Skip James Rediscovery and legacy when was he redicovered? He was virtually unknown to listeners until about 1960. what happened in 1960? In 1964, blues enthusiasts John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi.
how did he end up in the hospital?
How did Skip James end up in the hospital?
For the next thirty years, James recorded nothing and performed sporadically. He was virtually unknown to listeners until about 1960. In 1964, blues enthusiasts John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. According to Calt, the "rediscovery" of both James and Son House at virtually the same time was the start of the blues revival in the United States. In July 1964 James and other rediscovered musicians appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. Several photographs by the blues promoter Dick Waterman captured this performance, James's first in over 30 years. After that James recorded for Takoma Records, Melodeon Records, and Vanguard Records and performed at various engagements until his death in 1969.  More of James's recordings have been available since his death than were available during his lifetime. His 1931 recordings and several of his recordings and concerts from the 1960s have been reissued on numerous compact discs, in and out of print. His songs were not initially recorded as frequently as those of other rediscovered blues musicians. However, the British rock band Cream recorded "I'm So Glad", providing James with the only windfall of his career. Subsequently, Cream's adaptation was recorded by other groups. James' "22-20" inspired for the name for the English group 22-20s and the British post-rock band Hope of the States released a song partially about the life of James, entitled "Nehemiah", which reached number 30 on the UK Singles Chart.  In 2004, Wim Wenders directed the film The Soul of a Man (the second part of The Blues, a series produced by Martin Scorsese), focusing on the music of Blind Willie Johnson, J.B. Lenoir and James. Because James had not been not filmed before the 1960s, Keith B. Brown played the part of the young James in the documentary. CANNOTANSWER
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Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James (June 9, 1902October 3, 1969) was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter.

His guitar playing is noted for its dark, minor-key sound, played in an open D-minor tuning with an intricate fingerpicking technique. James first recorded for Paramount Records in 1931, but these recordings sold poorly, having been released during  the Great Depression, and he drifted into obscurity.

After a long absence from the public eye, James was rediscovered in 1964 by blues enthusiasts including John Fahey, helping further the blues and folk music revival of the 1950s and early 1960s. During this period, James appeared at folk and blues festivals, gave concerts around the country, and recorded several albums for various record labels. His songs have influenced generations of musicians and have been adapted by numerous artists.  He has been hailed as "one of the seminal figures of the blues."

Biography

Early years
James was born near Bentonia, Mississippi. His father was a bootlegger who reformed and became a preacher. As a youth, James heard local musicians, such as Henry Stuckey, from whom he learned to play the guitar, and the brothers Charlie and Jesse Sims. James began playing the organ in his teens. He worked on road construction and levee-building crews in Mississippi in the early 1920s and wrote what is perhaps his earliest song, "Illinois Blues", about his experiences as a laborer. He began playing the guitar in open D-minor tuning.

1920s and 1930s
In early 1931, James auditioned for the record shop owner and talent scout H. C. Speir in Jackson, Mississippi. Speir placed blues performers with various record labels, including Paramount Records. On the strength of this audition, James traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin, to record for Paramount. His 1931 records are considered idiosyncratic among prewar blues recordings and formed the basis of his reputation as a musician.

As was typical of his era, James recorded various styles of music – blues, spirituals, cover versions, and original compositions – frequently blurring the lines between genres and sources. For example, "I'm So Glad" was derived from a 1927 song, "So Tired", by Art Sizemore and George A. Little, recorded in 1928 by Gene Austin and by Lonnie Johnson (Johnson's version was entitled "I'm So Tired of Livin' All Alone"). James's biographer Stephen Calt, echoing the opinion of several music critics, considered the finished product totally original, "one of the most extraordinary examples of fingerpicking found in guitar music". Several other recordings from the Grafton session, such as "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues", "Devil Got My Woman", "Jesus Is a Mighty Good Leader", and "22-20 Blues" (the basis of Robert Johnson's better-known "32-20 Blues"), have been similarly influential. Very few original copies of James's Paramount 78 rpm records have survived.

The Great Depression struck just as James's recordings were hitting the market. Sales were poor as a result, and he gave up performing the blues to become the choir director in his father's church. James was later an ordained minister in Baptist and Methodist churches, but the extent of his involvement in religious activities is unknown.

Rediscovery and legacy 
For the next thirty years, James made no known recordings and performed sporadically. He was virtually unknown to the general public until about 1960. In 1964, blues enthusiasts John Fahey, Bill Barth, and Henry Vestine found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. According to Calt, the "rediscovery" of both James and Son House at virtually the same time was the start of the blues revival in the United States. In July 1964, James and other rediscovered musicians appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. Several photographs by the blues promoter Dick Waterman captured this performance, James's first in over 30 years. James subsequently recorded for Takoma Records, Melodeon Records, and Vanguard Records and performed at various engagements until his death from cancer in 1969.

More of James's recordings have been available since his death than were available during his lifetime. His 1931 recordings and several of his recordings and concerts from the 1960s have been reissued on numerous compact discs, in and out of print. His songs were not initially recorded as frequently as those of other rediscovered blues musicians.  However, the British rock band Cream recorded "I'm So Glad", providing James with $10,000 in royalties, the only windfall of his career. Subsequently, Cream's adaptation was recorded by other groups.  James' "22-20" inspired the name of the English group 22-20s. The British post-rock band Hope of the States released a song partially about the life of James, entitled "Nehemiah", which reached number 30 on the UK Singles Chart.  Only 15 copies of James' original shellac 78 recordings are still in existence, and have become extremely sought after by collectors such as John Tefteller.

In 2004, Wim Wenders directed the film The Soul of a Man (the second part of The Blues, a series produced by Martin Scorsese), focusing on the music of Blind Willie Johnson, J.B. Lenoir and James. Because James had not been filmed before the 1960s, Keith B. Brown played the part of the young James in the documentary.  James' song "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" was featured in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou? and included on the soundtrack album.

James was the inspiration for Dion's 2007 blues album, Son of Skip James, which peaked at No. 4.

James was honored with a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail in Bentonia, his hometown.

In 2020, James' song "Devil Got My Woman" was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Personality
James was described as aloof and moody. The musicologist Dick Spottswood commented, "Skip James, you never knew. Skip could be sunshine, or thunder and lightning depending on his whim of the moment".

Musical style

James as guitarist
James often played guitar with an open D-minor tuning (D–A–D–F–A–D), resulting in the "deep" sound of the 1931 recordings. He reportedly learned this tuning from his musical mentor, the unrecorded bluesman Henry Stuckey, who in turn was said to have acquired it from Bahamian soldiers during the First World War, despite the fact that his service card shows he did not serve overseas. Robert Johnson also recorded in this tuning, his "Hell Hound on My Trail" being based on James's "Devil Got My Woman." James's classically informed fingerpicking style was fast and clean, using the entire register of the guitar, with heavy, hypnotic bass lines. His style of playing had more in common with the Piedmont blues of the East Coast than with the Delta blues of his native Mississippi.

The "Bentonia School"
James is sometimes associated with the Bentonia School, which is either a subgenre of blues music or a style of playing it. In a 1994 biography of James, I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues, Stephen Calt maintained that no style of blues originated in Bentonia and that the "Bentonia School" is simply a notion of later blues writers who overestimated the provinciality of Mississippi during the early 20th century, when railways linked small towns. Calt asserts these writers failed to see that in the case of Bentonia bluesman Jack Owens, "the 'tradition' he bore primarily consisted of musical scraps from James' table". Owens and other musicians who may have been contemporaries of James were not recorded until the revival of interest in blues music in the 1960s. Whether the work of these musicians constituted a "school", and whether James originated it or was a member of it himself, remain open questions. One of the last living links to the original Bentonia school is Jimmy "Duck" Holmes, the owner of the famous Blue Front Cafe in Bentonia, Mississippi. Holmes learned to play in this particular style directly from Henry Stuckey, who reportedly taught James and Owens himself. Accordingly, Duck is called the "last of the Bentonia Bluesmen."

Discography

Paramount 78-RPM records, 1931

Later recordings, 1964–1969
Despite poor health, James recorded several LPs from 1964 to 1969, mostly revisiting his 1931 sides, traditional music, and spirituals, but also including a handful of newly written blues meditating on his illness and convalescence. These five prolific years have not been thoroughly documented: recordings, outtakes, and interviews not released on James's LPs (which have been repeatedly cannibalized and reissued) are scattered among many compilations released by small labels. Previously unreleased performances continue to be found and released but have been left largely unexplained, sometimes hours' worth at a time. Original recordings and reissues are listed below.
Greatest of the Delta Blues Singers (Melodeon, Biograph, 1964)
She Lyin' (Adelphi, 1964; first released by Genes, 1996)
Today! (Vanguard, 1966)
Devil Got My Woman (Vanguard, 1968)
I'm So Glad (Vanguard, 1978)
Live: Boston, 1964 & Philadelphia, 1966 (Document, 1994)
Skip's Piano Blues, 1964 (Genes, 1998)
Blues from the Delta, with two previously unreleased recordings (Vanguard, 1998)
The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James – 1930 (Yazoo, 1994)
The Complete Bloomington, Indiana Concert, March 30, 1968 (Document, 1999)
Skip's Guitar Blues, 1964(?), (Genes, 1999)
Studio Sessions: Rare and Unreleased, 1967 (Vanguard, 2003)
Hard Time Killing Floor Blues (Biograph, 2003†)
Heroes of the Blues: The Very Best of Skip James (Shout!, 2003)
Hard Time (Universe, 2003†)
Cypress Grove Blues (2004)
 Hard Time Killin' Floor (Yazoo 2075, 2005)

References

External links
 Interview with Skip James' surviving cousin

1902 births
1969 deaths
People from Bentonia, Mississippi
American blues singers
American blues guitarists
American male guitarists
American blues pianists
American male pianists
Country blues singers
Songwriters from Mississippi
Blues musicians from Mississippi
Blues revival musicians
Country blues musicians
Delta blues musicians
Vanguard Records artists
Deaths from cancer in Mississippi
Paramount Records artists
20th-century American guitarists
20th-century American pianists
Guitarists from Mississippi
Mississippi Blues Trail
African-American male songwriters
African-American pianists
African-American guitarists
20th-century African-American male singers
"How the Poor Die" is an essay first published in 1946 in Now by the English author George Orwell. Orwell gives an anecdotal account of his experiences in a French public hospital that triggers a contemplation of hospital literature in the context of 19th-century medicine.

Background

In 1928, Orwell went to Paris for 18 months. In March 1929 he was feeling unwell and spent two weeks in the Hôpital Cochin, rue Faubourg Saint-Jacques, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. Ill with the flu, he was treated at the hospital from 7 to 22 March 1929. In the hospital, he continued writing, as he gave it as an address to a publisher. Orwell was subject to bronchial conditions throughout his life, but it is not certain whether he was suffering from influenza or pneumonia. In Paris, he was checked for tuberculosis but was found to be unaffected. 

In December 1933, while Orwell was teaching in Uxbridge, he developed pneumonia. He was taken to a cottage hospital at Uxbridge, where his life for a time was believed to be in danger. He was kept in hospital over Christmas and the New Year. When he was discharged in January 1934, he returned to Southwold to convalesce and was supported by his parents for several months. He did not return to teaching.

In 1937, Orwell spent some months on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.  He was twice hospitalised during the war; once with an infection of his hand and again after he was shot in the throat by a sniper.

Composition
It is not known precisely when the article was written. Peter Davison, editor of Orwell's Collected Works, has suggested a possible history for its composition that places its writing between 1931 and 1936, while Orwell's work revolved around the unemployed, tramps and beggars, and that he reworked it between summer 1940 and spring 1941, submitted it to Horizon, which rejected it possibly because readers would have been unwilling to read about 'how the poor die' at such a time. Finally, a section was retyped and then published in Now, a magazine established by George Woodcock, in November 1946.

Summary

Orwell recounts a tale based on his experiences in a publicly-funded hospital in Paris. The various reception procedures and treatments he receives for pneumonia include bureaucracy, a bath, cupping therapy and a mustard poultice. In the ward, he notes the indifference of the staff to their patients, particularly when they are used as case studies for medical training. The death of numero 57 sets Orwell wondering how lucky it is to die a natural death or rather, as he thinks at the time of writing, and as he thought then, if it is better to die violently and not too old. Orwell sees his experiences in the French hospital and in a Spanish hospital, in stark contrast to the care of that he received in an English cottage hospital.

Orwell gives a historical background of how hospital wards began as casual wards "for lepers and the like to die in" and became places for medical students to learn using the bodies of the poor. In the 19th century, surgery was viewed as a form of sadism, and dissection was possible only with the aid of body-snatchers. Orwell dwells on the literature of medicine in the 19th century, when doctors were given names such as Slasher and Fillgrave, and Orwell particularly recalls In the Children's Hospital: Emmie (1880), a work by Tennyson. All of that accounts for the surviving dread of hospitals among the poor and explains why a sound instinct warns people to keep out of them.

Extracts

Two slatternly nurses had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a straitjacket while some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don't happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you can't get it off. This is the period the onlookers most enjoy. During the last five minutes, I noted a sort of numbness supervenes.

As a non-paying patient, in the uniform nightshirt, you were primarily a specimen, a thing I did not resent but could never quite get used to.

In the public wards of hospitals you see horrors that you don't seem to meet with among people who manage to die in their own homes, as though certain diseases only attacked people at the lower income levels. But it is a fact that you would not in any English hospitals see some of the things I saw in the Hôpital X. This business of dying like animals, for instance, with nobody interested, the death not even noticed till the morning—this happened more than once.

Postscript
In summer 1946, Orwell decamped to Jura, an island in the west of Scotland. A boating accident did little for his health. In December 1947, he was in hospital in Glasgow. Tuberculosis was diagnosed, and the request for permission to import streptomycin to treat Orwell went as far as Aneurin Bevan. After treatment, Orwell was able to return to Jura by the end of July 1948.

In 1948, Bevan, formerly Orwell's colleague at Tribune and now Minister of Health in the Labour government, instigated the British National Health Service as publicly-funded medical provision for all.

In January 1949, in a very weak condition, Orwell was taken to a sanatorium in Gloucestershire, a series of small wooden chalets or huts near Stroud. Visitors were shocked by Orwell's appearance and concerned by the shortcomings and the ineffectiveness of the treatment. In late summer, Orwell was removed to University College Hospital in London. In October he married Sonia Brownell, who prepared plans to take him to the Swiss Alps. Orwell was getting weaker by the beginning of 1950. Sonia spent most of 20 January with Orwell in his private ward but left in the early evening to have dinner with Lucian Freud and another friend. A visitor came and left a parcel outside the room in which Orwell was lying alone. Sometime early on Saturday morning, an artery burst in his lungs, and a few moments later he was dead, aged 46. Controversy surrounds Sonia's activities. Some say that she was at a nightclub and inaccessible. Others claim that at the end of the evening having had dinner with her friends, she called the hospital and came back distraught with the news of Orwell's death.

See also
Bibliography of George Orwell

References

External links
Text of How the Poor Die

Essays by George Orwell
1946 essays
Works originally published in British magazines Military Hospital 4/637 () was a large German military general hospital in Minsk operated by the Army Medical Service from 1941 to 1942 during World War II. The hospital was located in the former House of the Red Army building (now called the Officer's House or Army Palace), a monumental Stalinist building inaugurated in 1936 and designed by Iosif Langbard. The hospital reached a capacity of around 1,000 beds. The hospital mainly treated German soldiers, but also civilians and enemy soldiers to some extent.

History
The hospital employed a number of Jews from the nearby Minsk ghetto as auxiliary workers in a variety of capacities, thereby shielding them from the SS, and on at least one occasion the hospital's physicians risked their lives by allowing Jews to hide from the SS in the hospital. The Holocaust survivor Heinz Rosenberg recounts in his memoirs how he and other Jews were treated with a humanity and kindness which "seemed like a miracle" by the hospital's staff and leadership. This protection of Jews in the Minsk area came to an end when the hospital was ordered to relocate to Crimea.

References

Army Medical Service (Germany)
Hospitals in Belarus