FUTURE BLUES

“I want to give an incredible amount of credit to Al Wilson (above),” says Dick Waterman, who brought Son House to Cambridge, Massachusetts in July 1964 for a refresher course in his own pre-war sorcery. Wilson – only 23 and three years from co-founding Canned Heat – was a blues guitarist and scholar so immersed in House’s canon that he knew even the nuances by heart. “They sat knee to knee,” Waterman recalls, as Wilson demonstrated a song like My Black Mama – first as House cut it for Paramount in 1930, then as he did it for Lomax in 1942. “Son would watch him, play along and go, ‘I’m getting my recollection!’”