Artist:The Mississippi Moaner
Song:Mississippi Moan
Album:Mississippi Blues Vol. 1 (1928-1937)
The history of early blues is littered with guys who walked into a recording studio, recorded a few songs and then disappeared. Some of the songs are pretty good like this one by The Mississippi Moaner. His real name was Isaiah Nettles. We don't know much about him except that he used to hang around a train station in Rockport, MS singing for change. One day H.C. Speir came by. He owned a record store in Jackson and he would broker blues singers to record companies. He discovered Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Son House and plenty of others. He had a disc machine in his record store. He would record a demo and send it to labels and he was very successful. Remember none of these musicians were sophisticated enough or had the money to do this. So they needed a guy like Speir until Alan Lomax started doing field recordings. Speir is in the Blues Hall of Fame for his activities. Nettles recorded five songs at Speir's record store in Oct. 1935. They were produced by Art Satherley who came up with the name The Mississippi Moaner. Vocalion Records bought the recordings but only released Mississippi Moan on a 78. Nettles is clearly influenced by Blind Lemon Jefferson who was very popular at the time. Nettles never recorded again. Speir retired in 1936 so the stream of blues records from Mississippi would have slowed down. Nettles would have had to sell a lot to get another shot. The four available Nettles recordings are on this Document Records CD with several artists with similar histories. After doing some research for her 1998 book Chasin' That Devil Music: Search for the Blues, Gayle Dean Wardlow surmised that Nettles served during WWII and at some point he moved from Mississippi to "up north". That's all we know. Here's a video for Mississippi Moan by The Mississippi Moaner.
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