Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

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.

In the next stage of a low-intensity war of extreme pointlessness, in which telemeister has decided to pit his preference for bottleneck blues against mine for rock the louder, bastard offspring of the delta, I present here, the caddyman guide to musical development.

As told by Mr Roll and Mr Woogie, both of whom have since left the business (though the latter's partner, Mr Boogie still tours the dance halls).

Oncepowntahm there was down in the mouth of Old Man River hisself, down on the very delta, a sound they called the Blues. The Blues done lost his wife, his job, had kicked his dog and his liver was suing him for abuse. Nonetheless, people were mighty impressed by Ole Blue, and one day they up and walked him up to a place called Nworleens where he done come close to killin’ hisself on Comfort, so sad was the boy.

Any road up came the day when Ole Blue opened his sad old eyes and there he was, wandered clean up the ways to Chicago. Lost his bottleneck on the way (mebbe to pay his fare) and then got hisself a job. Poor Olde Blue still was depressed awhiles though, but he hung on in there.

Some years passed, and despite it all, Ole Blue got fat on good corn from the prairie; made a little money and got into business for hisself. Sad enough to report, the market wasn’t what he thought it was, and he took hisself a younger business partner and formed the trading concern of Rhythm and Blues. Thanks to Mr Rhythm they jollified their business a mite and soon the bubblegum and pepsi-cola brigade made ‘em richer than Croesus. Course, Ole Blue was still depressed, so when he got drunk again and lost his stake in the company on a turn of cards to a pair of shysters no one was real surprised.

Ole Blue still plays guitar, and sometimes he picks out the bottleneck and goes back to his roots. People still like him, that nice old man, but they buys their music from his old company, now trading as Rock’n’Roll them fancy shysters who done took Ole Blue an’ his buddy Rhythm fer all they had. Course, they kept the old name fer awhiles, then sold it on as R&B. At least no-one associates Ole Blue with that no more.

Anyways, the world don’t generally like mean folks who do old fellers out a what’s theirs by rights, and some years later, them boys, Rock and Roll got their comeuppance. They was out enjoyin’ their ill-gotten gains when they slipped further off the rails. Mr Rock didn’t know where to draw the line and soon was hanging around with ladies of ill repute named Mary Jane, and mekkin’ loud noises late at night and gettin’ picked up by the law.

Mr Roll left soon after, leaving Mr Rock on his own. Somehow he still keeps on going, getting louder an’ louder. But his voice is goin, now.

Ole Blue’s still down on the delta, mind, and occasionally he meets up with his old friend rhythm an’ they kicks out a tune for the old days.

People still like Ole Blue.

Next: By which I mean "if I can ever be bothered"; how Folk emigrated, got sunburnt and hung-over and became bluegrass. Then the story of how he bought some cows, got depressed and ended up in Tennessee, distilling whiskey he couldn’t drink and slowly becoming country after his liver gave out.

The benefits of leaving home comparatively late to miss the rush hour include the ability to watch BBC breakfast news, which generally includes bits and pieces that don't generally fill the remaining news broadcasts during the day, even on BBC News 24.

This leads me to a piece of information which may be of interest to at least three people on my friends list, in no particular order: telemeister, cybersofa and suitandtieguy.

Having been seriously unwell a couple of years back, Chris Rea has spent the past 18 months or so recuperating, and took the opportunity to record some material without particularly worrying about commercial needs. He just jammed in a studio with a bunch of like-minded musician friends. The upshot is that he went back to his musical roots and has just released a 11 CD (+ 1 DVD) set of blues material, called Blue Guitars. The CDs are split into different blues styles, so:

CD1 BEGINNINGS
CD2 COUNTRY BLUES
CD3 LOUISIANA AND NEW ORLEANS
CD4 ELECTRIC MEMPHIS BLUES
CD5 TEXAS BLUES
CD6 CHICAGO BLUES
CD7 BLUES BALLADS
CD8 GOSPEL SOUL BLUES AND MOTOWN
CD9 CELTIC AND IRISH BLUES
CD10 LATIN BLUES
CD11 60s / 70s
CD12 DVD STONY ROAD

More to the point, it is priced at under £40 to keep it accessible.