Topic: Are Robert Johnson's recordings fraudulent?

[lindy]

If you play "Hellhound on My Trail" backwards you'll hear the voice of Louella Parsons urging you to vote for Wendell Wilkie.

Chris:

I was just about to suggest a contest for the best phrase heard on a Robert Johnson record played backwards--at any speed. I was going to start the list with "I got this from Scrapper, I got this from Scrapper . . .," but I like yours better.

Lindy

[repeater]

Yes, clearly a troll -- but good for a few laughs nonetheless.  Maybe he'll move on to say.. Arizona?  

Stuart, I don't think he'll focus on the question -- in fact there is no question, repeater is already convinced of the absolute logic of his position.  Doesn't matter that there is nothing to back it up.

What are you TALKING about.  For the last GD time:  I DON'T HAVE A POSITION.  All I have is a question.  And the answers I'm getting are not convincing, if only for the fact that they're as speculative and unsupported--if not more so--than Gibbens'.

In fact, Gibbens is infinitely more circumspect about his own evidence and conclusions than anyone who's posted on this thread.  And that's a crying shame.

Also, "troll"?  Really?  Because I don't truckle to the majority or suffer hostility lightly?

Good God, such reactionism and mobbing I would not have expected on a site devoted to the country blues.

I say good day!

[repeater]

PS: Here's an interesting--and civil--discussion about the issue:

http://beta.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/2010/jun/09/slow-down-robert-johnson/

[blueshome]

There's fairies at the bottom of our garden............

Still perhaps the folk who made the RJ masters had been kidnapped by aliens and told to do it. It's plausible.........................................

[Parlor Picker]

I'm bored of this thread. 

[Bunker Hill]

I'm bored of this thread. 

I'm experiencing severe deja vu. Was it a number of late 60s Blues Unlimited's which carried lengthy discourses in their letters pages on this very topic? I'm loathe to look.

[dj]

Was it a number of late 60s Blues Unlimited's which carried lengthy discourses in their letters pages on this very topic?

Was the discussion back then that during LP mastering of King Of The Delta Blues Singers the pitches of the original 78s were altered to the nearest standard pitch based on A 440, or that Johnson's entire body of work had been mastered 20% faster when the original 78s were made?  I wasn't aware of the latter argument until the internet age.  It would be interesting if it had surfaced 30+ years ago.   

[Bunker Hill]

Was the discussion back then that during LP mastering of King Of The Delta Blues Singers the pitches of the original 78s were altered to the nearest standard pitch based on A 440, or that Johnson's entire body of work had been mastered 20% faster when the original 78s were made?

That's probably what I'm thinking of, it's all a blur to me.

I do know I found it tedious but folk like me, who were just amazed at what came out of the grooves of any blues LP, were privileged to hear what they heard.  

I'll shut up now.

[uncle bud]

Repeater, you present something as a conspiracy from the start, refuse to accept logical and musical and technical explanations of why the idea of Johnson's recordings deliberately being sped up to the degree suggested is extraordinarily improbable (to be polite), and demand a scientific explanation for something that in all probability never happened. How are people supposed to react? If you think we need a scientific explanation, then why ask, go hire a scientist.

[Slack]

It is such an absurd and silly topic, I'm tempted to purge the whole thing.

[Parlor Picker]

"Purge" - that's a nice word for the day.

Purge, purge...

[Slack]

PP, we'll probably leave it - there were some good points made that blows the theory out of the water and if it ever comes up again (these things take on a life of their on the internets) we can simply point to this thread.  We'll consider closing the thread however.

[dj]

One more comment if I may.  One of the facts put forward to prove that Robert Johnson's recordings were sped up is that almost all his recordings are "significantly" shorter than the "three minute limit" for a 78.  Since I have a smart playlist for every year in iTunes, I sorted by artist and checked 1937, the second year Johnson recorded and the year he recorded the bulk of his "short" songs.  It certainly is true that RJ didn't record a lot of long songs that year.  He's got a few that clock in at less than 2:20, and only one, Travelin' Riverside, that reaches 2:50.  I haven't done the math, but I'd guess he averaged around 2:30 per song.

I wondered if anyone else was so consistently short, so I scrolled through the entire year, looking for artists who seldom or never reached the three minute mark in a song.  Then I went down the list again, only pulling those who had the bulk of their recordings clock in at less than 2:45.  The list is surprisingly long.  Besides Robert Johnson, it includes:

Alex Moore
Black Boy Shine
Oscar Woods
Kitty Gray
Pine Top Burks
Son Becky
Ted Mays
Richart Trice (though he only had 2 songs under his name)
Lonnie Johnson

In sum, recording songs that lasted significantly less than 3 minutes wasn't all that unusual in 1937.  Probably the artist with the most significance to the "RJ is sped up" theory is Lonnie Johnson.  We KNOW what he sounded like, and those short songs weren't sped up.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that some artists would tend towards longer songs, some towards shorter, and some would have a mix of both.  But I never thought abot it until this discussion came up.

I hope this post may prove interesting (in a dull sort of way) to some.  At any rate, it was a fun way to spend my lunch break.    

[lindy]

DJ:

One thing I've noticed over the years is a difference between white performers/groups (including hillbilly, early country, and what we refer to as white country blues) and black country blues performers. I'm talking about recordings in the 1930s, maybe a stray tune from the 1920s. The former tended to end their songs between 2:55 and 3:10 and the latter would stop anywhere from 2:10 to 2:50. This wasn't true for all black performers--black jazz bands tended to have set arrangements that took them right up to the 3:00 mark.

Admittedly my sample is small for the white performers, the Columbia compilation called "White Country Blues". For the black performers I have multiple compilations from Catfish, JSP, etc. etc.

Let it be known that I think this means absolutely nothing, I don't feel any need whatsoever to ponder why it might be true, don't really care. It's one of those small observations I made one day many years back, thinking "Maybe someday I'll be on a truly esoteric game show and this will be worth some prize money, or whatever's behind door #3." But your post dredged it up from my memory.

Lindy

[Stuart]

Slack: Leave the thread open for the time being. Let's all try to focus on the question: Are the recordings we have of RJ accurate reproductions of how he actually sounded at the time he made them?

Gibbens states, "If the theory I?ve advanced is not completely crazy, a possible motive for speeding up Johnson?s records might have been to try to make them more exciting for an age in which the Delta tradition he came out of was already a thing of the past."

His article posts a link to the IGS thread, which I suggest you review. Dave Rubin has some interesting things to say as he actually listened to the 78s.

But it is a theory--he says so himself. What are it's presuppositions? And what do the other statements Gibbens makes presuppose?

Where and what is the objectively verifiable evidence (not possible speculative reasons) that the specific engineers who recorded RJ made the deliberate and conscious decision(s) to have the equipment that recorded RJ's individual songs (either one, some or all of them at both sessions) turn at a slower RPM speed so that the resulting 78s would make RJ's song(s) sound faster and pitched higher than they actually were when he preformed them when they were recorded?