The first thing that you have to accept when you write a book about early blues music, Dr. Gregg Kimball says, is that you’ll never solve the mystery of it all.

“We just don’t know,” says the author of the new “Searching for Jimmie Strother” (University of Virginia Press), a fascinating and highly readable musical detective story. “Researchers tend to try to be authoritative about when X happened and when the blues emerged… We love [to build] a timeline. But there are certain things we will never know.”

Kimball’s new book helps us better understand the tortured trajectory of the blues, by focusing on a mysterious guitarist and banjo player, born 1881 in Culpeper, Virginia, who could best be described as a “songster,” steeped in the late 19th century African American song forms that emerged before blues and jazz. “There were a lot of crazy things happening in that period,” says Kimball, the former director of Public Services and Outreach at the Library of Virginia. “Breakdowns, two-steps, rural dance music.”

One of the reasons it’s difficult for music writers to explain this period, he says, is that people have to think of it as “a pretty wide pastiche of different things that are all entangled with each other. You have minstrelsy obviously, you have work songs, you have spirituals. A lot of these songs were chanted, or in different meters, and of course there was an intertwining of white and Black gospel in the early South.”

An obscure blues legend

The subject, Jimmie Strother, was a unique transitional figure in blues history, Kimball’s book recounts, even if little has survived in the public record about his life. “In terms of hard facts, he’s a fairly obscure character… there was a time earlier on that I never thought it would be possible to write a book centered on him.”

James Lee Strother—or “Strothers” as he is sometimes identified—was incarcerated in the Virginia State Prison Farm in 1936 when the Library of Congress musicologist John Lomax came to record the music of inmates there; he had discovered the legendary blues artist Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter in a Louisiana prison two years earlier, and would later discover McKinley Morganfield, later renamed Muddy Waters, living at a Mississippi plantation

“Lomax had these ideas about what was ‘pure’ folk music,” Kimball says. “He would go to prisons to collect and find the old songs because the people were supposedly less affected or influenced by radio and records and modernity. But where that falls apart with Strother is that he’d only been in prison about a year when Lomax came. He had absorbed a lot of modern influences in some of his songs. It’s not like he never heard records or radio.”

Blinded early in life by an explosion in a steel mill, Strother, who for decades had toiled in Culpeper and Baltimore, Maryland, as a street musician, had been sent to the Farm for murdering his second wife, Blanche. As “Searching for Jimmie Strother” shows, if it hadn’t been for a couple of sharp lawyers—one had served in the Virginia House of Delegates—the murderer could have been put to death for the brutal crime. Instead, he ended up serving less than five years before being pardoned by Virginia Governor James H. Price. “It’s hard to understand the leniency,” remarks Kimball. “I hate to say it, but it was probably because he killed another Black person.”

Captured on a then state-of-the-art disc cutting machine that fit snugly in Lomax’s trunk, the 13 songs that Strother recorded at the Farm have endured over the decades, covered by the likes of Pete Seeger, Jefferson Airplane and contemporary folk revivalist Dom Flemons, who wrote the foreword to Kimball’s book.  “My first experience with Strother’s music came from hearing the Library of Congress LP, ‘Negro Religious Songs and Services,’ writes Fleming. “[It] features several of Strother’s religious songs. including ‘Do Lord Remember Me’ and ‘We Are Almost Down to the Shore,’ which I later added to my repertoire and recorded for my own album, ‘Traveling Wildfire.'”

Flemons says that “Strother’s repertoire of songs, as recorded by Lomax, provide a microcosm of Black music as it was played in the late 19th century moving into the twentieth. Songs like ‘Tennessee Dog’ displayed the unique banjo picking of the medicine show, while his version of ‘Cripple Creek’ provides a window into the dangerous world of the Jim Crow South.”

The 55-year-old performer’s songbag was indeed wide-ranging, from religious laments to uptempo minstrel songs (“Corn Shucking Time”) to bawdy ballads about prostitution (“Poontang Little, Poontang Small”). One tune, “Going to Richmond,” is an expansive eight-bar blues that clocks in at a weighty six minutes. “Of course he would know the blues. That was the thing, if you made your living out on the street, you had to pick up newer styles as they emerged.”

Kimball includes quotes from Lomax’s assistant Harold Spivacke, who recounted in an archival interview that the musicologist talked to the performer for about an hour about what he would play. “You know that Strother gave him what he wanted. He knew how to work a crowd,” says Kimball. “He knew what was being asked of him. But Lomax wasn’t there for the actual recording, he was somewhere else. So Strother eventually does things like ‘Tennessee Dog’ which obviously is not pure folk music.”

“A blind man who shot his wife”

The author, who received a doctorate in history from the University of Virginia as well as a Master’s of Library Science from the University of Maryland, grew up in upstate New Hampshire but developed a fascination with the American South. He had a childhood flirtation with folk and blues music thanks to his folkie sister, a Bob Dylan fan—but really reengaged with music after he came to Richmond in the mid-’80s to start curating historical exhibits for the Valentine. “I remember doing this exhibit, one of the first that was done about antebellum [Black life in] Richmond. We used some of the tunes from those early Library of Congress recordings as part of the soundtrack.”

That’s where he discovered Strother’s music, and the rest of the sounds that Lomax and Spivacke recorded at the Farm. “Lomax got a lot of good stuff in Virginia,” he says. “The most important one, other than Strother, was Joe Lee, who performed these wild acapella pieces.” Lee and Strother memorably dueted on a few numbers for Lomax. After years of mystery, Kimball’s research uncovered who “Joe Lee” really was. “Once I had the middle name, Lynn, it became easier to find him in the prison records, which led me to his mug shot. It turns out he was a root doctor, a conjurer from the Danville area. Some guy wouldn’t pay him, so he hit him in the head with an iron bar.”

Kimball plans to return to his old Library of Virginia stamping grounds on March 7, for a book signing and presentation that will include a performance by the author of Strother’s music (guitarist Kimball, in his off time, is also a working musician, specializing in vintage blues and old-time music). “Performing the songs adds a lot,” he says. “It’s hard to describe this stuff on the page. It’s useful for people to actually hear the music performed live.” He’ll also spin some of the original recordings, and a few of the covers, like the Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 version of “Blood Stained Banders,” which the San Francisco psychedelic band retitled ‘Good Shepherd.”

Kimball’s sleuthing unearthed key details about Strother’s life—his birthdate and death notice, where he likely lived and performed in Virginia and Maryland, and newspaper coverage of the murder. But the man himself remained elusive. The author did find a series of articles from 1915 where the performer inadvertently caused a vigorous debate in the local Baltimore press. “This is the magic of digital newspapers,” he laughs.

“There was a guy named William Stone, a major figure in Maryland politics, who ran the Port of Baltimore, appointed by the president. He writes this letter to the paper complaining, ‘my cook’s husband, Jimmie Strother, is being prevented from playing on the streets because he’s blind.’ He and this guy who ran the local federated charities in Baltimore, who thought it was insulting to blind people for them to perform on the street, got into a pissing contest over it.”

This episode provided, for Kimball, a window of insight into how people viewed and debated blindness, especially in musicians. “That’s the thing that authors who write about the blues kind of gloss over, and don’t take too seriously. Attitudes toward disability had never really occurred to me either, It’s rarely talked about in music literature. It’s also kind of a punchline. When I give a talk about Strother, I always get a little snicker when I say he was a blind man who shot his wife.”

Kimball serves today as Senior Consulting Historian for the Shockoe Institute, a planned learning center about Richmond’s slave trade history slated to open next year inside Main Street Station. His first book was “American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond,” but “Searching For Jimmie Strother” gave him the chance to indulge his passion for Virginia music history. “I really wanted to write a book for ordinary folks who have no background in traditional music or Virginia history. So that’s my biggest hope, that people will sit down and read the book and get something out of it.”

“Searching for Jimmie Strother” is available in bookstores or through https://www.upress.virginia.edu/.