I love Myth. I think Myth is pretty much the stuff all of our consciousness flows from. Stories of larger-than-life heroes exemplify the traits we all strive, with varying degrees of success, to emulate. Our Myths define us as individuals, as groups, and as a society.

The problem with Myth is that Reality doesn't always measure up. Take baseball, f'rinstance. I LOVE the American Myth of baseball a lot more than I like watching any actual GAMES, which tend to be long and boring. (I feel kinda the same way about Christianity, but that's another story altogether.) MOVIES about baseball are something else, however - there you're able to get a bigger dose of the Myth and less of the infielder scratching his balls while waiting for the pitch.

And of course, being a regular here at the First Church, I love the American Myth of rock'n'roll and its granddaddy, the blues. If you've read my screed elsewhere on this site about "My Life In the Blues Bucket," you're aware of some of my thoughts on that wellspring of American music. More recently, however, as part of my continuing spiritual development, the Rev. Coomers laid a tome on me which encapsulates the Reality of blues better than anything else I've read (including Leroi Jones' seminal "Blues People").

One of my favorite blues rekkids is "She Lyin'," a collection of recordings made by the country blues legend Nehemiah "Skip" James shortly after his rediscovery in 1964 and released on the Genes CD Co. label (P.O. Box 7778, Silver Spring, MD 20907) in 1993. James was the author of "I'm So Glad," a song he developed from the germ of an innocuous contemporary pop song called "I'm So Tired," later popularized in dumbed-down rock cover versions by Cream and Deep Purple. Back in the twenties (the only time in history when blues was actually POPULAR music; the profusion of blues "hits" in the fifties and sixties were largely due to record company payola), he'd actually had hits with that song and "Devil Got My Woman."

James' music has a unique sound. His singing lacks the rasp of a Charlie Patton, Son House, Bukka White, or Blind Willie Johnson; rather, it's a high, near-falsetto with an ethereal, otherworldly quality. He was equally adept on guitar and piano (there's another volume of post-rediscovery recordings on Genes covering his piano pieces) - a rarity among blues musicians - and his songs aren't typical Mississippi-style constructions, either (Calt questions the validity of some of the regional blues "styles" identified by blues scholars - even in the twenties, musicians traveled and had access to recordings of contemporaries from other regions). Robert Johnson (and through him, Muddy Waters) seems to have been influenced by James. The performances on "She Lyin'" might lack the fire of James' original Paramount sides, but they're streets ahead of the perfunctory, lackluster ones he subsequently cut for Vanguard.

Part of the fallacy of blues fandom is the desire to recreate the bluesmen as benevolent uncles (as the non-musician Mississippi John Hurt was marketed) or noble savages. There is a certain tendency to idealize and sentimentalize them. (I'm reminded in particular of an article I read in "Blues Access" a couple of years ago, depicting the recently-deceased pianist Sunnyland Slim as a Buddha-like figure. The author was a blues writer whom I'd met 25 years ago in upstate New York, who'd lambasted me for my less-than-Politically-Correct view of the blues.) That tendency is notably absent from "I'd Rather Be the Devil." For example, here's Calt on his meeting with bluesman Henry Stuckey: "His shack was foul-smelling, and full of flies. Finally, I could stand the stench no longer. I went outside and threw up."

Calt met James as a young blues fan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. "Had I known how our lives would intersect over the next four years," he writes, "I would not have initiated that first conversation." He depicts James as a chilling figure as cold-blooded as any gangsta rapper - a former bootlegger and pimp who carried a gun and wasn't afraid to use it, a misanthrope and misogynist who periodically sought to distance himself from the blues and follow in the footsteps of the preacher father who'd abandoned him. In contrast with the Mythic take on the blues (and bluesmen) as "true" or "authentic," Calt's James is a secretive, duplicitous, delusional individual who attempts to conceal his past while seeking self-aggrandizement in the present.

Neither are those young white fans (of which he was one) immune to Calt's jaundiced eye. Later chapters describe he ways in which many of them were motivated by the desire for wealth as much as by love for the music and reverence for the musicians, stealing publishing royalties in the manner of the more notoriously exploitive record moguls of the twenties and thirties, and even chiseling them out of the paltry take from their small-time tours and record releases.