Topic: Why the lack of love for Blind Lemon

[wreid75]

I have always wondered why there appears to be a lack of love for Blind Lemon.  I know that he has his fans, I am one, but he tends to get left out of discussions for someone who would surely be on the Mount Rushmore of country blues artists.  His life seems to have it all.  Disability check, influential check, people lying about leading him around or playing with him check, unusual and disputed demise check. 

[tinpanallygurl]

well it could be because he su cks 

[Slack]

Who are you talking about Wreid, the general public?

[Mike Billo]

  I've wanted to like him, because he is highly regarded and I've thought of reasons why I should(And they have nothing to do with disabilities or any other biographical data) but I've never been able to warm to his recordings in the slightest.
 Of course, as we know, musical likes and dislikes are the most subjective topic there is, but I've never been able to muster anything stronger than "pretty OK" for anything of his.
  Granted, he's got a lot of "pretty OK's" to his credit, but he's just not my cup of tea.

 

[wreid75]

Mike Billo does a good job of making my point.  The general public might, might have heard of him.  I know that personally I had a lot of other artists before I bought my first Lemon.  Dont get me wrong I know that there are people here that like him but other artists are discussed far more frequently and I think a bit of lack of love is at play.

[wreid75]

and he doesn't suck 

[Prof Scratchy]

Why the lack of love? My guess would be the sound quality of the reissued recordings, taken as they often were, from beat Paramount 78s. If you are prepared to listen through the scratches, Blind Lemon's playing is always top drawer, often miraculous; and his singing is hard to beat, with a pitch that would have carried a fair distance when he sang on the streets. But yes, hard listening at times because of the quality of the originals, presumably recorded down a horn onto the original masters, pressed on inferior materials, then played to death by the original purchasers before being re-recorded and reissued in the present day. Another possible reason for the 'lack of popularity' is that his accompaniments were so complex behind his singing, that very few revivalist players have attempted to play his stuff. (Frankie and Ari are exceptions that spring to mind). So with Blind Lemon you don't get the added 'popularity' that might come from folks touring and performing his music to present day live audiences. Just my opinion.

[bnemerov]

And a very good opinion it is, professor.

Kind of ironic--the most popular country blues recording artist of the 1920s is penalized in his legacy because of that popularity.
When I was overseeing the recorded sound collection at the Center for Popular Music, I noted how beat the BLJ discs were. And not just on one side. Both sides were grey in the grooves.

Had the Pm metal parts survived to the CD era, we might be talking about Leman in a whole different way.
best,
bruce

[wreid75]

I wonder how Patton was able to overcome poor sound quality of his records and the fact that sometimes you cant figure out what the hell he is saying?  I can't think of anyone this side of Robert Johnson that gets more affection than CP.................................which is well deserved I must add.

[Blind Arthur]

His style is indeed by far not as imitable as many others, especially for guitar beginners (for example, Robert, or Muddy), so you are less likely to have your guitar teacher "by accident" introduce you into an example of his songs than, say, Muddy, or Robert, which might then get you hooked.

Plus, as was said, the original quality of his recordings, has made many reissue producers radically erase all the high tones and some have even added background hall to them. This muffling treatment of the originals (not the "Paramount sound") was what put me off a little 25 years ago at first listening, I must admit, and if it had not been for the Document series I might never have discovered him at all. I have only discovered the wealth in his music when the Document Completes came out.

Probably the biggest reason, in my understanding, is: The music of the latter half of the 20th century has developed NOT from the pre war Memphis artists, NOT from the pre-war Texas artists, NOT Atlanta etc but from the Mississippi players going North and founding electric blues bands in Chicago (bands+small combo play). So he is not exactly in a direct tradition line towards rock?n?roll and neither towards the 1960ies blues revival era, thus not covered, he has simply left fewer traces in the music that came after him

[CF]

I think Lemon's singularity & oddness keep him somewhat marginal. His music, to my ears, is the most experimental & 'different' of the early country blues stars. He's an alien 

[bnemerov]

Blind Arthur and cheapfeet have hit on a prime factor, I think.
The lineage to and through rock & roll is through Mississippi, Chicago, (and England), and on.
And, again, I think the reason is found in the rhythmic idiom....Lemon's broken rhythms just didn't work as well as those of the Mississipians who
added drums, bass and piano.
Elmore James did something with Dust my Broom; hard to imagine him doing much with most of Lemon's stuff.
best,
bruce

[jpeters609]

This thread is timely for me, as I have only recently rectified my own "lack" of Blind Lemon Jefferson. I often felt that I talked about Blind Lemon more than I actually listened to him. After picking up the Black Swan collection of his Paramount sides (which I highly recommend) and listening to it at length in recent days, I think Lemon's virtues are also what make him difficult for general listeners to appreciate. His vocal lines are so independent from his guitar parts -- and yet somehow so integrated, I admit with awe -- that it is difficult to think of his recordings in a real melodic sense. Patton, on the other hand (whose diction was challenging and whose records suffer the same noisy sound quality), played guitar in a way that clearly responded to his voice (or vice versa), making for easier listening -- relatively speaking, of course.

What really surprised me were the similarities I heard between Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bo Weavil Jackson, another exceptionally difficult and unsurpassed prewar blues musician whose singing and guitar playing seemed to come from different halves of the brain. 

[eric]

Hmmm...I can't speak for his popularity, although outside of RJ, popularity seems relative in the world of pre-war vernacular music.

For my money, Lemon is brilliant on a couple of levels.  He's a great guitarist, and seems to be able to improvise an infinite number of variations, like a good jazz player.  Check out Big Night Blues for example.  He plays with complete mastery of rhythm.  His lyrics are creative, unique, funny.  The tenor voice that rang like a bell.  His contemporaries that saw him were in awe of his playing.  Wouldn't it have been great to see him some Saturday afternoon busking for the crowds on Deep Ellum?  My two cents.

[tinpanallygurl]

Well the poor sound quality on old 78s will soon be a thing of the past for most records.  More than one school is working with lasers and Dupont chemicals to improve old recordings.  I am a layperson so this is how it was explained by friends of mine that are working on this.  A chemical is used that works kind of like a scratch cover on auto paint jobs where the clear coat is scratched.  For deeper scratches a laser is used that can pull sounds that the tiniest needles cant get to.  Another laser can not only pull the sounds out with less static than the one before but it can differentiate between the instruments and voice and static, putting each sound in its own track.   They are getting so effective that each individual string can sometimes be put in individual tracks which in the future will allow for HD remastering.  If there are two guitar players then there would be ten tracks (unless Big Joe is playing). They can simply delete the tracks with the static sounds.

A recording made it Jack Whites music store using 78 technology from the 30s was scraped with a nail and ran over by a car on gravel and they were able to restore the sound to before.

They can even pull sounds from warped and bubbled recordings.  Here art and science come together.  They have to use a program not unlike autotune to return the pitch to where it likely was before the warping took place, which will eventually contribute to debates on sites like weenie.  So to everyone that didn't take the records nailed to the walls of sheds, we will all be weeping in the future over that.  Just kidding, no one could have known in the 60s that technology would allow records like that to be playable.