Robert Johnson - Classic or Dud?

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.

I guess I don't really think of Leadbelly as a blues musician, he's more folk to me

Obv, not trying to downplay the focus on 'authenticity' by those marketing and selling the blues. As well as a kind of 'purity' that presumably means anything not done sufficiently authentic would get nixed.

*not deemed

I guess for many of these artists you need to weigh up what they recorded vs what they performed or had in their repertoire.

I can't remember the book, driving me nuts but can't place the name right now, but it dealt with a lot of those issues, but also acknowledged that the old bluesmen were canny themselves and they instinctively knew what an audience wanted, so they played up the aspects of their work they knew the white guys from New York wanted, just like when they played a bar where everyone was partying they didn't play the doomy stuff they played fun music

Right, yeah. Same way I'm sure when muddy or whoever is being asked about RJ for the umpteenth time, he prob knows what they want to hear. But... who knows, with a diff audience, how it might have gone. But i tend to think that most of these artists who got a second life in the 60s had already had one career life, and if you're looking for something resembling "authenticity", that would prob the period to look at.

is it the elijah wald book mentioned upthread? the abbott & seroff books on that link also look v informative

There's a book called Fakin it from 10 or 15 years ago that looks into various forms of authenticity probabl includingthe area of lomax and the definition of blues .

Interesting

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/15/music

this was the book I was talking about

https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/francis-davis/the-history-of-the-blues/9780306812965/

Interesting to think that the blues in the Mississippi Delta were actually pretty massively hip at teh time they were being recorded. Since they are seen as this archaic embodiment of ancient soul and history and all like that

folk prob also had something to do with the premium being placed on authenticity as being a guy with his guitar in overalls/sharecropping clothes, rather than urban guys using amps, etc.

not trying to be a jerk here but a lot of these questions about authenticity were simply not relevant/obviated by larger inequities in their time

as are questions of genre, which were much muddier waters (so to speak) in the year before this music had radio airplay

(and if you wanna hear musical diversity, search the Document label catalog - which is blessedly available on streaming services - and just click around)

have been doing a bit of reading lately about how many of those early delta slide guitar guys likely picked up their slide techniques from touring Hawaiian players. there was a massive fad for hawaiian slide guitar music in the late teens, in 1916 it was the #1 selling genre of record, and hawaiian slide players were touring all over the south in those years. a lot of the midcentury scholarship that ties those delta slide techniques back to west african instruments is actually thinner than you'd think, and likely influenced by popular received ideas about the primal, ancient folk-culture Authenticity of those delta blues guys. when in reality there are interviews with a bunch of them where they plainly describe themselves as playing 'hawaiian style' or mention getting the idea from seeing touring hawaiian guitarists, and never refer to things like the diddley-bow or other african folk instruments or styles.

Cool. Did you read the John W. Troutman book?

not yet but i ordered it! he seems like the authority on it

Even today people place great worth in 'pure' black genres, undiluted by outside influence, and following a clear 'untampered with' lineage.

Right just noting not sure what I was saying got across. When I say massively hip I was thinking in terms of trendy cutting edge new thing as opposed to what it came to mean to later often white students.
Guitar was apparently something that popularised thanks to widespread use of Sears mailorder too. & it's portability.

the vinyl box of the RJ centennial collection looks incredible btw. also looks incredibly expensive. supposedly was mastered separately from the CD/digital too.

https://www.discogs.com/Robert-Johnson-The-Complete-Original-Masters-Centennial-Edition/release/3701379

for those of you not on the deepfake thread, this one fucked with me quite a bit

Robert Johnson pic.twitter.com/re2gjgyFit

— SoulstationZebra (@SoulstationZeb2) March 1, 2021

Oh right, the anniversary set illustrating where the word album came from in terms of long playing sets.
Inherited one of those of Voice of the Xtabay fro my grandfather when he died.
Surprsed taht somebody would mass produce a set of Shellac discs when this set came out thoiugh. Obviously not going to be a reproduction of an existing set or is it?
Would anybody have been buying things like thsi in the wake of John Hammond trying to include Johnson in his big production at Carnegie Hall.

The Netflix doc on RJ is worth a look, really just to see his grand kids (cool to see Taj Mahal in it too), and a fresher look at the mythology around him. Might be as it's only 45 mins but its very scant on his actual recording career, more interesting on his life, before the inevitable clips of Clapton, dylan, the stones, etc at the end zzzz

Books, going into particulars while contextualizing in history etc: haven't read Peter Guralnick's Searching For Robert Johnson, but I'm told it's good (first published in 1989, don't know if he's updated it w some of the discoveries sense), I have read his Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues, Country, and Rock 'n' Roll, which provides really good perspective on interrelation of genres and subgenres (he's written a lot more, of course, but those might be most relevant to this discussion).
Also! Leroi Jones's Blues People: Negro Music In White America(1963) really broke ground on deep trans-genre, bluesoid studies:

1 Content
1.1 "The Negro as Non-American: Some Backgrounds"
1.2 "The Negro as Property"
1.3 "African Slaves / American Slaves: Their Music"
1.4 "Afro-Christian Music and Religion"
1.5 "Slave and Post-Slave"
1.6 "Primitive Blues and Primitive Jazz"
1.7 "Classic Blues"
1.8 "The City"
1.9 "Enter the Middle Class"
1.10 "Swing—From Verb to Noun"
1.11 "The Blues Continuum"
1.12 "The Modern Scene"
2 References
And Deep Blues, by Robert Palmer (the one in Insect Trust, not Power Station).
And Charles Keil's Urban Blues, travels with blues in the Southern Migration to Chicago etc. (Paul Oliver's The Story of the Blues is good on this, but he's more limited in taste than these others, like he doesn't approve of Buddy Guy).

https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/mack-mccormick-quest-to-find-real-robert-johnson/

Took me a few hours to read that whilst in the midst of doing some other stuff but well worth it.

that is a wild fuckin' article

It was incredible, even if you went in with a vague sense of where it was going, where it had to go. Reminded me of that one scene in Crumb where his brother shows the sketch book and it’s all one big blurry scrawl line for pages and pages.

That story broke my brane.

Crazy, and ultimately disappointing. I vaguely knew about McCormick and was under the impression that the manuscript would be the definitive record, so it's a shame how much of it is apparently garbage and moreso that McCormick more or less self-destructed. Hopefully the research related to Johnson's late sisters will see the light of day soon - crazy how McCormick ultimately did Johnson a huge disservice by obstructing so much that could've been released earlier.

"“Each of us are connected by an infinite number of threads,” he told me, a thought I considered particularly beautiful."

A beautiful thought. Also eek, can you finish anything with that kind of thinking?

Placing a link to this tl;dr overview review for future reference if needed: https://www.salvationsouth.com/hellhounds-and-phantoms-biography-of-a-phantom-robert-johnson-don-mcleese/

Thanks--the vetted, published manuscript of Book One, The Story of a Phantom, even if somewhat reined in by editorial concerns, seems like it does add to the trove of info, but mainly, I'm glad to know that the Texas box set is coming out this summer---also I still need to check that Henry Thomas album mentioned in Hall's saga.

Henry Thomas rules

Yeah so that and the box and the book and the Smithsonian trove have outlived the twistedness of McCormick, though products of the same--context.

mesmerised by this playlist of someone's estimations of the correct-pitch slowdowns of RJ songs. I think some are a touch *too* slow but not by much. They feel really vivid and plausible to me. I wonder if the record company wanted to make him sound less Black?
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqqAasxT-gbedDMhdI5xG8QqE3gDosJeA

I assume Johnson’s records were aimed at the “race” market so being “too black” may not have been an issue.

incredible Texas Monthly article, almost reminded me of the blues version of the play Proof in its bizarre unfurling.

this also inspired me to listen to Robert Johnson tunes again this week which is never a bad thing.

yeah I agree that the songs on that yt playlist sound a bit too slow. I like the Centennial Collection versions, you can compare them here for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUzl6kVIzZw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp9jeCpMz6g

Elijah Wald, who I trust, says:

"I have no idea why this story seems to surface every few years as if it were news, but we are clearly on another round. The claim was first made back in 2004 that all of Robert Johnson’s recordings were issued at a speed that was about 20% faster than he actually played. This claim reappeared in 2010 in an article published by the UK Guardian newspaper, which added the completely spurious claim that this is a “consensus” among musicologists. So, to start at the beginning: No, it isn’t. The virtually unanimous consensus among experts on prewar blues--musicologists and musicians alike--is roughly what I outline below. Some of Johnson’s tracks may have been issued at slightly inaccurate speeds (for example, recorded at 76 r.p.m. and played back at 78), but it is wildly improbable (bordering on impossible) that all of them have been issued at a single, consistent, wrong speed."

https://elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html

^ indeed, this was linked 11 years ago on this very thread - so "seems to surface every few years" is OTM x 1000

:-)

haha yeah

I mean wouldn't potential speed issues by a byproduct for lots of recordings from that early 20th century time-period, due to the technology of the time? and probably not deliberate at all?

hell, even Billy Joel's true debut album was accidentally recorded at wrong speed so he sounded more chipmunky than in later years, and that was the 60s/70s!

At first I was convinced by the 'sped up' theory, but now I think it's probably wrong. The slowed down recordings can seem more realistic at first, but this is just because it makes him sound closer to a modern singer. Most music was still unamplified in Johnson's time, so the average vocal style would have reflected that. A singer would have naturally sang with a brighter sound, since they would have always been fighting with background noise.
The slowed down recordings have a bassier sound that's closer to the 'hushed' vocal tones of a modern amplified singer, but I think practical considerations would have worked against this style in Johnson's era.

Ah, good point.

hell, even Billy Joel's true debut album was accidentally recorded at wrong speed so he sounded more chipmunky than in later years, and that was the 60s/70s!

― Trout Fishing in America (Neanderthal),

thx for the new dn

whether it's true or false, I strongly prefer the keening, eerie aspect of the non "corrected" (if this is even a correction)

otm. i like it the way it is!