Skip James did not make blues designed to make anyone feel comfortable.
His high, spectral voice, minor-key guitar tunings and unusual sense of rhythm gave his recordings an almost unsettling quality that still sounds unlike most Delta blues nearly a century later. There was nothing casual about the atmosphere, even when the instrumentation consisted of nothing more than one man, a guitar or piano, and a microphone.
That makes Devil Got My Woman a particularly strong candidate for the revived Bluesville series.
Craft Recordings will release the 1968 Vanguard album on August 21, 2026, as part of its revived Bluesville series. Priced at $33, the AAA edition was remastered from the original analog tapes by Matthew Lutthans at The Mastering Lab and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Quality Record Pressings. The package includes a tip-on jacket and an obi with new reflections from Grammy-winning producer, songwriter and blues musician Scott Billington.
There is very little on this record for mediocre mastering or a noisy pressing to hide behind.
Related Reviews:
- Classic Blues From Smithsonian Folkways Recordings Comes To Vinyl For The First Time In New 2LP Edition: Review
- Eddie Kirkland It’s The Blues Man! Review: Craft Bluesville Gives 1962 Blues The AAA Treatment
- John Lee Hooker’s That’s My Story Review: Craft Bluesville Revives The 1960 Blues Classic On All-Analog 180-Gram Vinyl
The Bentonia Sound
Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James was born on June 9, 1902, near Bentonia, Mississippi, and developed a style that would become closely associated with that small part of the state.
James learned piano as a child and took up guitar as a teenager, drawing heavily from local musician Henry Stuckey. His playing eventually incorporated an open D-minor tuning, intricate fingerpicking patterns and harmonic structures that helped define what became known as the Bentonia school of blues.
The description is useful, but it does not fully explain why James sounds so strange beside many of his contemporaries. His guitar often creates tension rather than simply establishing a groove. Chords ring against one another in ways that feel unresolved, while the vocal seems to float above the instrument rather than lock neatly into it.
James could also sound considerably more delicate than the subject matter suggested. That combination became his signature.
Paramount and Disappearance
James traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1931 to record for Paramount Records, producing an extraordinary group of performances that included “Devil Got My Woman,” “I’m So Glad,” “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues,” “22-20 Blues” and “Cypress Grove Blues.”
They arrived at an exceptionally bad time to be selling records.
The Great Depression had devastated the market, Paramount itself was approaching collapse, and James’ recordings sold poorly. He subsequently withdrew from the commercial blues world, worked a variety of jobs and became involved with the church, including performing gospel music.
For more than three decades, that appeared to be the end of his recording career.
His records, however, had begun attracting the attention of blues collectors and younger musicians who recognized that there was something highly unusual buried in those old Paramount sides.
The Rediscovery of Skip James
John Fahey, Bill Barth and Henry Vestine located James in Mississippi in June 1964, by which point he was receiving treatment in a hospital. Within weeks, he was appearing at the Newport Folk Festival.
The rediscovery arrived during a period when younger American and European audiences were becoming fascinated with prewar blues musicians whose original records had disappeared from circulation. Son House, Mississippi John Hurt and other artists suddenly found themselves performing for college students and folk audiences decades after their first recording careers had stalled.
James was a particularly odd fit for the revival, which probably helped.
He did not return sounding like an elderly musician attempting to recreate an old act for a new audience. The voice was still unmistakable, and the music retained its eerie quality. Vanguard Records eventually signed him, and the sessions that produced Devil Got My Woman were recorded in New York City from March 22 through March 24, 1967. Vanguard released the 12-track LP the following year.
It became the final album issued during James’ lifetime. He died on October 3, 1969.
The Devil in Two Different Eras
The title track creates one point of historical confusion worth clearing up.
The performance of “Devil Got My Woman” on this album is not the famous Paramount master recorded in 1931. James returned to the composition decades later and recorded it again for Vanguard.
It is the earlier recording that was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2006 and the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2020. That original performance also gained a much later audience through Terry Zwigoff’s 2001 film Ghost World, where its inclusion sent another generation looking for Skip James records.
Anyone who then decided an original Paramount 78 might be an affordable way to hear it learned something useful about the collector market.
James’ influence had already travelled far beyond blues scholarship. Cream recorded “I’m So Glad” for Fresh Cream in 1966, transforming his composition into something much louder and more obviously designed for people standing near amplifiers. Going from Cream back to James is roughly the musical equivalent of leaving Piccadilly Circus and waking up alone on a Mississippi road at midnight.
One Man, Two Instruments
Devil Got My Woman also demonstrates why describing James primarily as an acoustic guitarist misses part of the story.
He accompanies himself on guitar for “Good Road Camp Blues,” “Devil Got My Woman,” “Look at the People Standing at the Judgement,” “Worried Blues,” “Sickbed Blues,” “Catfish Blues,” “Lorenzo Blues” and “Illinois Blues.”
The piano takes over on “Little Cow, Little Calf Blues,” “22-20 Blues,” “Mistreating Child Blues” and “Careless Love.”
The change of instrument alters the weight and movement of the performances without changing their emotional character. James’ piano playing can be more percussive and grounded, while the guitar material frequently feels suspended in space. There is no backing ensemble softening the edges or providing additional scale.
That makes this a particularly exposed recording. Voice, strings, keys, room sound and tape are essentially the entire presentation, which puts considerable pressure on any reissue to preserve texture without artificially brightening the recording or adding unnecessary weight.
James does not need modern hi-fi cosmetics. He needs to sound like Skip James.
The material is spare, frequently bleak and almost aggressively uninterested in making itself easy to digest.
That is part of its appeal.
There is a rawness and purity to Devil Got My Woman that immediately separates it from a lot of modern remastering work. You do not hear heavy EQ trying to make James’ voice larger, darker or more dramatic than it already is. He sounds like he is supposed to sound, which is really the only sensible goal with music this exposed.
We have no way of knowing exactly where the microphone was positioned during these sessions, but the guitar has both clarity and resonance without either quality overwhelming the other. Individual notes have definition, but they also bloom naturally and occupy their own space. Nothing feels artificially sharpened or shoved toward the listener.
Haunting is an overused word in music criticism, but it applies here.
This is one man, his guitar, his piano, whatever sorrow or inner hell he was carrying, and whatever life had already thrown at him by the time he walked into the studio. The presentation is clean without becoming clinical, and James is not pushed unnaturally far forward in the soundstage. The recording lets you move toward him rather than dragging him into your lap.
The piano is handled equally well. It sits in line with his vocals, has enough tonal weight to sound convincing, and never becomes bloated or detached from the rest of the performance. There is body to the instrument, but the mastering does not attempt to turn an intimate blues recording into something grander than it was.
You either connect with the blues or you don’t.
Maybe you need to be slightly damaged as I am, and know what it means to trade your soul with the devil in the backseat of a 4Runner in a Westchester parking lot to understand what all of this means. The blues has never been about perfection. It is about regret, bad judgment, loneliness, survival and occasionally realizing that the bill has finally arrived.
The pressing itself is excellent. My copy was clean, centered and quiet enough that nothing distracted from the performances.
If you can listen to Skip James pouring all of this into a microphone and feel absolutely nothing, perhaps you are better suited to watching adults dance on TikTok while explaining things nobody needed explained in the first place.
For me, Devil Got My Woman is one of the best Bluesville reissues I have heard so far.
Our Ratings:
★★★★★★★★★★ Music
★★★★★★★★★★ Sound Quality
★★★★★★★★★★ Pressing Quality
Where to buy:
Related Reading:
- Craft Recordings And Bluesville Announce Jimmy Reed And Skip James Vinyl Reissues
- Freddie King ‘Feeling Alright’ RSD 2026 Release Captures Sizzling 1975 Nancy Jazz Pulsation Concerts
