Recording Black Culture

In the past week there’s been several interesting blues items that have popped up on the web. I was reading the Sunday New York Times when I came across an interesting piece on folklorist John Work III. Work is nowhere near as famous as fellow folklorist Alan Lomax who won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993 for The Land Where the Blues Began. In blues circles, however, the book and Lomax in general has seen a fair bit of criticism regarding his methods and his rather selective memory. Two years ago Lost Delta Found was published which criticized Lomax for giving short shrift to the work of three black researchers, chiefly the contributions of Work, with whom he made some of his landmark field recordings in the 1940s. The big news in the article was the recent unearthing of some previously unknown acetates Work made in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Spring Fed Records has released these as John Work, III: Recording Black Culture.

I stumbled upon the Digital Library of Appalachia through a posting on a blues newsgroup I’m a member of. To quote the website the thousands of recordings in this online library “are derived from non-commercial sound recordings that document much of Appalachian music’s geographic, ethnic, vocal, and instrumental diversity.” This amazing repository of music including lots of blues (scroll down and click the “blues” link in the second paragraph). There’s many performers I’ve never heard of, which of course is part of the fun, plus many by artists who’ve made commercial recordings like Marvin and Turner Foddrell, Buddy Moss, Rabbit Muse, Archie Edwards, Drink Small, John Jackson, Etta Baker and several others. As the original poster noted, this is the kind of thing the web was made for.

From another newsgroup I occasionally peruse I came upon the following by Andrew Rose: “I am an award-winning music restoration and remastering engineer who normally specialises in historic classical music recordings. Earlier this year I developed a remarkable new process (”XR”) for improving the sound of older recordings and have employed this to great critical success on a number of classical recordings. For the first time I’ve used the process on a non-classical release, bringing out incredible sound quality from a number of recordings by Robert Johnson. You can hear for yourself what I mean by listening to “Ramblin’ On My Mind” which is streamed on our website. The initial release includes 19 of Johnson’s songs, with plans afoot to rework the rest and produce a second release very soon.” Naturally there’s been quite a bit of commenting on this and the entire thread is well worth reading. You can hear the results yourself on Mr. Rose’s website. I’m a natural skeptic but I have to say what I’ve heard sounds pretty remarkable. I plan on buying the CD and I’ll be better able to judge on my home stereo. I’ve never been particularly impressed with so called revolutionary remastering technologies like CEDAR No-Noise which to my ears sounds sterile and artificial. Personally I have no problem with a bit of noise which is why I’ve been partial to the releases on the Yazoo label.