Listening to Robert Johnson

Elaine pointed me to a WNYC.org feature about an ongoing debate concerning the proper playback speed for Robert Johnson’s recordings. Some listeners contend that Johnson’s recordings play at least twenty percent too fast, due to an effort to make the recordings sound more exciting or to faulty equipment.

My knowledge of pre-war blues recording makes the first explanation seem merely outlandish: it assumes on the part of recording personnel an imaginative interest in music and production for which we have no other evidence. Skip James’s 1931 Paramount recording sessions, for instance, included these elements of production: mints, whiskey, a company guitar, and a board to enhance the sound of James’s stomping.

As for the second explanation, faulty equipment could well play a part in the sound of Johnson’s recordings. But what equipment? And what part? Johnson recorded in San Antonio in November 1936 and in Dallas in June 1937. Can we assume that the same equipment was in use in both places? There are further variables: Johnson’s guitar may have been tuned higher or lower than standard pitch. (Tuning higher gives more punch.) He may have been using a capo (greater punch still). The impossibility of reverse-engineering the circumstances of recording puts me in mind of the title of David Shapiro’s poem “After a Lost Original”: we have no reference point for knowing what Johnson sounded like when recording other than his recordings.

There is though at least one fairly straightforward way to begin thinking about the question of speed: we know the schedule of several days’ worth of recording sessions that preceded and followed Johnson’s, with Mexican musicians, old-timey musicians, and Western swing groups (all listed in the booklet accompanying the 1990 CD release of Johnson’s recordings). Such recordings as are still available could provide a basis for comparison: slow them down too and find out what they sound like. To make such comparisons would mean thinking of Robert Johnson as one musician among many in a world of makeshift studios, not as a musician whose recordings can be removed from historical context and adjusted to suit the twenty-first-century listener’s sense of what sounds right.

One more consideration: I know of no Johnson associate ever commenting on differences between Johnson’s recordings and his non-studio performances. Indeed, there’s a remarkable moment in The Search for Robert Johnson (dir. Chris Hunt, 1992), when Willie Mae Powell, the “Willie Mae” of Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” hears for the first time the 1937 recording of the song she inspired. Her face opens wide when she hears Johnson sing her name. There’s no question that the voice she is hearing is a familiar one.

And that doesn’t surprise me. To my ears, the drastically slow samples available online are deeply unconvincing. The “Cross Road Blues” played in the WNYC feature (link below) sounds lethargic, lifeless, like someone singing in slow motion. One industrious listener with a Technics turntable has made available very slightly slower versions that may be more convincing. But if they are more convincing, that would be because they sound very much like Johnson’s recordings as we’ve known them.

Further reading and listening
Steady Rollin’ Man (With musical samples)
Slow Down, Robert Johnson! (WNYC)
Robert Johnson revelation tells us to put the brakes on the blues (Guardian)

And earlier today, WNYC linked to a comment on the speed question by Elijah Wald, author of the excellent Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York: Amistad, 2004). I wrote this post before reading what Wald has written.

[The details of Skip James’s 1931 recording sessions may be found in Stephen Calt’s I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (New York: Da Capo, 1994), the best book on blues I’ve read.]

(Thanks, Elaine!)