A blues legend… as you’ve never heard him before

[caddyman]

There’s an article in today’s Times - more precisely in the Times 2 section of the paper that one or two of my friends may find interesting. I am thinking particularly of (in no particular order) telemeister, fractalgeek, rumfuddle, jimfer and possibly keresaspa. I have rooted around on the Times Online website and can’t find the article there to link to, so I am typing a précis of it here. If you disagree with the text, remember that I am only reproducing the salient parts of the article; they’re not my words, but this sounds very interesting to me.

A blues legend… as you’ve never heard him before John Clarke

Robert Johnson is widely considered the greatest of all the prewar blues singers. Before he died at the age of 27 in 1938 … he had cut tracks such as Kind Hearted Woman Blues, Ramblin’ on my Mind, Love in Vain and Hellbound on my Trail, which, through countless reissues, have gone on to influence a whiole generation of rock stars including Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards…

Yet now it appears that none of us is hearing Johnson the way he actually sounded. Blues fans in Japan apparently think Johnson’s recordings are playing too fast. Slow down the recordings by 20% and … you hear the music transformed, “a man whose words are not half-swallowed, garbled or strangled, but clearly delivered, beautifully modulated; whose performances are not fleeting, harried or fragmented, but paced with a sense of space and drama that drew an audience in until people wept as they stood in the street around him”.

If we are to accept this claim, then every one of Johnson’s 12 78rpm records and all of the reissues since have been giving us a distorted view of the man Clapton claims was the world’s greatest blues singer.

…several other 78s recorded in the 1930s have been slowed down … to obtain the correct pitch at which they were cut.

But for blues fans brought up with the Johnson records, this is almost heresy. Why didn’t any of the musicians who knew Johnson … ever mention it, and why should every one of (his) records … have been speeded up?

Samples of the music slowed down can be found here: www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html and you can buy a CD of 24 reduced-speed Johnson tracks.

Comments

[mr-h-r-hughes.livejournal.com]

Could be something in that, likewise it could be wishful thinking (some blues singers had weeeeird voices). I don't believe it would be without precedent though I think a number of quite big Columbia albums in either the 60's or 70's were issued with the recording inadvertently speeded up and it wasn't picked up on until years later and I once heard a DJ swearing blind that he thought something similar may have happened to some Dylan live recordings which he then played slowed down and bingo the weird, strangulated voice on the tracks suddenly became much more Dylan-like.

Who knows, there's probably not anyway of proving it conclusively.

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

Bloody HELL, here we go again. I have too much to say about something like this, so I'll restrict myself to...

* Speeding up a recording at the mastering stage is common practice, to make the thing sound a bit more energetic, and the singer sound "younger". A blatant example was on a Rod Stewart single ten years ago or more, on which the band's backing track was sped up a fourth or fifth (so if it was played in Cmaj, it was now in Fmaj or Gmaj) for Rod to sing over. Several radio DJs popped the single on the turntable, on the air, and thought they'd accidentally switched the speed to 78rpm.

* None of R Johnson's surviving contemporaries (Johnny Shines, David Honeyboy Edwards, Robert Junior Lockwood, Son House) ever said anything about those recordings sounding sped-up, his or their own. It's a lot of bollocks. The poor bugger's music has been messed with quite enough. They should leave him alone.

[itsjustaname.livejournal.com]

Wow. What a mind-stunning idea. Listening to the slowed-down tracks, it's a convincing argument. I definitely prefer the slowed versions (not that I'm setting myself as an arbiter here!). Have ordered the slowed down album.

[fractalgeek.livejournal.com]

I will listen when the bandwidth limit is un-exceeded.

BTW, if you have Ram Jam's "Black Betty" on 45, try it at 33 - the riff sounds amazing.

[suitandtieguy.livejournal.com]

i would love to hear this.

yeah i think this is entirely likely. this is exciting news for people who love actual black music, as opposed to eric clapton.