Although House first began his career as a blues singer at the age of 25 and made his first recordings a couple of years later for the Paramount label, it was the work he recorded with Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1941 that led to his renaissance two decades later, by which time he had long since retired from his career in music. This album dates from that period and was recorded live in Indiana in 1964 - as far as one can hear, without an audience - under the auspices of blues scholar Dick Waterman. The recording predates The Legendary Son House album that established the singer's credentials as an elder statesman of the blues, and these previously unreleased tapes have been polished to an astonishing level of clarity for this album, making it a fresh and unfamiliar treat.

The sound is beautifully sparse: just House, his ringing guitar and inimitable voice, captured with a sense of intimacy which was often only hinted at in the more produced recordings of the period. In particular, the title track, which he never recorded in a studio, really encapsulates what the rural blues had meant in House's youth; a guitar and, more importantly still, a voice - perhaps weary but nevertheless indomitable - speaking its truth directly to the listener. And the truth of House's music is indisputable. The blues is one of the very few genres of popular music where maturity is valued and youth allowed to pass without a fight, and the contrast between the version of "Preachin the Blues" - here just called "Preachin' Blues" - that House recorded at the age of 62 and the one he had earlier recorded for Paramount aged 28 is striking. The 1930 "Preachin' the Blues" is fast and both cocky and bitter, the song of a young man who had just been released from jail on murder charges and who had only relatively recently rejected the religious life of a pastor, embracing instead the music that he had preached against a few years earlier. The mature singer takes the song a little more slowly and delivers its lyric with a vocal full of complex emotion, sometimes amused and sardonic, sometimes accusing, but with a sense of patient self-deprecation which is entirely different from the tone of his younger self.