This is a beautiful song. Like many songs by the Embarrassment, I haven’t the faintest clue about what it’s about, but it’s a great song and a great performance. I’m particularly partial to Bill Goffrier’s soaring responsorial vocal.

You can download it in loss-tastic MP3 form from their myspace page, our you can be a mensch and buy their Heyday 1979-1983 CD and bask in the greatness of it all. To borrow a phrase from another Embos admirer, “Gawd they were good.”

The image at right comes from the Embarrassment Yahoo group: groups.yahoo.com/embos.

This Skip James clip is from the Newport Folk Festival in 1966. James performs his classic song ‘Devil Got My Woman’, which, more recently, was featured prominently in Terry Zwigoff’s film Ghost World. James was one of a host of Mississippi delta performers who traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin, to cut sides for the Paramount label. James cut ‘Devil Got My Woman’ for Paramount in 1931. Yazoo has a good reissue of James’ 1931 recordings: The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James .