Son HouseI can’t get over those hands. The trembling,...

Son House

I can’t get over those hands.  The trembling, palsied fingers lifting and peeling from the resonator.  He is steel on steel, a wreck of iron.  Then there is the voice.  On some recordings from near the end of his life, you can hear him rasp for breath— the low hiss between phrasings, digging for air.  It pushes through the slack muscles of his lungs and like last life, flares out in bright searing pain.  The song hurks-and-jerks, and I stumble with it, forward into naked space, and it catches me from below— and all at once I am in its rhythm, the dream-like clang of a hydraulic press, driving forward and forward, inexorable, impossibly.