Blind Jim Howard

James (Blind Jim) Howard (b.6-22-88) was one of the two singers recorded by John and Alan Lomax on their first Kentucky trip in 1933. He lived in the Harlan County community of Dressin.  He mostly played his fiddle to accompany his singing.  He performed for school programs, neighborhood gatherings, and in the early 1940s, on Harlan, Kentucky radio station WHLN. John Lomax remembered him as being “kindly, keenly intelligent, without formal education” and singing “blood-stirring ballads of love and life in the mountains.” Alan Lomax made additional recordings of his singing and playing in 1937.