Ishmon Bracey recorded just sixteen songs, yet collectors treat his original 78s as holy grails of Mississippi Delta blues. Born in Byram, Mississippi, around 1899 or 1901, he learned bottleneck slide guitar directly from local players Rubin Lacy and Louis Cooper and cut his teeth at rural fish fries, dances, and juke joints where there was no amplification and the music had to physically cut through the crowd. After relocating to Jackson, he was discovered in 1927 while playing on Mill Street by talent scout H.C. Speir, which led to his first recording sessions for Victor at the Memphis Auditorium in February 1928, backed by Charlie McCoy.

This episode explains why Bracey’s piercing, unembellished nasal voice was perfectly suited to the primitive acoustic horn recording of the era, how he broke convention by recording for Paramount with the New Orleans Nehi Boys and their piano and clarinet, and why the Great Depression cut his recording career short. It follows his medicine show years with Tommy Johnson, his 1951 ordination as a Baptist minister and complete break with secular music, and the remarkable 1963 encounter with historian Gayle Dean Wardlow, when the Reverend refused to play the blues but became a vital informant who helped locate Skip James.

• How bottleneck slide turns the guitar’s staircase of fretted notes into a ramp of microtones that mimics the human voice
• What a 1928 location recording session actually involved, and why singers had to power the cutting stylus with their lungs
• Bracey’s habit of altering the standard three-line blues verse, and his hybrid of Delta slide guitar with New Orleans jazz instrumentation
• The cultural divide between the church and the devil’s music that made a blues career and a pulpit mutually exclusive
• His final years pastoring a church in Canton, Mississippi, his death in 1970, and his burial in Willow Park Cemetery in Jackson