Kokomo Arnold
James Arnold was born on a farm near Lovejoy's Station, Georgia — sources split between 1896 and 1901 — and picked up rudimentary guitar from his cousin John Wiggs before drifting north to work as a farmhand in Buffalo and a steelworker in Pittsburgh. He settled in Chicago in 1929 and ran a bootlegging operation through Prohibition; his first record, cut in Memphis as "Gitfiddle Jim" in 1930, went nowhere. Only after Prohibition ended did he take music seriously. Signed to Decca in 1934, he opened his debut session with an adaptation of another man's song and became famous overnight as Kokomo Arnold — left-handed, guitar laid flat across his knees, voice pushed into a rapid-fire falsetto. He cut 88 sides in four years, then quit outright in 1938, disgusted with his contract, and spent thirty years refusing to come back.
Arnold's first Decca session, on September 10, 1934, opened with a song he didn't write. Scrapper Blackwell had cut "Kokomo Blues" in 1928 — title, subject (the town of Kokomo, Indiana), and the strange refrain "eleven light city" all intact. Arnold kept the bones and rebuilt everything around them: as radio historian John Kessler put it, "Scrapper Blackwell came out with it in 1928. In 1934, James Arnold would have more success with it" — enough success that the song renamed him. Decca billed him Kokomo Arnold from that record on.
listen forBlackwell's 1928 "Kokomo Blues" is a single-string picker's record — clean, unhurried, built for a partner (he usually backed pianist Leroy Carr). Arnold's 1934 remake keeps the same words and that odd nickname-refrain but strips the accompaniment down to just his own slide guitar, laid flat across his knees, chasing his voice through a tempo that keeps threatening to outrun itself. Same skeleton, opposite temperament — that gap is the whole story of what Arnold added.
Before any of it — before Chicago, before Decca — there was a cousin in rural Georgia. Three independent tellings of Arnold's life agree on the same spare fact: John Wiggs "taught him the basics of the guitar," full stop, no elaboration, no record of Wiggs himself ever picking up an instrument professionally or on tape. Arnold left for farm and factory work in Buffalo and Pittsburgh soon after, and whatever came next — the left-handed slide, the guitar flat on his lap — he built alone.
listen forThere's no Wiggs recording to play against anything; he never made one. Listen instead to how plain the fundamentals still sound underneath Arnold's showmanship on 1934's "Milk Cow Blues" — steady chord changes, a foundation that never wavers even as his slide runs and his voice go their own erratic way. That bedrock, and only that, is what a cousin's basic lessons in Georgia could plausibly explain; the wilder technique built on top of it is Arnold's own invention, credited to no teacher anywhere in the record.