Topic: If there was one song....

[waxwing]

I still don't see much value beyond that of a beginner needing to organize a lot of names, to which they still don't associate the recordings, as an aid towards remembering them, or perhaps when addressing an audience with little deep knowledge of the music. Once someone "knows" a player and his or her music, one can make one's own determination as to what you think their influences were. Labeling them with some regionalism is not a short cut to knowing their music. Quoting some book, which of course is designed to appeal to the broadest range of readers, specifically including newbies, only shows what association that writer makes given their own criteria. I doubt we at Weenie have the capability to decide decisively what any of these regional definitions really defines, every writer seems to have their own set, so I sure hope we're not going to try.

But the idea that one song could "sum up" the entire panoply and variety of music from any of these regions, large or small, over many years is, well, ludicrous. Sorry.

We seem to be getting deep into discussion about discussion here, the dreaded "metadiscussion". I'm sorry if my original post, designed to do just the opposite, started us on that path. Suffice to say, there have been no other lists of exemplary songs posted since Ghosty's TIC offering, so I'm going to conclude that most here agree with my statement that we don't really care to do so? Knowing the individuals by their own music and being able to discover the influences of other individual players is far more rewarding and, as has been pointed out, can be obscured by reliance on generalizations.

Wax

[uncle bud]

I think the answer is yes and no.

There is a little value in categorizing. If I refer to a St. Louis sound -- that one can hear to varying degrees in Charley Jordan, Henry Spaulding, Henry Townsend, Peetie Wheatstraw, J.D. Short -- some people will know what I'm talking about, and yes, compilations can be organized around them.

I'd never have thought myself to include Lonnie Johnson in either that group or as representative of an alternative St. Louis sound. But then if you listen to the musicians on Document's St. Louis 1927-33 DOCD-5181, you don't hear much of that "St. Louis sound", aside from a couple tracks where the above musicians show up. You do actually hear some Lonnie Johnson style, and not just because he's involved on some tracks. Bert "Snake Root" Hatton sings like Lonnie, and Jimmy Strange even moreso. 

St. Louis pianists shake this view up even more.

So, my first categorization of those familiar St. Louis guitarists (and Peetie) doesn't really stand up to an in depth look at St. Louis. Yet it is still useful as a shorthand. "Sounds like those St. Louis guys..." etc. Most here will know what I mean by that.

 

[Stuart]

There's the subtext of the non-subtext to my (hopefully not deceptively) simple question. In other words, I'm with Johnm and John C on this one. Since it's ultimately about the music--listening to and/or playing it, why not go straight to and focus on the music? It can be fun to talk about similarities and differences between players and/or regions, but it's not for everyone. If one would rather just listen to and/or play music, that's fine as well.

[doctorpep]

The more I listen to "Country Blues", the more I realize how often Memphis Minnie would play in an urban area (and Henry Townsend, too). I also realize that the urbane Leroy Carr sang verses that the "crudest" of the backwoods Country Bluesmen sang. I also see the lyrics to "In The Pines/Black Girl" pop up in Leadbelly and Bascom Lamar Lunsford songs, and I hear 80 million versions of "John Henry", "Frankie & Johnny" and "Betty & Dupree" done by every black and white rural musician to have ever lived. The other day, I was listening to a black Rhythm & Blues artist do a lyric-for-lyric version of a Bo Weavil Jackson song; I'm sorry I can't remember who it was that was doing the song.

Robert Johnson was a "Polka Hound", Johnny Shines enjoyed working with David Bromberg (a then-young Jewish man who had a completely different life than Johnny did) as opposed to recording alone. John Hurt thought that Uncle Dave Macon was white.

Countless black and white musicians from the '20s and '30s seem to have known "Get Along Home, Cindy" or "Whoop 'Em Up, Cindy" or "Cindy". Blind Lemon Jefferson was inspired by Mexican Flamenco guitarists.

I could go on and on, but these are just some reasons why classifying types of Blues is really silly. All I know is that there is Gutbucket Blues (which doesn't mean the music has to be simple, but just heartfelt and thought-provoking) and there is bastardized cheezy, Blues-Rock stuff.

[dj]

When this thread started, I didn't think it would be very interesting.  But it's morphed into something that's made me think a lot in the last couple of days.

Why are "all the books" organized by region?  My original glib answer was that they have to be organized somehow, and by region is an easy and obvious organizational choice.  But after literally hours of thought (you know you're really a weenie when... you think about stuff like this for hours), it dawned on me that the reason everything is organized by region is that the first books on the blues, and the first LP releases, were organized that way.  And why was that?  Because the authors and compilers thought of country blues as folk music, and the study of folk music is concerned with regional styles, whether the region in question is a village, a city, a county, a state, a multi-state grouping, or a country.  Once the regional concept had been used several times by folklorists, it became set in stone - the unconscious way that most people who thought about country blues used to organize their thoughts on the subject.  Which brings up the question: are there other and better ways ot organize a presentation of the subject?

This realization led to another: You never see the "classic" female blues singers organized by region.  Why?  Because everyone assumes that they weren't folk artists, but rather pop singers working in a more universal style.  (You never hear Bing Crosby referred to as an exponent of the "Washington state school of crooning", do you?)  A lot of the issues of regional style that have been mentioned in this thread are due to the fact that the people who we consider "country blues singers" include some people who could very much be considered representatives of a folk tradition (Mississippi John Hurt Mance Lipscomb, and Washington Phillips would be good examples), some people who were polished professional entertainers who recorded in a "folk blues" style because that's what the record companies thought would sell best (Lonnie Johnson, Blind Blake, Papa Charlie Jackson, Leroy Carr, Georgia White), and a lot of people who fall somewhere in the middle.  A lot of the confusion about "regional styles" comes from the fact that just about any region you can name includes the whole gamut of folk, semi-professional and professional musicians (for want of better terms).  In other words, there were some musicians recorded who were primarily on the folk or semi-pro side of things, who were minimally influenced by recordings at the time when they were recorded, and whose work does fit into some "regional style".  The styles these musicians represent are interesting, at least to me, in that they may be able to give us information of the origin and spread of styles and techniques.  But there are other people, the "non-folk" musicians, who just can't be crammed into that regional style thing, and who only muddy the waters when they are.

If you've made it this far in a very long post, thanks for your patience!       

[Stuart]

This may be a modern, American manifestation of a human phenomenon. As some of you know, in my other life, I do Chinese Language and Lit. The earliest (we're talking B.C.E.) anthology of Chinese poetry, The Book of Songs, (the assumption is that they were sung, or at least chanted) has it's first fifteen sections arranged by region. There are even a few comments about regional styles by others who commented on the texts. And the earliest biographies (again B.C.E.) almost always contain info about a person's native place. I think that it just might be the way us humans think about about the identity of a person, a musician, or the music they make. So maybe the question should be, "Why shouldn't regional or geographical information be given when fleshing out the background of a musician or music?"

Our own Johnm has just released a couple of instructional DVDs, "Texas Blues Guitar" and "Memphis Blues Guitar." I'll let John speak for himself about this, but I think that the identity aspect is obvious. Place as well as time are important.

[jed]

...manifestation of a human phenomenon.

...might be the way us humans think about about the identity of a person, a musician, or the music they make. So maybe the question should be, "Why shouldn't regional or geographical information be given when fleshing out the background of a musician or music?"

That nail must feel complete right now, because Stuart hit it squarely on its head.  The harder new things are to quantify, the more we try to quantify them.  As we become more familiar with them, we can rely less on their wrappers (the 'where/who/when') and more on their - forgive the modern term - content (the 'what,' and the 'why' if we're curious). 

When we go further and deeper into the 'what,' its details - rhythms, picking, voicings, phrasings, can become endlessly interesting; musical discoveries quickly begin to overshadow the applied labels; it's the "Aha - so that's where he got this or that" syndrome. 

In one sense, it's a technical icing on the cake that is the music; in another, it helps us link one artist's spirit to another.  Once the emotional impact of piece is digested and familiar, this 'why' is part of the enjoyment.  I like it. 

Cheers,
Jed

[Alexei McDonald]

Why are "all the books" organized by region?  My original glib answer was that they have to be organized somehow, and by region is an easy and obvious organizational choice.  But after literally hours of thought (you know you're really a weenie when... you think about stuff like this for hours), it dawned on me that the reason everything is organized by region is that the first books on the blues, and the first LP releases, were organized that way.  And why was that?  Because the authors and compilers thought of country blues as folk music, and the study of folk music is concerned with regional styles, whether the region in question is a village, a city, a county, a state, a multi-state grouping, or a country.

That's not quite it, I think.   You need to go one step further along this line of thought and ask why the ethnomusicologists did things this way.   Very few of them had the same kind of resources as the Lomaxes and so great trips ranging over the whole country were not possible, which in turn led to studies of folk song and song collecting expeditions being more or less focussed on relatively small areas geographically and/or upon very limited topics (such as collecting all the versions of Barbara Allen or John Henry you came across to the exclusion of all other material).

In other words, the early authors and compilers approached the subject as they would any other academic discipline and so this is the prism through which we are often tempted to view and categorise older musical styles.   I don't think it's a problem as long as we bear in mind that we're dealing with a construct and that things were really a lot more complex than we are sometimes led to believe.

[Blind Dawg]

I still don't see much value beyond that of a beginner needing to organize a lot of names, to which they still don't associate the recordings, as an aid towards remembering them, or perhaps when addressing an audience with little deep knowledge of the music. Once someone "knows" a player and his or her music, one can make one's own determination as to what you think their influences were. Labeling them with some regionalism is not a short cut to knowing their music. Quoting some book, which of course is designed to appeal to the broadest range of readers, specifically including newbies, only shows what association that writer makes given their own criteria. I doubt we at Weenie have the capability to decide decisively what any of these regional definitions really defines, every writer seems to have their own set, so I sure hope we're not going to try.

But the idea that one song could "sum up" the entire panoply and variety of music from any of these regions, large or small, over many years is, well, ludicrous. Sorry.

We seem to be getting deep into discussion about discussion here, the dreaded "metadiscussion". I'm sorry if my original post, designed to do just the opposite, started us on that path. Suffice to say, there have been no other lists of exemplary songs posted since Ghosty's TIC offering, so I'm going to conclude that most here agree with my statement that we don't really care to do so? Knowing the individuals by their own music and being able to discover the influences of other individual players is far more rewarding and, as has been pointed out, can be obscured by reliance on generalizations.

Wax

Let's say I came on here and stated talking about them Mississippi Delta blues and mentioned Peetie Wheatstraw, Sleepy John Estes, Ramblin' Thomas, Bessie Smith and Papa Charley Jackson? How soon before somebody..."those weren't Delta players?" Now if I were talking Son House, Tommy Johnson, Ishman Bracey, Bukka White and Charley Patton no problem....right? See how it goes?

  A single tune trying to represent a brand of music? Obviously it's very subjective. That's why I asked

[Rivers]

Complex or simple? Human nature wants to compartmentalize, sort, parse, categorize, relate. Music, as it's produced in the present, is what it is. As time advances and history kicks-in the major groups and styles emerge, and you've also got a bunch of crossovers. That's a discernible fact. So we learn to hold two or more diverging facts at the same time.

Which leads to the study of outliers and exceptions since it can throw some light. A list of "The greatest [examples of style X]" is a bit too one dimensional and makes orphans out of all the people who were outside the defining regional style.

50 years from now will a website devoted to early British R&B be assigning the Stones to "The Dartford style"? Probably. And it's absurd of course. I like the quote that pops up on here now and again, "People say, 'Skip James was a Delta musician'. That's like saying Chopin was a southern German piano player"

[Rivers]

John Hurt thought that Uncle Dave Macon was white

Which just goes to prove John Hurt wasn't color blind.

[jed]

What?!? MJH wasn't color-blind?

[samjessin]

I think the fellow who wasn't color blind was Uncle Dave himself.
 

[Mr.OMuck]

 I'm too enamored of taxonomy to give it up entirely, and it does have its uses, trivial as they may ultimately be. Plus those categories, as employed by Sam Charters, Jed Pearl and Richard Nevins and others is how I learned much of this music. I like JohnM's idea of Blake being an urban musician though. That IS a useful category it seems to me and one that comfortably accommodates Big Bill, Memphis Minnie, maybe the whole Bluebird roster.
I imagine that from an anthropologists perspective, being able to ascribe local traits from which its possible to work backwards towards identifying African sources would be an important tool. It could also be useful in reconstructing population movement through stylistic influences, though the advent of recordings and radio makes that a somewhat more difficult project. A friend of mine in Maine constructed a map of depleted fish species' historical migratory patterns, pre population collapse, through interviewing old fishermen, however so you never know.

[Stuart]

...I imagine that from an anthropologists perspective, being able to ascribe local traits from which its possible to work backwards towards identifying African sources would be an important tool. It could also be useful in reconstructing population movement through stylistic influences, though the advent of recordings and radio makes that a somewhat more difficult project...

A while back we mentioned Gerhard Kubik's, "Bourdon, Blue Notes, and Pentatonism in the Blues: An Africanist Perspective," which is in David Evans' Ramblin' On My Mind: New Perspectives on the Blues. You might give it a look. Here's the WC link:

http://weeniecampbell.com/yabbse/index.php?amp;Itemid=128&topic=4970.0

This thread began with a discussion re: whether or not there are distinguishing features of the various "regional sounds." I'm still trying to think through how this would ultimately be determined--if it were indeed possible. One of these years...