Jimmie Strothers

Jimmie Strothers was a blind banjo and guitar player from Virginia who recorded 15 tracks for Alan Lomax and Harold Spivacke in 1936. Biographical details are sketchy, but Strothers was apparently a medicine show entertainer for a time before going to work in the mines, where an explosion took his eyesight, forcing him to earn a living as a street singer. Things changed even more drastically when he was convicted of murdering his wife with an axe and was sent to the state penitentiary in Lynn, VA, which was where Lomax and Spivacke, working on a field recording project for the Library of Congress, found him. Strothers recorded a total of 13 songs (plus alternate takes of "Jaybird" and "Poontang Little, Poontang Small") over the course of two days on June 13 and June 14, 1936, often with fellow inmate Joe Lee sharing vocal and guitar duties. In what may have been a crowd-pleasing gimmick from the medicine show days, Strothers and Lee even play the same guitar at the same time on "Do, Lord, Remember Me."