An American blues singer and guitarist, noted for his highly emotional style of singing and slide guitar playing.

After years of hostility to secular music as a preacher and church pastor, he turned to blues performance at the age of 25. He quickly developed a unique style by applying the rhythmic drive, vocal power and emotional intensity of his preaching to the newly learned idiom. In a short career interrupted by a spell in Parchman Farm Penitentiary, he developed to the point that Charley Patton, the foremost blues artist of the Mississippi Delta region, invited him to share engagements, and to accompany him to a 1930 recording session for Paramount Records.

Issued at the start of The Great Depression, the records did not sell and did not lead to national recognition. Locally, House remained popular, and in the 1930s, together with Patton's associate, Willie Brown, he was the leading musician in the area, where he was a formative influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters (it is said that he taught both of them to play guitar).