Nehemiah “Skip” James was twice presumed murdered by the people of his Mississippi hometown, disappeared from music for 33 years, and was found alive in a Tunica hospital bed in 1964 by young fans who refused to believe the rumors. In this deep dive we trace one of the core architects of the Delta blues from his 1902 birth near Bentonia, Mississippi, where his mother Phyllis, a plantation cook, bought him a $2.50 guitar and his father Eddie ran illegal liquor before reinventing himself as a preacher, through brutal levee camps and road crews, gambling and bootlegging, and the surprising fact that by the late 1920s he was running a music school in Jackson teaching guitar, piano and violin.

We examine the eerie open D minor tuning, rolling bass lines and spectral high vocals that scholars call the Bentonia School, the debate over whether James invented that sound or was its most famous student, and the myth that Henry Stuckey learned the tuning from Bahamian soldiers in World War I, a story his military service card disproves. Then we follow his 1931 audition for talent scout H.C. Speir, the Paramount sessions in Grafton, Wisconsin that produced “22-20 Blues” and other landmark sides, and how the Great Depression wiped out his audience and drove him into the church as choir director and ordained minister.

• How James took a standard 1920s pop tune and deconstructed it into a frantic minor-key masterpiece, and how Robert Johnson later adapted “22-20 Blues”
• Why only about 15 original copies of his Paramount recordings are known to exist today
• The 1964 rediscovery by John Fahey and friends, his Newport Folk Festival return, and his final Vanguard albums confronting illness and mortality
• The $10,000 royalty check from Cream’s electric cover, the only real financial windfall of his career before his death from cancer in 1969
• His legacy in Wim Wenders’s 2004 documentary “The Soul of a Man,” the film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and the 2020 Grammy Hall of Fame