What a tremendous and exciting moment for those three guys, to find that man.

It's incredible.

I mean, it's really incredible.

♪ The doctor came, he was looking very sad ♪ ♪ The doctor came, he was looking very sad ♪ ♪ Doctor came, he looking very sad ♪ ♪ He diagnosed my case and said it was awful bad ♪ - [Common] For the three, this was the climactic moment, the fulfillment of an impossible quest, and they spun a grand design, talking of a record contract and a tour to go with it.

James eyed his searchers doubtfully, unsure if he could trust them.

And days removed from an operation, the doctors forbade his release.

"Come back later," he said.

♪ Oh, bad news and I ♪ Sometimes I feel like I was falling ♪ - [Common] The danger of Mississippi was no longer a rumor.

While waiting for Skip James to get out of the hospital, Fahey and friends were mistaken for civil rights workers and thrown in jail.

Spared the fate of their counterparts in Philadelphia, they were released after one night.

♪ Oh, I'll be ready now ♪ I'll be ready when my train pulls in ♪ ♪ Oh, I'll be ready now ♪ I'll be ready when my train pulls in ♪ ♪ I know my time ain't long and I ♪ ♪ I can't live this life again - [Phil] June 23rd, we reached 61 Greek Street in Rochester.

- [Dick] This is it, boys.

Two weeks on the road, here it is.

- [Phil] There was a thin guy sitting on the stoop.

- We said, do you know if Mr. and Mrs. Eddie House live on the fourth floor?

"Yes, they do, they do."

So as we started up the steps, he said, "But he ain't in there."

We turned and said, he's not, how do you know?

And the man said, "Because I'm him."

- [Phil] So we had finally met Son House.

When we went off looking for Son, we didn't know if he was 40 or 100.

We didn't know if he ever cared to record again.

Anything could've been the result.

- We asked him if he would play.

He hadn't played in many, many years.

His hands were shaking, tremors, but he took the guitar and he looked down at his hand for a long time and then.

[jaunty blues music] ♪ Yeah, got a letter this morning ♪ ♪ How you reckon it read ♪ It said, hurry, hurry ♪ The gal you love is dead ♪ Got a letter this morning ♪ Yeah, how you reckon it read ♪ It said hurry, hurry ♪ 'Cause the gal you love is dead ♪ - I had heard Reverend Davis and Mississippi John, and it they were just like children, and the man had walked in.

♪ I grabbed up my suitcase and I took off down the road ♪ ♪ I said, but when I got there ♪ She was laying on a cooling board ♪ ♪ You know I thought I'd never love ♪ ♪ But four women in my life ♪ My mother, my sister, dead gal and my wife ♪ ♪ I thought I'd never love, I said, ♪ ♪ But four women in my life ♪ I said, my mother and my sister, my dead gal and my wife ♪ - So here's Son, 34 years from the original 1930s recordings, rusty as hell, but recognizably Son House.

[audience applauding] And we felt great at that point.

The obvious thing to do was to see if we could get him on the Newport Folk Festival, which was a few weeks away.

[energetic blues music] - [Common] The Newport Folk Festival, held in Rhode Island in July, was the most important event of the folk revival.

Its four days of concerts and workshops attracted an audience that was slowly morphing into the counterculture for which the '60s would be known.

Newport was Woodstock before there was Woodstock, the place where Joan Baez became a star, and where Mississippi John Hurt enjoyed the first days of his triumphant second act in 1963.

- So we called the Newport people.

We said we just found Son House.

The great Son House has been found.

And they said, "Yeah, we just had a call "that Skip James has been found.

"Three guys from California found him "the same day in a Tunica hospital."

I said, what are you talking about?

We just came from two weeks in Tunica, right outside of Tunica.

- It was in Newsweek magazine, saying that two great blues icons had been recently discovered, Skip James and Son House.

That's where I found out.

It broke my heart, man.

They happened to find the right person who knew where James was living, whereas I'd been up there two or three times, didn't find that person.

In a sense it's luck, but you know what, you make your luck.

[gentle blues music] ♪ Gonna buy me a hammock ♪ Sit in it beneath a tree ♪ Gonna buy me a hammock ♪ Sit underneath a tree - [Ed] Basically, I got a phone call saying we found Skip, but we need to bring him up north.

And so I went there to do that.

♪ Leaves blow, the leaves may fall on me ♪ - After meeting John Hurt and Booker, I kind of expected another outgoing person, and then suddenly here was Skip, and he was totally different.

Skip was an intellectual.

He was interested in time and motion studies, and so he was not as empathetic, I guess you would say.

He was more reserved, on his own.

- [Skip] I don't pattern after anyone, nor either copycat.

It's just Skip's music all over there.

- [Interviewer] You don't sing other people's songs?

- [Skip] I don't sing other people's songs.

- Skip really thought of himself as an artist, and had a big disappointment that he should've been a star.

- He's on his deathbed, practically, by the time people find him.

It's almost like he was waiting for somebody from out there who'd kind of get the memo that I'm important and you need to recognize this.

And that was his stance.

- [Interviewer] I just meant where you learned that song.

- [Skip] I ain't bothered, that's not yours to know.

But if you want to learn it, then you copy it after my playing.

- [Interviewer] Oh, but see now-- - [Skip] They'll get a idea from me, but where I learned it, you might not never know.

- Unless you tell me.

- Might not never go there.

- Unless you tell me.

- Well, that is-- - [Interviewer] That's why I'm asking you.

- [Skip] I use my own version.

I compose my own things.

♪ Drinking wine, drinking wine - So now just to tell the truth about it, I was brought up in church, from a little boy on up, and I didn't believe in no blues or none of.

I was too churchy.

I didn't believe in that and I talked against it.

- Son House, you know, he had a problem, I guess, coming to terms with the church and the blues, and just kind of not going together.

[jaunty blues music] And the way he played, he would just, you know, just go someplace else.

♪ Oh Lord, it was you ♪ That hold my old song - We found later that Son was an alcoholic.

He needed the booze to play.

He needed medication to keep from the shakes.

I couldn't believe how bad it could get, and would we be able to do anything that would prepare him for Newport?

♪ One thing I'll do - Most of those guys on a Saturday night fish fry, you'd drop your dimes and nickels in the hat as he'd play.

And soon as you'd get enough, he would look and go get a quarter beer or bottle of wine, a jug of wine, and they'd play it for fun all night.

Son House did that all his life, so how can you change a 75-year old man into a 26-year old rock star, super star?

Don't let him, try to not let him get enough drink 'til he go to the stage.

- Charley Patton and Willie Brown and Robert Johnson and them, and they died, one of this, right one after the other.

And then that scared me, and I said, well nigga, oh Lord, I'm next.

And I got scared and quit playing for 16 years until Mr. Dick Waterman found me and give me nerve enough to try it again.

[jaunty blues music] - We went down there and asked these people to come up with us without a thought that this might be a strange thing to do or a stupid thing to do, just this must be done.

We didn't have any plan B.

If the gigs didn't come through, we didn't have any money either.

- [Greg] For Son House and Skip James, it couldn't have been more marginal to go to the Newport Festival at that point in time, given how important it was to white America.

- Boogie chiller.

- It does give them that kind of national historical stage.

They had the opportunity to connect with a broad American public.

♪ Yes, my momma don't like me ♪ Used to stay out all night long ♪ ♪ I didn't care what she didn't like ♪ ♪ Lord, put your knees together ♪ ♪ Let your backbone move its thing ♪ ♪ Women in town can't shake it down like you, Lordy ♪ ♪ Must I do it again - That weekend, the only thing I can compare it to was the first year that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame began, and Chuck Berry, Little Richard, James Brown, Fats Domino, they were all inducted at the same time.

You could be walking around and you'd say, oh, there's James Brown, oh, there's Jerry Lee Lewis.

That was what it was like in Newport.

It was like walking around among the stars.

But all of it paled, all of it was obliterated for me by Skip James' performance that afternoon.

- [Dick] In '64, the blues workshop was the place to be.

They played on a low pallet, and usually there were just people, probably a couple of thousand people.

- [Peter] At that workshop that Saturday afternoon where Skip appeared, I mean, when he came out, there was no idea what to expect.

- [Dick] He had made some scratchy 78s in 1931, and now 33 years later, a legend coming back in the flesh to make music.

- [Peter] He's up there onstage and he's got a guitar that clearly isn't his, that he has borrowed, and he's wearing his black preacher's hat and this sort of suit, and there's this pause.

[gentle blues music] ♪ I'd rather be the devil ♪ Oh, I'd rather be the devil ♪ To be that woman's ♪ To be a man, to be ♪ I'd rather be the devil ♪ To be that woman's ♪ You don't want nothing but the old devil ♪ ♪ You don't want nothing but the devil ♪ ♪ He don't share, my baby's mine ♪ ♪ You don't want nothing but the devil ♪ ♪ He don't share, my baby's mine ♪ - [Peter] You just hear this unearthly falsetto, just floating across the field.

♪ I would rather be the devil - I found I was at a truly historic moment, that greatness such as this will not pass my way again.

♪ To be that woman's man [audience applauding] [gentle blues music] - In the 60s, a lot of attention was brought to the way in which black lives were made not to matter, institutionally.

Black people kind of emerge in the public eye as a community, as a people who were definitely feeling the swing of a certain momentum towards justice, towards recognition, towards visible presence in American life, in a way that really hadn't been seen before.

But I don't think that would've been as potent, would've been as deeply felt without the musical presence.

[gentle blues music] ♪ Freight train, freight train, runnin' so fast ♪ ♪ Freight train, freight train, runnin' so fast ♪ ♪ Well now, please don't tell which train I'm on ♪ ♪ They won't know which route I'm going ♪ - [Phil] These guys, many of them didn't have a career in the first place as musicians.

They made a couple of records and went to back being a railroad porter, itinerant preacher, or whatever.

But Newport 1964 put a stamp on country blues as something that was worth public attention.

So if they wanted a career, they should have one.

♪ Well, when I'm dead and in my grave ♪ ♪ Oh, no more good times here I crave ♪ - [Common] Son House and Skip James did have another career, living just long enough to witness their own resurrection.

Skip died of cancer in 1969.

Son House retired for good not long after.

But never again did their blues retreat into obscurity, and they were honored by their native state, something that would have been unthinkable in 1964.

In one of history's least predictable turns, the music created by a scorned and oppressed people became the pride of Mississippi.

♪ Oh, freight train, freight train, runnin' so fast ♪ ♪ Freight train, freight train - Blues revival had an immeasurable impact, I think, on the course of popular music, certainly, and really inadvertently kind of seeded the whole second wave of rock and roll.

- We tend to focus on the story of young whites appropriating blues, you know, becoming millionaires in the '60s.

But I think they were very much an instrument of history and of black culture.

You know, in the case of Fahey and Waterman, they basically spend the rest of their lives in service to what that music represented to their younger selves.

- We were just nerdy guys into the music.

But the day that we actually found Son, my life pivoted, and my life has never been the same since.

- That was when I found out I could go out in the world and achieve things, and important things.

Now these men's names and their art and their knowledge will live on forever.

♪ I wanna live so that God can use me ♪ ♪ Anywhere, anytime ♪ I wants to live so God can use me ♪ ♪ Anywhere, Lord, just anytime ♪ Yes, I wanna sing so that God can use ♪ ♪ Anywhere or anytime ♪ I wanna sing so that God can use ♪ ♪ Yes anywhere, yes anytime ♪ You know I wanna preach so that God can use me ♪ ♪ Anywhere, yes anytime ♪ Yes, I wanna preach so that God can use me ♪ ♪ Anytime, yes anytime ♪ Sometime I wanna moan so that God can use me ♪ ♪ Anywhere, yes anytime ♪ You know I wanna moan so that God can use ♪ ♪ Yes anywhere, yes anytime ♪ Sometime I wanna cry so that God can use me ♪ ♪ Anywhere, yes anytime ♪ Sometime I wanna cry so that God can use me ♪ ♪ Anywhere, yes anytime [audience applauding] [upbeat electric blues music] ♪♪ ♪ Every day I love to see the change ♪ ♪ Everywhere I go I keep seeing the same old thing ♪ ♪ And I ♪ I can't take it no more [laid-back blues music] ♪