Robert Johnson - Classic or Dud?

re: the reason the speed question won't die -- it *is* interesting how much he sounds like son house when slowed down, so i think there's a little something there that convinces people (or at least makes them consider the possibility). but as wald lays out in that article, it really seems unlikely to me.

Sold on that 2-CD thing

Wow

Sounds good to me.

Used to think it was cheesy that Dion DiMucci painted a big picture of Robert Johnson and then had a picture taken of himself sitting in front of it but now I've warmed up to this.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/rip-mack-mccormick/

WBGO celebrating his birthday right now, a few days early, with some "Elgin movements" on the Blues Break.

i know i'm doing exactly what the marketing people want me to do but fuck it:

https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5ec55c9b3020048a55dc4c9b/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/Brother-Robert-Lede.jpg

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/05/exclusive-first-look-at-new-photograph-of-blues-legend-robert-johnson

third photo is a huge deal imo

Aww, new photo

Wait, what, another one?

an exclusive first look, the photograph is presented here as it appears on the cover of Brother Robert: Growing Up With Robert Johnson, Mrs. Anderson’s forthcoming memoir written with Preston Lauterbach, to be published by Hachette on June 9. In an excerpt from the book, Mrs. Anderson, now 94, recounts the day the photograph was taken:

I'm just about to get around to listening to Robert Johnson and I'm afraid a challenging opinion may be brewing.

Listening to the Centennial Collection mentioned upthread, which I somehow didn't know existed until yesterday, and holy fucking shit. Even on Spotify it sounds like a completely different set of recordings than the early 90s version, which I owned on cassette. I need to own this.

it's strange that, for a collection whose major distinction is that the songs have been remastered for unprecedented sonic clarity, they would design the cover with fake sepia and wear / tear (water damage?) + ye olde general store font, like it's a nitty gritty dirt band record or something

lol

I'm just about to get around to listening to Robert Johnson and I'm afraid a challenging opinion may be brewing.

― Wuhan!! Got You All in Check (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, May 21, 2020 8:56 AM

please check back in with this. very curious.

Listening to the Centennial Collection mentioned upthread, which I somehow didn't know existed until yesterday, and holy fucking shit

Has the speed been reduced on that one? I know that the "too fast" theory has been questioned but idk the "Complete Recordings" box set I used to own in the 90s always sounded sped up to me.

xp Just been listening to '26-'29 recordings of much less filtered blues / roots recordings and now I've got to the mid '30s, and the lomaxes have arrived and this astonishing variety of music has turned into capital-B Blues, as filtered through the prism of the taste of a couple of white guys with well-meaning but ultimately racist ideas about noble savages and the like. Lots of this music is good! but also it is much more uniform than before. I worry that RJ's music will be much the same as Kokomo Arnold or Big Bill Broonzy, just with a mythology added which I don't care about. But maybe I'll be wrong, who knows. Will know in a couple of months.

Has the speed been reduced on that one?

It must have been; it seriously sounds like you're sitting across from a guy who's playing an acoustic guitar and singing.

Does sound a lot different but a spot check of "Kind-Hearted Woman Blues" gives the exact same runtime.

Unless of course Spotify just put the same recordings retrofitted into King of the Delta Blues Singers.

I worry that RJ's music will be much the same as Kokomo Arnold or Big Bill Broonzy, just with a mythology added which I don't care about. But maybe I'll be wrong, who knows. Will know in a couple of months.

This is pretty much my experience tbh. As a kid my intro to this world of early blues was skip james, and by the time i got around to robert johnson i couldnt figure out why he was elevated as the great figure of this era & genre (other than he happens to be the guy who many influential 70s rockers were first introduced to). I like the records plenty, but dont find a lot there that I cant also get from a good number of other players around then. Especially if you're already well steeped in the sounds and figures of that era, I'd say dont go in expecting any major revelations.

https://i.imgur.com/IXkWAGS.jpg

Loool!

Like his stuff actually sounds like that

Haha, that it does.

There’s a famous Keith Richards quote about that

I first heard his songs in thee mists of childehood: Cream's cover of "Crossraods," Stones' "Love In Vaon" (credited to "Woody Payne," I think), Zep's "Traveling Riverside Blues," various folkies doing "Ramblin' On My MInd," Howlin' Wolf and a bunch of others doing "Dust My Broom"---then way into the 70s, heard some of his own pre-LP hotel room tracks made into an album, King of the Delta Blues Singers (with the rustic setting of the cover painting, his head down over his guitar, when nobody knew what he looked like): glas I heard all that as an intro, but by the time of the bag 'o' tracks on CDs, I was pretty well acquainted by how box sets and bootlegs could go beyond the conditioned sense of shape,no complaints.
Would like to read this recent book:
Blues legend Robert Johnson has been mythologized as a backwoods loner, his talent the result of selling his soul to the devil. Wrong and wrong again, according to Johnson's younger stepsister, who lives in Amherst, Mass. She tells his true story in Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, a memoir about growing up with her brother she published in June...Amherst is a long way from the Memphis of Mrs. Anderson's childhood, where she grew up in an extended family of siblings, half-siblings and the guitar-playing older stepbrother she called Brother Robert.

"Brother Robert and I used to do the buck dance," Anderson says. "Because you know he could move. People don't know. He didn't just sit and play like they showed him with that caricature."

Anderson's childhood — back then she was Annie Spencer — was steeped in the tunes played by Johnson and others, along with all the popular songs they listened to together on the radio.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/29/950794131/brother-robert-reveals-true-story-of-growing-up-with-blues-legend-robert-johnson

mists ov typos too, sorry!

Does the mystique survive the ease of getting hold of music by the artist in question.
& is there something there when you don't need to invest a lot of time tracking the music down.
I'd guess something, think he wasa bit of a powrful performer though kind of weird to hear something like i think its the 4th side of the double lp king of the Delta Blues singers where he's turned into what sounds like a jukebox and playing a number of different songs in different styles.

Great imagery in his toons anyway

Cos I think there wasa time when the quest was part of the experience. having to track down lps from some place in th ecentre of london or before taht from some place in the Southern states.
Or even having to wait to fgind out what the record you'd ordered more locally was going to be like, but it was going to take you however long to get there.
During which time you could dream about what the contents of this thing you'd been reading about was like.
Kind of different in a time when a lot of things are on youtube or spotify really.

Wuhan!! Got You All in Check (Camaraderie at Arms Length) at 7:00 21 May 20
xp Just been listening to '26-'29 recordings of much less filtered blues / roots recordings and now I've got to the mid '30s, and the lomaxes have arrived and this astonishing variety of music has turned into capital-B Blues, as filtered through the prism of the taste of a couple of white guys with well-meaning but ultimately racist ideas about noble savages and the like. Lots of this music is good! but also it is much more uniform than before. I worry that RJ's music will be much the same as Kokomo Arnold or Big Bill Broonzy, just with a mythology added which I don't care about. But maybe I'll be wrong, who knows. Will know in a couple of months

Zep's "Traveling Riverside Blues,"

This one is convoluted. LZ's "Traveling Riverside Blues" has no musical connection with RJ's "Traveling Riverside Blues" (tho Plant quotes a few lyrics from OTHER RJ songs a couple times), the music seems original to my ears.

Should be noted that "The Lemon Song" borrows lyrics from RJ's "Traveling Riverside Blues" (whose music is inspired by Howling Wolf's "Killing Floor".)

Robert Johnson's music was only quoted by LZ in "Custard Pie" (via RJ's version of "Shake 'Em On Down") & "Trampled Underfoot" ("Terraplane Blues") afaik.

So RJ as part of the um folk process, v good carry on (and be ready to explain and demonstrate in court, as John Fogerty and Charlie Daniels did, successfully enough)

Never found the mythical, supernatural claims made by Clapton et al to be true as far as RJs music, but maybe I had to hear it in the 60s, but he has a lot of good songs. I've read interviews with guys like muddy waters saying RJ scared them when they saw him play, but I wonder sometimes if that's to please rock writers interviewing them. Did read the good anti revisionist Elijah Wald book on RJ a long time ago and have recently been thinking of revisiting it.

I think there might be a bit of the ‘magical negro ‘ concept in claptons reverence for RJ

xxxp What I meant was, I'm so glad I got to hear and hear of him first of all in the 60s and 70s, cresting in that first (?) legit LP, before alll the hype peaked, before the floatation of takes on the CD set, and then the revisionism leading to anti-hype as another form of hype, aside from expectations too high maybe., which is certainly understandable and balanced view than kneejerk clickbait anti-hype of some.

Stevolende mentions the jukebox aspect---and as I put it on the Harry Smith vs. Alan Lomax thread, re Johnson and Jimmie Rodgers as traveling performers (RJ by reputation, JR also as recording artist)
... up-to-date and golden-oldies human jukebox sense: you better be ready with that stuff if the audience, esp. the drinking-dancing one, gets enough of the sensitive folk ballads and originals. Which is why I kept the bit about kid Robert and his sister listening to the radio in the above quote re her memoir.

The Cream version of "Crossroads" (also cut in the studio by Clapton as part of his 'Powerhouse' w/Stevie Winwood singing) is a lyrical mashup of "Crossroads Blues" and "Traveling Riverside Blues".

Dylan writes in Chronicles about getting his mind blown by hearing an advance acetate of King of... around the time of his own debut.

"Crossroads" also works as an old tymey/early bluegrass/folk stomp reimagining by the Turtle Island String Quartet, recorded in 1989.

The one Robert Johnson song that really strikes me as extraordinary is "Preaching Blues", which despite the downcast lyrics seems a lot more high-spirited and rhythmically startling than a lot of his other stuff.

Because John Hammond, no?

That was xpost to Dylan comment

I believe so.

parts of this have been discussed already in this and other threads and i haven't read that elijah wald book which probably has some answers but... taking for granted that so much received mythology about "The Blues" comes from the 60s folk and rock scenes- why was this specific style already, decades earlier, considered the only thing worth documenting from the musicians who have come to be known as bluesmen? (and women but it seems they were written out of the story almost as soon as it became a story) - since we know basically all of them had far more diverse repertoires? it's tragic how such a huge part of their music- and of pop/folk history- has been lost for commercial? or ideological? reasons (did "the blues" sell better than anything else at the time? or was it considered the only authentic black folk style by archivists?)

"Trampled Underfoot" ("Terraplane Blues")

Where is this quoted? I can see more of a connection to Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" tbh.

Left: blues singers were discouraged from recording pop or Tin Pan Alley songs at the time for publishing/copyright reasons. The record companies weren't giving publishing royalties to the blues songwriters, of course, but if their artists were recording published songs, the onus would have been on the companies to pay royalties to the songwriters. They preferred to encourage the blues singers to perform "original" songs, so the paying of royalties was irrelevant (most were just paid flat fees per song recorded).
There may well have been questions about whether the audience for blues records at the time would have bought songs in other styles, as well.

it's tragic how such a huge part of their music- and of pop/folk history- has been lost for commercial? or ideological? reasons (did "the blues" sell better than anything else at the time? or was it considered the only authentic black folk style by archivists?)

without being too presumptuous, I'd suggest you look into the work of the alan and john lomax or this collection of books:
https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Contributors/A/Abbott-Lynn

"They're Red Hot" seems like the one surviving recording of the other side of Johnson's repertoire

One of the worst things about the Lomaxes is how they claimed publishing credit on songs they recorded. Pretty fucked up.

But didnt leadbelly record a lot of non blues songs? I can't be sure if they were written by others or his own, but theres def a lot he recorded that wasnt blues.