Jack Owens

1904-1997

by Ted Drozdowski

If the blues is the Devil's music, then he's surely held the strain that's echoed in the verdant Delta lands around Bentonia, Mississippi, dearest to his tar-black heart. It's in the farmland that surrounds the winding roads and willow groves of Bentonia that a mythology of songs about Ol' Nick has been woven since at least the 1920s, producing such tunes as "It Must Have Been the Devil" and "Devil Got My Woman," as well as less overt homages detailing the lives of bad men and women working their way to Hell.

The dark spirit of these songs isn't limited to the lyrics. To hear them sung in the voices of the greatest Bentonia country-style players is akin to listening to the call of a ghost wandering through the topsoil-studded flatland where cotton and catfish are king of the earthly plane, but where the conflict between God and the Devil for the souls that populate it still feels tangible while you're driving along a moonlit Highway 61.

Now the 93-year-old man who was perhaps the last great Bentonia-school blues player has become a ghost. Word of the February 9 death of Jack Owens -- a farmer for most of his life who learned to play from his father and his uncle -- is just beginning to trickle out of the Delta. But after Skip James, his most famous predecessor and most direct source of inspiration, Owens was the best-known player of these blues. Like James, he often sang in a keening falsetto wail, a banshee cry perfect for the haunting songs he performed. In particular, "It Must Have Been the Devil" -- a lengthy tale full of adventurous twists chronicling the hucksterish travails of a Satan who's more a nasty variation on the Afro-Caribbean trickster Papa Legba than the Prince of Darkness -- was Owens's trump card. Along with his blind, harp-playing sidekick Bud Spires, he made the number seem as much a part of the firmament of Mississippi culture as the big muddy river itself.

Owens' "fame," if one could call it that, came late in life. He farmed for nearly 50 years before musicologist David Evans recorded him in the early '70s. Those field recordings were captured on two albums, the Rounder compilation Goin' Up the Country and the Testament label's soul-shaking It Must Have Been the Devil, under Owens's own name. From then on, Owens was held in reverence by a cult-within-a-cult of blues fans the world over. And he occasionally entertained visitors from Japan and the Netherlands and Scandinavia on the front porch of his shotgun house, strumming a scar-faced acoustic guitar while he sang, and offering occasional belts of his homemade hooch.

But Owens continued to make his life as a farmer, at least into his 80s. It was only after the early-'90s release of filmmaker Robert Mugge and music journalist Robert Palmer's collaborative documentary Deep Blues, and an accompanying soundtrack CD distributed by major-label Atlantic, that his skills become more widely known. Then he made his way as a full-time musician, still generously entertaining visitors on his porch, but playing an increasing number of formal gigs and festivals in the US and Europe.

To see Owens perform in the heat of a Delta summer, as I did in 1995 and '96, was to slip wholly out of time. Certainly he was a man of another era. When his Testament album was reissued on CD, he gave copies the label had sent him to visitors, explaining that he didn't have a machine that would play the new-fangled "round tapes." But his music, heard on its home turf, was nearly a hallucinogen. It took only seconds, and a willingness to be moved by the rich emotional currents that welled from his throat, to be swept away to a foggy realm of plantation toil, Saturday-night sins, and Sunday-morning salvation. His voice was a high-straining whisper, carried on the hot Delta breeze like a roaming spirit, and his guitar -- tuned in his own custom -- thrummed with cadences like the polyrhythms that told the news of ancient African villages (or the beat-keepers of the now nearly lost Mississippi fife-and-drum-band tradition).

His was a sound as heady as hashish, as quietly consuming as buried passions. If we're lucky, there's someone still playing in the backwoods juke joints around Bentonia who can summon up that sound. If not, may old Jack Owens, and the deep spirit of Bentonia blues, rest in peace.

This Tuesday, May 6, a show in tribute to long-dead country blues legend Robert Johnson, featuring acoustic-blues revivalist Guy Davis and Robert Jr. Lockwood, who learned to play guitar from Johnson, will be presented at the House of Blues in Harvard Square. Call (617) 491-BLUE for information.