I Got a Letter This Morning

A Journey Into the Song That Changed the Way I Listen

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When I started digging into the deeper levels of the blues—not just the sound, but the soul—I didn’t expect it to begin at the bottom of a bargain bin. A half-lit thrift store, a crate of warped cassette cases, most of them forgettable. But there it was: Father of Folk Blues. Son House. Cracked case. Faded insert. I’d heard the name, enough to risk a dollar.

It turned out to be one of the most important decisions I’ve ever made as a listener.

I took it home, fed it into a beat-up tape deck, and the first sound I heard was metal on metal: slide guitar, jagged and immediate, slicing across steel strings. It didn’t sound like music—it sounded like a wound opening. Then came the voice. Torn, trembling, part sermon, part confession.

I was pulled into its magic. Even now, when I play it, I sit back, close my eyes, and just listen. I don’t skip. I don’t dissect. I absorb the story it’s trying to tell—not just the words, but the spaces between them. The breath. The hesitation. The weight. It’s like the song is trusting me with something it can’t quite say aloud.

The track was “Death Letter Blues.” I didn’t know it yet, but that song would change how I thought about music, grief, and the strange, sacred place where the two meet.

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The First Cut Is a Death Letter

“I got a letter this morning, how do you reckon it read? / It said, ‘Hurry, hurry! The gal you love is dead.’”

No buildup. No gentle start. Just blunt sorrow—delivered and detonated.

“Death Letter Blues” isn’t a song that gradually reveals itself. It crashes in. A man gets the worst kind of news and does what any of us might do—he runs. But he arrives too late. His lover’s already gone, laid out on a cooling board. That image—cold, final, intimate—burns into you.

The verses trace the ritual: the journey, the funeral, the empty house. But there’s no arc of healing here. Just a man in freefall. No answers. No resolution. Just the dull, unrelenting ache of loss.

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Preacher, Sinner, Storyteller

Son House lived at war with himself. A Baptist preacher turned bluesman, caught between the pulpit and the juke joint. He once believed blues was the devil’s music. Then he picked up a guitar and played like he was chasing something darker than doctrine—something real.

You hear all of that in “Death Letter Blues.” He doesn’t sing about pain—he’s still inside it. His guitar isn’t backup—it’s a second voice, one that groans when words fail. That resonator guitar and copper slide wail with raw imperfection. The rhythm stumbles, surges, and breathes like grief itself.

This 1965 version wasn’t the first—its bones came from “My Black Mama, Part 2,” recorded back in 1930—but this was House reborn. Older. Weathered. Every scar in his life sharpened the sound.

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Why It Sticks With You

It’s tempting to call this a song about death. But it’s really about what remains—the emptiness, the helplessness, the stillness after the storm. Grief doesn’t walk in wearing poetry. It shows up in letters. It steals your routine. It rewires silence.

Son House doesn’t offer comfort. He offers recognition. And in that, a strange kind of mercy. He permits you not to be okay. To sit in the wreckage and feel.

Jack White. Cassandra Wilson. Others have covered it, trying to catch that lightning. But House didn’t just create a sound—he conjured a state of being. That kind of rawness can’t be replicated. Only survived.

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The Blues Is the Truth

I’ve played that song more times than I can count—during heartbreaks, funerals, long nights when the questions come heavy. And it always lands the same: like someone sitting beside you, saying nothing, but understanding everything.

Son House didn’t sing to impress. He sang to unburden himself. And in doing so, he gave the rest of us something we didn’t know we needed.

That cassette? Long gone. A busted Walkman took it years ago. But I still hear that voice. Still feel that slide. Still see that man running down the road with a suitcase and a broken heart.

Somewhere along the way, the blues stopped being a genre to me. It became a language. And Son House? He was the first person who made me fluent.

I don’t have a favorite genre of music. I don’t want to limit myself. That’s how you miss things. And sure, there’s plenty I wish I had missed. But that’s the risk you take when you stay open. There’s still so much left to discover in whatever time I’ve got—and if it’s anything like finding Son House in a dollar-bin resurrection, then I’ll keep digging.

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Author’s Note
This piece was written for Jim Adams’ Song Lyric Sunday. The prompt was to choose a track released posthumously. I chose “Death Letter Blues” by Son House—not only for its timing, but for the way it still speaks from beyond, like a voice that refuses to fade.