Close enough for tarantellas

A musician is a musician is a musician. Here’s a wonderful example of musical versatility, with Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines in New York and New Jersey:

Playing popular tunes, as well as anything else requested by the crowds, added to their popularity and marketability. And if they didn’t know a particular song they just played the correct tempo for dancing. Shines commented that for waltzes “you could play anything just so long as you played it in cut-time, 3/4 time. You could make up your numbers; you just had to set the right tempo.” This ability to fake their way through any genre provided varied opportunities. While in New York City they were asked to return to Newark to perform at an Italian wedding. As Shines noted, they already knew polkas and Jewish music, and for the wedding they played primarily tarantellas, adapting some of their own songs, a few standards, and some new ones to conform to the traditional 6/8 tarantella rhythm.

Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow, Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019).

Up Jumped the Devil documents a life (not legend) in remarkable detail, even down to the recollections of one of Johnson’s teenage companions in fishing. My only complaint: I’d like more about the music. But that would have to be a different book.

Related posts
A New York Times obituary for Johnson : On slowing down Johnson’s recordings

[The post title is after Jonathan Turley’s witless remark about what’s “close enough for jazz.”]