This rare 10" shellac features the enigmatic and highly revered pre-war blues pianist Jesse James.
Side A features "Southern Casey Jones", a driving, rhythmically complex piano blues track driven by powerful barrelhouse left-hand work and expressive vocals.
Side B features his equally legendary "Lonesome Day Blues". Jesse James is highly sought after by blues purists due to his incredibly small recorded output—having only ever cut four tracks in his entire lifetime.
Recording & Release Year
Recorded: June 3, 1936, in Chicago, Illinois (originally captured for Decca Records).
Released (This Pressing): October 1954. This Vocalion V.1037 release represents the first and highly collectible British equivalent press using the original master matrices

Recorded during the tail end of the Great Depression, "Southern Casey Jones" subverts the traditional heroic American railroad folklore of engineer Casey Jones into a gritty commentary on African American survival. James’s lyrics touch heavily on the realities of poverty, referencing riding the train rods ("He'd fix the road so a bum could ride"), the dark humor of collecting insurance payouts from industrial accidents ("Get that money from your Daddy's death"), and the immediate domestic shifts following workplace tragedies. It serves as a stark, auditory window into the economic vulnerability and social displacement of Black workers in the 1930s Jim Crow South and industrial North.

Jesse James vanished from the music industry after this lone 1936 session. The remaining two tracks he recorded that day were unissued at the time and were thought lost for decades until being recovered on modern archival CDs.

Because his identity remains shrouded in history, this record is considered a foundational cornerstone text of early barrelhouse and boogie-woogie blues piano style.

Condition Report
Grade : Excellent (E)
Surface: An exceptionally clean, beautiful copy retaining a deep, radiant original factory gloss. The dark shellac is superbly preserved, displaying very few superficial surface marks and showing zero signs of groove graying, tracking wear, or structural flaws.
Labels: Pristine, beautiful red-and-gold Vocalion labels. The ornate gold typography and accents are incredibly bright, with near-zero spindle trace wear around the center hole.
Audio: Plays magnificently from start to finish with immense acoustic presence and an excellent signal-to-noise ratio. The relentless, driving force of Jesse James's barrelhouse piano piano work and raw, expressive vocals cut through the mix with stunning vintage clarity. Completely free of clicks, skips, or groove damage.
Postage, Packing & Shipping Info
We are highly experienced specialists in handling fragile historic shellac. We never use flat cardboard envelopes or weak pizza boxes.
The Double-Skin System: The 78 is housed in a fresh sleeve and placed securely between multiple layers of thick card stiffeners.
Shock Absorption: This central unit is completely wrapped in multi-layered, shock-absorbing bubble wrap to guard against transit impacts.
The Vault: The entire bundle is suspended inside a heavy-duty, rigid double-skin box using premium void-fill packaging to prevent any shifting during travel.
Your historical treasure will arrive completely safe, carefully packed and promptly dispatched.