Jim Jackson

Jim Jackson was a singing guitarist with a folk and blues repertoire as vast as Huddie Ledbetter's and a pre- to early-20th century minstrel-like manner similar to that of Henry Thomas. Enormously popular for a short while thanks to the competitive efforts of agents working for the Victor and Vocalion record companies, Jackson became regionally famous in Memphis and Chicago during the '20s, then went back home during the Great Depression and died in 1937. Home was the town of Hernando in northwestern Mississippi (twenty miles to the south of Memphis) where Jackson was born on a farm in 1884. Hernando's other famous son was bluesman Robert Wilkins, best known for having one of his songs covered decades later by the Rolling Stones. Guitarist Elijah Avery of Cannon's Jug Stompers lived in Hernando too, as did Frank Stokes, a rough-voiced blacksmith and minstrel who later achieved modest fame after teaming up with Dan Sane to form the Beale Street Sheiks. It was Stokes who had the greatest influence upon the young Jim Jackson, who was initially taught to handle a guitar by his father and was singing, dancing, and strumming the strings to attract crowds for peddlers of patent medicine as early as 1905. Soon young Jackson was entertaining at social gatherings throughout the area, sometimes gigging with Wilkins and a banjoist from Red Banks, MS named Gus Cannon. By 1915, Jackson was spending more and more time on the road with minstrel shows. Grown tall and weighing in at 235 lbs, he commanded attention with his booming voice, a knack for telling jokes, and his friendly, dignified way of putting a song across. He toured with the Red Rose, Silas Green, and Rabbit's Foot Minstrel companies, sometimes in the company of Cannon, guitarists Furry Lewis, and Will Shade, and pianist...