#❛ ― audio. / the minstrels will sing this for years to come.

[lordustin-a]

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❛ ― tag. / words.

[thesonicarchitect-blog]

A History of Recording The Blues

(This is my own work and research.)

The achievements of audio recording technology can never be understated. If it had been developed later, in the early 20th century instead of the late 19th, the field hollers that founded the base of the blues, the early minstrels that developed the sound, the pioneers that developed it to its signature voice, would not continue to influence and be heard today.

Attempts at capturing sound began during the Industrial Revolution in the1800s. Pioneering attempts to record were made during the late part of the century, and culminated in the invention of the phonograph, patented by Thomas Edison in 1877. Emile Berliner, who had developed a carbon microphone in 1877, would also develop the easily reproducible disc record in the 1890s, allowing for records to be listened to at home on Edison’s invention. The earliest recording technologies were mechanically based recorders that used a large horn to collect and focus the physical air pressure of the sound waves produced by the source. A sensitive diaphragm would be located at the high point of the cone, connected to an articulated scriber, which would scratch signals of the sound waves onto a recording medium, such as a disc coated with wax, as the changing air pressure moved the diaphragm back and forth. The later development of the vacuum valve amplifier and the electronic microphone by Western Electric made sound available with good quality and volume, and was adopted by major US record labels in 1925. Recording was now a hybrid process- while sound could be captured, amplified and balanced electronically, the actual recording process was still mechanically based, with the signal still being inscribed into a disc, which could then be mass-produced by stamping impressions of the master on polyvinyl plastic disks.  

Further developments by Western Electric improved the fidelity of recorded sounds, increasing the frequency range to between 60 Hz and 6000 Hz, a wider band than before, and allowing “the capture of a fuller, richer and more detailed and balanced sound,” in addition to electronic amplifiers that enabled instruments such as the guitar and the string bass to compete on equal terms with louder instruments, such as horns and percussion. The electric microphones led to a change in the performance style of singers, and in combination with the November 1920 release of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”, brought about the emergence of “race music”. The most popular was Lucille Hegamin, who recorded nine songs in the early 1920s that were released through various labels around the country. While major labels preferred to release ragtime and classical records, smaller labels were quick to capitalize on the craze for the developing genre. In 1921, Black Swan Records was founded by a man called Harry Pace, who had a mission to find and record the best musicians and singers among the African American population, recording vocal quartets and vaudeville acts alike in this search, while boosting the sale of records by artists such as Ethel Waters and Alberta Hunter. Outside of vaudeville and vocal group acts, there were few recordings of African American men at this point in time. Though jazz was growing as a genre, the first jazz records were made largely by white musicians, and blues music had yet to emerge, with only three blues records, by Roberta Dudley and Ruth Lee, released in this time period. By early 1923, the record industry was growing. Bessie Smith was signed to the major label Columbia, where her records reached sales unprecedented before this point. Regarded as one of the greatest singers of the era, and the highest paid black entertainer of her day, she began the public’s initial introduction to the blues.

           "The delta isn't really the Mississippi's delta, which lies several hundred miles farther south...(but) a flat, fertile, leaf shaped plain that stretches from just south of Memphis down to Vicksburg, a distance of around two hundred miles" (Palmer, 1981). The Delta’s early settlers were pioneers moving with their families and slaves into the swamps and forests after the Choctaw tribes ceded their lands east of the Mississippi to the United States. These settlers set up large plantations and were ready for their first crop within a year or so of clearing and draining the land. The dark, rich soil of the Delta plains was perfect for cotton picking, which required hired hands, that in the Southern economy were difficult to come by, particularly after the Civil War, when the economy of the South was in such a state that many farmers and plantation owners could barely afford to buy seeds, let alone labor. And so a deal was struck between the white landowners and the black laborers, explained and examined by Robert Palmer in his book Deep Blues: “The white landowners, through mortgaging their property or through credit connections, scraped together enough cash to provide seed, implements, provisions, and basic shelter for the blacks who were willing to stay on and work. In return, the blacks planted and harvested the crops, under the supervision of a handful of salaried white overseers on the larger plantations and under the watchful eye of the owner himself if the farm was smaller. It was up to the plantation owners to sell each year’s cotton harvest, compute each black family’s fair share of the proceeds, deduct the market value of the food, clothing, and other necessities that had provided to that family, and pay them that difference in cash. In theory, the system was fair enough, but in practice it was heavily weighted against the blacks. The price of cotton on the open market fluctuated wildly. At the end of a good year, a large, hardworking black family might expect to see some cash…At the end of a bad year, and most years seemed bad to some degree, the blacks wound up in debt…Families that stayed on the same plantation year after year found that they sank deeper into debt regardless of how hard they worked…This was the sharecropping system.” (Palmer 1981) Palmer notes similarities to the feudal system of medieval times, and comments that sharecropping “may have been born out of mutual dependency, but it endured by playing on mutual distrust.” (Palmer 1981) Black laborers assumed that they would be exploited by plantation owners, but preferred them to the racism of poor whites, enemies of both the blacks and plantation owners, who while distrusting the black labor, trusted it more than that of the poor whites that fiercely competed amongst themselves for work. Blacks that sought work up North found equally harsh competition with European immigrants for city jobs, though one could still earn enough to enjoy themselves on a Saturday night.

           While overseeing the plantation workers, it was not uncommon for one to hear the workmen keep up a rhythmic song as they went, with one strong voice taking the lead, improvising short, poetic lines, and the others replying with a refrain. These songs would reference local gossip, Biblical stories, or women known to the workers. In June 1901, an archaeologist named Charles Peabody was investigating Indian mounds in the vicinity of several plantations when the field hollers caught his ear. Having had some musical training, Peabody was intrigued enough to jot down his impressions and descriptions, later to be published in the 1903 Journal of American Folk-Lore. These are the earliest descriptions of black music in the Delta, and while the music wasn’t referred to as the blues, it was the root of what would grow to be the genre.

           Most Africans that were taken at the start of the slave trade were from a stretch of West African coast the traders called Senegambia. In the societies that inhabited this area, musicians belonged to a social caste called the griots, who would sing the praises of the community’s powerful and the histories of the people. The griots were both loved and hated, for though they would build considerable reputations, they were thought also to consort with evil spirits, and after death were often left to rot in hollow trees.  Their music relied heavily on driving polyrhythms pounded on percussive instruments and the call and response of their voices, and on the group participation of the village, for their music encouraged participation. The singing would include various tonal effects, from grainy shrieks to hoarse and guttural growls that would later be echoed by the traveling minstrels in the taverns where black laborers, after a hard week’s work on the plantation, would go to carouse and enjoy themselves. While working in the week, the workers chanted and hollered as slaves had done in the fields earlier in the century, their melodies seemingly based on the major scales familiar to European ears, but their voices wavering or flattening the thirds, fifths and sevenths, relying on their own harmonic inclinations. The recordings of artists such as Charley Patton, Son House, and even the later stylings of Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf echo these tendencies.

           While plantations initially had local bands that would play at events hosted on the land, these orchestras were disbanded after the Emancipation to save on money, and many of these musicians took to the roads. Walking from plantation to hamlet, street corner to street corner, the musicians lived on busking on the weekends, when the workers would come into town to let loose and party. Their repertoires consisted mainly of dance tunes, spirituals, and ballads, that would often ramble on to keep the crowds dancing, the entertainers frequently improvising as they went. These compositions were referred to as “jump-ups”, and while they were connected to the blues, to the point one might say the blues was an evolution of jump-ups, they were reserved for rowdy environments of taverns and social events. The musicians roamed far and wide, which is where regional distinctions become useful in examining the evolution and emergence of the blues. In the southwest, most notably in Texas, the music leaned closer to boogie woogie rhythms and elaborate flourishes than it did in the Delta, where intense, gritty melodies were hollered over percussive accompaniment with hypnotic charisma, with slashing guitar lines played with broken-off bottlenecks. It was here in the Delta where the blues would experience the majority of its growth.

           One of the most important musicians of this period was named Charley Patton. Little is known of the man that would later be regarded as “The Father of the Delta Blues”, though his rough, barbaric style of playing would become enormously influential among his contemporaries. In his book, Palmer examines Patton’s recording of “Pony Blues”, a record that “depends for its musical effect on an extraordinary rhythmic tension. The guitar part strongly accents the first beat of each measure, while the vocal is just as strongly accented on beat four. Furthermore, Patton carries the note that begins on each accented fourth beat over into the next measure, producing the polyrhythmic effect of a three-beat measure followed by a five beat measure over the clearly delineated four-beat measures of the guitar part. The rhythmic picture is further complicated by the way both the vocal and guitar parts skillfully weave triplet figures into the piece’s duple-meter flow, and by Patton’s use of off-beat accents, which he bangs out on the body of the guitar. The song’s verses are each approximately thirteen and a half bars in length- three four-bar phrases, each followed by a two bar fill, adding up to a structure that sounds perpetually off-balance and adds yet another dimension of rhythmic complexity. Most of the rhythmic devices Patton uses have counterparts in West African drumming, and he uses them in an African manner, stacking rhythms on top of each other in order to build a dense, layered rhythmic complexity. Blind Lemon Jefferson and other Texas bluesmen who were more or less Patton’s contemporaries employed polyrhythmic effects in a manner that was essentially linear rather than layered; instead of stacking contrasting rhythm patterns they tended to join them end to end…Patton’s command of vocal nuance is equally noteworthy. He handled his voice like an instrument, to alter the stresses of conventional speech for purely musical ends. ” (Palmer, 1981) Underrated by his contemporaries because of his primary focus as an entertainer, this technical brilliance would go unrecognized until years after his death, with bluesmen such as the legendary Son House expressing surprise at his skill. House, a failed preacher and convicted murderer, had played with Patton frequently, and had, along with Tommy Johnson and Willie Brown, been recommended by Patton to Paramount Records, who had recorded Patton the year before. Both Brown and Johnson received more praise in their time than Patton for their technical skill, though the three frequently played together. Brown would provide fast and aggressive melodic lines and rumbling bass patterns while Patton indulged in various performing antics such as throwing his guitar in the air and dancing about. Johnson, not content to serve as a mere sideman, possessed a polished and clean guitar technique, paired with a powerful voice and a sinister reputation grown from stories encouraged by Johnson himself that he had sold his soul to the devil, an image that would be echoed in later years by the most renowned bluesman of the period, Robert Johnson, who bore no documented relation.

           In contrast to Tommy Johnson’s boastful image, Robert Johnson’s myth extended beyond the mere sale of his soul, to stories that he was in league with the Devil himself, and his prowess on the guitar seemed to support the tale. Palmer writes, “He made the instrument sound uncannily like a full band, furnishing a heavy beat with his feet, chording innovative shuffle rhythms, and picking out a high, treble-string lead with his slider, all at the same time. Fellow guitarists would watch him with unabashed, open-mouthed wonder. They were watching the Delta’s first modern bluesman at work.” (Palmer, 1981) The field recording units sent out by competing labels attempting to capitalize in the wake of Bessie Smith’s success had ended some years before Robert Johnson made his first and only recordings in November 1936, due to the onset of the Great Depression. Some units had stayed in Memphis, at the top of the Delta, recording numerous artists and providing a clear picture today of the blues in the 1920s. But by 1936, these units had retreated, and most blues recorded in this period was based in the cities, where Chicago had developed its own unique strain, and jazz was coming into its own. If field representative Ernie Oertle hadn’t taken an interest in Johnson and invited him to San Antonio, Texas to record, Robert Johnson would have been easily lost among the traveling bluesmen of the period. Charley Patton’s former mentor, talent scout H.C. Speir, had recommended Johnson to Oertle, with whom he arranged the sessions, months in advance. Unlike the approach of Patton, House, and others, who had only loosely arranged their recorded songs, Johnson focused on developing tight arrangements with uniting thematic elements. He recorded eight sides during his first session, including later hits “Sweet Home Chicago”, “Terraplane Blues”, and “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom”, facing a corner in a hotel room with the engineers in the adjoining room. Contrary to rumors of shyness, Johnson did this to achieve an acoustic effect, regarded as “corner loading”, a technique that eliminates most of the top and bottom frequencies of the guitar while emphasizing the middle. Though arrested the same night, he was released the next day, and completed the sessions over the next several days. Johnson sat six feet away from each of the adjoining walls of the corner, with the microphone approximately four feet to his right as he played, the cable running into the other room. The most famous of the 32 recordings he made during these sessions would be “Cross Road Blues”, song in which “the guitar rhythm is deliberate and driving, but Johnson repeatedly interrupts it to hammer and bend a single string, so forcefully that the instrument momentarily sounds like an electric guitar. Examined more closely, the guitar accompaniment is a complex, carefully constructed, mercurially shifting succession of two-beat and three-beat figures, and an equally complex, equally mercurial alternation of driving bass riffs and high, bottlenecked lines. The singing is tense, as if Johnson was forcing wind through a throat constricted by fear.” (Palmer 1981). Though the recordings did not sell well in his lifetime, Johnson would be rediscovered in the early 1960s, with artists such as Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Chuck Berry, The Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton taking cues from his style, which had been influenced by Patton, House, Tommy Johnson, Brown, and others. His influence continues to extend to this day, and if not for his recordings, modern music would not be the same today.

If it hadn’t been for the development of the audio recording medium in the 19th century, the sounds of the blues as they were captured in that period of the genre’s growth would have been lost. They would not have influenced the artists of the later stages, the Howlin Wolfs, the Muddy Waters, the blues-rock musicians of the sixties, all of whom have contributed enormously to modern musical culture, and continue the blues influence to this day.

My Citations:

"Recording Technology History: notes revised July 6, 2005, by Steven Schoenherr", San Diego University (archived 2010)

Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Viking, 1981. Print.

"Robert Johnson Recording Set Up and Location." TheDeltaBlues. 2009. Web.

"Chronology of Blues on Record." Chronology of Blues on Record. Web.

"A Brief History of the Blues." A Brief History of the Blues. Web.

"Recording The Blues." All About Blues Music. Web.

http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/recording.technology.history/notes.html

"Depression and Consolidation 1925-1940." History of the Recording Industry. Web.

"THE HISTORY OF SOUND RECORDING." THE HISTORY OF SOUND RECORDING. Web.