Nehemiah had long disappeared, slipping into the southbound currents of the Mississippi River, and his music with him. Missing, assumed murdered, they all said. It was three decades since he’d sold his guitar. And if his fingers itched at first to pluck and rap that smooth curved body like a drum, well, the way he used to tell it was that he cut them plain away and carried on the work that needed doing.

After awhile, they forgot who he was, and maybe it was just as well. He forgot it, too. The manic frenzy that could overtake him at the juke joint piano, the strange ghostly presence that came up through him when he picked those strings in that intimate way he did.

They said he was the only bluesman in the delta who was a genius on both piano and guitar. No one taught him to play: he’d just learned it himself, from listening as carefully as he could, then working out his songs in his own way. Even so, it was his voice that stood out, high and mournful, as beautiful as a woman’s. The cussing clatter and stomp of the gambling crowds always fell to a hush when it was his turn. Flying chairs and breaking bottles froze mid-air until his songs were done. Someone said he sounded otherworldly, like a ghost, or a rare bird keening from the dark bayou.

Nehemiah knew deep down anyhow that his gifts belonged to the devil. A conjure man had told him as much and urged him to outrun his hexes. There was a player from Greenwood that Nehemiah taught for awhile, young Robbie Johnson. Kid stole Neemie’s songs and sold them to the rich people who came to hear him play. There was all kinds of talk of a crossroads curse, and whatever it was, Robert was dead before he turned 28. Nehemiah wasn’t going out like that.

Before the blues, and then again after, Neemie had gone riding the rails with his Bible and his gun, preaching repentance and dodging bullets, just like his Daddy before him had done. The man he’d never known. Nehemiah had the kind of face you couldn’t read and that came in handy for cleaning up when playing cards, but sweeping those little towns clean of their spare coins while preaching hellfire never made him any friends. Everyone liked him better when he made strong mountain dew and passed it around good and cheap, and that paid a hell of a lot better than any piano bar.

The best he’d ever done for money was arranging dates between hungry men and willing women, and standing cross-armed nearby to protect the girls if anyone got unruly. Neem could clean up on corn whiskey, women, and card tables on the weekend, and shiny himself up for Sunday morning, taking any offers for lunch that came his way. After thanking his hosts for the plates of oysters, macaroni, and strawberry Jello, he slipped away, following whatever small town was calling him next.

But all that money was gone now, and blues or no blues, he’d been cursed the whole way through. He was as wretched as he’d ever been, stuck in a sweltering hole in the back of a godforsaken hospital, some nowhere town of 500. He was a eunuch now. The doctors had amputated everything that made him a man. That once proud rooster had been covered in festering tumours. Nehemiah knew the cancer was bad hoodoo juju, and probably from the latest of his ex-wives. Ladies had their ways of keeping a man on a leash.

Neemie thinks he’s dead and gone to glory when he stirs from a few days of slumber to find a choir of round white faces staring down at him. He smiles, surprised and pleased to find himself with the angels after all. But it’s something else.

“Skip James!” They’re saying his old name, over and over. In the heat and in the muddle of his mind and the throes of stabbing pain at his severed centre, it’s hard to make sense of all that they’re saying. Turns out these three white kids have been hunting him down, hoping he’ll be their surprise star for an upcoming music festival.

The first words he’s spoken in days: “Son, I haven’t played a guitar for thirty years.” Neem rings the nurse’s bell so that she’ll fill him back up with morphine. The hollow fire in his pit is as much pain as he’s ever known. Then one of the kids says he’s going out to his car. He returns with a guitar, one Nehemiah can barely recognize. For a moment, he misses his Stella, and the stab is near as bad as the hole between his legs.

“Pass it to me,” Neemie commands the kids. He starts teasing the strings, and writes a song right there, on the spot.

“I’m layin’ sick, honey, and on my bed ... I’m layin’ sick, honey, and on my bed ... I used to have some friends, but they wish that I was dead ... in awful pain and deep in misery ...”

That strange magic comes up from Nehemiah’s bones like a man raised from the dead. Just like that, a song is born, and by nightfall, two more. A few more dozen are burning through from his insides and will soon come to light.

Oh, sure, the white kids will parade him about at the folk revival. They’ll keep all his money and his recordings. He’ll still die from the cancer his old lady cursed on him: he has only five years left. But Nehemiah doesn’t care. He is plugged in again. He is pulling the music from heaven and hell and it’s coming through him. He remembers who he is.

*Publisher’s Notes:

1. Born and raised near Bentonia, Mississippi, Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James (1902–1969) was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist, songwriter, and preacher, who’s now considered one of the seminal figures of the blues (Wikipedia).

2. In 2007, Jeff Harris founded the Big Road Blues radio show which airs on listener-supported Jazz 90.1 for two hours every Sunday evening. On 23 February 2020, he hosted I’d Rather Be The Devil—The Blues of Skip James, which “spotlights the music of the brilliant and troubled Skip James, from his remarkable sessions for Paramount in 1931, to the relaunching of his career for a few short, but productive years in the 1960s...”

The recording of Skip James performing “Sickbed Blues” from his album Devil Got My Woman appears in this episode from 20:14 to 24:16. (To read more about the singer, scroll down through the playlist to access the Show Notes.)

Jeff Harris took inspiration for this show from a book by guitarist Stefan Grossman, Blues and the Soul of a Man: An Autobiography of Nehemiah “Skip” James, and Harris’s interview of Grossman is included in this episode of Big Road Blues.

3. See also Whose Skip James Is This? by cultural historian Peter Guralnick in Oxford American (Issue 111; 27 October 2020), reprinted from his collection of musician profiles Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing.

Links above were retrieved on 19 April 2025.

Lorette C. Luzajic

writes, edits, publishes, and teaches prose poetry and small fictions, usually ekphrastic. Her own fiction and prose poems have appeared in Bending Genres, The Citron Review, The Disappointed Housewife, Flash Boulevard, Ghost Parachute, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Flash Fiction Review, Trampset, Unbroken, and beyond. Her works have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Two of her flashes were chosen for Best Small Fictions anthologies.

She’s also the author of five collections of small fictions and/or prose poems, including Disgust (forthcoming from Cyberwit Books), The Rope Artist, The Neon Rosary, Pretty Time Machine, and Winter in June.

Lorette is the founding editor of The Mackinaw, a journal of prose poetry, which debuted on 15 January 2024. She is also the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal established in 2015 and devoted to literature inspired by visual art. Her ekphrastic journal’s first print anthology, co-edited with Clare MacQueen, was released in March 2024: The Memory Palace.

In addition, Lorette’s a teaching artist, and an award-winning neoexpressionist artist who works with collage and mixed media to create urban, abstract, pop, and surreal works. She has collectors in thirty countries so far. She is also passionately curious about art history, folk horror, ancient civilizations, artisan and tribal jewelry, and culinary lore, to name a few.

Visit her at: www.mixedupmedia.ca

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Southern Soul, flash fiction and visual art, an homage to Lucinda Williams by Lorette C. Luzajic in Issue 26 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (January 2025)

⚡ Patience, and Other Virtues That I Lack, CNF by Lorette C. Luzajic in the Gratitude Issue (20X) of MacQ; nominated for Best of the Net 2025

⚡ Blue and Gold for Ukraine, mixed-media painting by Lorette in MacQ (Issue 18, April 2023); nominated for Best of the Net 2024

⚡ The Triaminic Man, flash fiction by Lorette in MacQ (Issue 14, August 2022); reprinted in Best Small Fictions 2023

⚡ Two Must-Read Books by The Queen of Ekphrasis, commentary by Clare MacQueen in Issue 9 of MacQ (August 2021), with links to additional resources

⚡ Featured Author: Lorette C. Luzajic at Blue Heron Review, with two of her prose poems (“Disappoint” and “The Piano Man”); plus “Poet as Pilgrim,” a review of Pretty Time Machine by Mary McCarthy (March 2020)

⚡ Fresh Strawberries, an ekphrastic prose poem by Lorette in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019), nominated for Best of the Net 2019 (selected as a Poetry Finalist) and the Pushcart Prize