22-20 Blues

While Skip James is famous for his eerie guitar work, he was also a fiercely idiosyncratic piano player. During his legendary 1931 Grafton sessions, he sat at the Paramount studio piano and violently attacked the keys to record "22-20 Blues." The song was an adaptation of the traditional "44 Blues," but James played it with a jagged, erratic, heavily syncopated rhythm that sounded almost like avant-garde jazz. His performance was so uniquely menacing that a few years later, a young Robert Johnson would borrow the exact vocal melody and lyrical structure to write his own classic, "32-20 Blues."