Cherry Ball Blues

The guitar on this one moves in a circular, almost hypnotic pattern, the bass strings answering the treble in a conversation that never quite resolves. Skip James's cross-note tuning gives the instrument a modal quality foreign to conventional blues, something closer to the pentatonic scales of field hollers than the twelve-bar framework that would come to define the genre's commercial form. The song carries a surface playfulness — there's a winking quality to the subject matter, an adult teasing embedded in the vernacular of the era — but James never lets that lightness fully take over. His falsetto keeps even the lighter moments slightly uncomfortable, a sweetness that curdles just at the edges. The picking is dense in places, elaborate runs that show a technical facility James rarely displayed openly, then suddenly sparse again, a single note ringing out alone. You feel the heat of the Mississippi summer in it, the particular boredom and desire of rural isolation, the way people made entertainment and meaning from whatever language was available. It rewards close listening — there are ornaments buried in the guitar work that only reveal themselves after repeated exposure, tiny decisions that distinguish it from anything a contemporary would have played.