By any measure, I’m no blues scholar. I’m no connoisseur of the blues. When I first picked up a guitar, my dad taught me the scales. It’s only been in the last month or two, about two decades later, that I’ve started running through them again. So maybe I’m not the best person to write about the blues. But I can’t shake this song, “Haunted House,” and its recent transformation(s) by Suzanne Langille and Loren Connors.
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The available information surrounding “Haunted House” is scant. The song is, at least in part, an amalgam of verses from “Blue Ghost Blues” (1927, 1938) and “Lonesome Ghost Blues” (1927), both songs pre-dating “Haunted House” by decades. Regarding the biography of the songwriter, Alonzo “Lonnie” Johnson, I kindly direct you elsewhere. Without going too far off course, suffice it to say that his influence is still felt. “[His] early recordings are the first guitar recordings that display a single-note soloing style with use of string bending and vibrato,” that is, he originated the guitar solo.
One can make guesses as to the origins of the content of songs, but sometimes one is left, simply, to drift through them, and know the song as it gives itself — again and again, listen after listen. In my opinion, “Haunted House,” in the hands of Langille and Connors, is a gorgeous, and yes, haunting song in all of its recorded iterations. In an email, Suzanne Langille wrote, “I think Lonnie Johnson’s ‘Blue Ghost Blues’ is the greatest love song ever written. It’s about a love — and a need to protect — that transcends death. I believe in it.” She continued, “Loren introduced me to the song, which had been introduced to him by our good friend Robert Crotty, a blues musician from Hamden who passed away not too long ago. It was the truest thing I had ever heard. No other song comes close.” She concluded, “When our band was first coming together, after a couple performances of it, we decided to call our band Haunted House and the song ‘Blue Ghost Blues.’”
Although three of the four recordings of “Haunted House” are performed by the full band, the very first and most “simple” rendition is by Langille and Connors alone, together, at the end of Connor’s 1989 album In Pittsburgh. It may take a few listens to hear the ways in which the voice and guitar sing to each other. The song is slow like a crawl, and is as lonesome as it is lovely. One guitar plays a simple rhythm throughout, as though creating a space in which Langille and Connors can inhabit and explore, both as ghosts, both as lovers. There are moments in this rendition more convincing, and moving, than in most songs I’ve heard: the drawl of time, I’ve been in this haunted house/ six long months today; the solo after the black cat’s sympathy; when Langille sings the grip of the ghost around her, and the spoken words of the dead lover, the whispered “I love you”; the way Connor’s guitar drops, and drops, throughout the song until, by the end, it’s nothing but a pick scratching against the strings.
The next recording of “Haunted House” (hereafter, “Blue Ghost Blues”) would come one decade later, in 1999, on Haunted House’s live album, Up In Flames. The crawl had been stretched out from 6 and a half minutes to 23 minutes. The voice isn’t first heard until well after the eight-minute mark; in the meantime, throughout the opening minutes (if the voice’s entrance can be said to initiate the song) were experimental electric guitar improvisations typical of Connor’s work during the 90’s: minor and foreboding. At the nine-minute mark, nearly everything drops out but Langille’s voice. An underlying, low, discordant, and distorted thump carries it forward, and Connor’s guitar wanders, strangely, around the words being spoken and sung. More forcefully than before, Langille almost yells that the “blue ghost got [her] house surrounded/and [she] can’t get away,” and that’s exactly what this version sounds like: the storm surrounding the house, the house surrounding the storm, the ghost and the lover intertwining in the terror and promise of their mutual alienation and affection. This time around, Connor’s guitar drops into a fury of noise, and the song is carried out, held captive, within it.
The next year, Haunted House would release an EP (collected on Night Through) containing a second live recording of “Blue Ghost Blues.” Although it is much shorter than the version on Up In Flames, it is nonetheless quite similar, only distinguishing itself in intensity: between loud and quiet, between fury and silence, between body and specter. The house-shape is more clearly articulated in the almost empty space Langille’s voice inhabits, and Connor’s guitar soars and swirls around the body, bringing to mind Mr. Lockwood’s encounter in Wuthering Heights: “I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, ‘Let me in – let me in!’”
In 2011, over two decades after the first recording, Haunted House released Blue Ghost Blues, containing their fourth, and latest, recording of “Blue Ghost Blues.” If I may let my own voice fade away for a bit so that you might finally listen for yourself…
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Suzanne concluded her email: “We did yet another version and vibe of it at the Haunted House performance at Roulette this year. I don’t know if the recording came out okay. I’ll find out this weekend.”