Robert Johnson - Classic or Dud?

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!

Miles Davis's Kind of Blue - the most famous, best-selling jazz album ever - was out there at the wrong speed for decades.

Nobody ever asks if Robert Johnson wanted his recordings sped up.

DOS never says Excellent Command or File Name

Miles Davis's Kind of Blue - the most famous, best-selling jazz album ever - was out there at the wrong speed for decades.

it definitely was not as radically different as people are suggesting with Robert Johnson

Also, it was widely known at the time: as soon as any trumpeter attempted to play along with the record (as many, many trumpeters did) they realized, ok, either I’m out of tune or the record is.

Believe that is far from the only recording where that was the case, but maybe the most notable. Think in most case things are maybe a perceptible number of cents out of tune (fifteen plus?) whereas the Johnson thing was supposedly a different order of magnitude.

I think there was some old studio trick where they would have players turn down a half step and then speed up the tape for mastering, i guess it was supposed to pop a little more?

Yes, I may have heard of something like that as well.

Kind Of Blue is a mistake though I think, only one side had the wrong speed

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?

Correct, as is Wald. Pitch correction is always an issue with music of that vintage.

For example, when Sony had Phil Schaap produce that Louis Armstrong box set of the complete Hot 5's and 7's recordings, one of the things he actually got right was correcting the pitch. He even had the brilliant idea of getting Wynton Marsalis's help and having him confirm those pitches through his own musical ability. When I was reading about this in the liner notes, pitch correction was still a new concept for me. I then found John R. T. Davies's email address and asked him about it since I just bought the collection he mastered for JSP. (This was when he was still responsive to emails - sadly, his health declined soon after.) Great guy, he went through the trouble of explaining to me how any good mastering engineer will ALWAYS check for pitch when mastering 78-era material because that music will rarely be pitch perfect due to the way those records were manufactured. (IIRC back in the day, any good phonograph player would have a switch that allows you to adjust the pitch incrementally when you played back a record.) He always checked, using original sheet music but also through his own abilities as a musician. The one mistake he made was on "Cornet Chop Suey," which is a testament to Louis Armstrong's extraordinary talent. There were two possible keys - Davies pitched it lower because he tried playing the higher pitch, and it was tricky enough that he thought it was more likely Armstrong improvised his solos at the lower pitch. He later realized he was mistaken, but he did note that even Schaap had enough reservations that he included that track in two different keys, just in case Armstrong really did play it at the lower pitch. (Maybe some historian will uncover definitive evidence someday, but it's probably extremely difficult without Armstrong and anyone else from that time still alive to remember for us.)

I get the feeling some people think Johnson's records need to be lower or slower for reasons that have nothing to do with reality - like they're used to hearing blues (probably modern blues from decades later) in lower pitches and slower paces, and the music also becomes easier to play, so for some misguided logic, it MUST be 20% slower, but that's a ridiculous margin of error. I don't think those who remember and knew Johnson's music (not just on record, but in-person) ever made that argument about his records, and I'm sure they would've said something because enough historians and blues enthusiasts have grilled them many times over, playing Johnson's records for them and asking them about what they hear.

Also another major project that was pitch corrected for a box set in the '00s - Charlie Parker's Savoy and Dial recordings. Those date from the '40s whereas Johnson's came from the '30s and those Armstrong records came from the '20s. I only point that out just to emphasize how it's the format, not age, that's a factor.