Tue 4 Dec 2007
Blues Around The Web
Posted by Jeff under Blues News, Delta Blues
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.
December 5th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
John Work III was arguably not that obscure. His book on folk music is available in a Dover edition. But he was acclaimed primarily as a classical musician and choral director and arranger, like his father before him, also a very famous man.
The claim that Lomax’s 1993 memoir doesn’t credit him is also overblown. He is the first person to be thanked in Lomax’s acknowledgments page. The unsubstantiated distortions of Lomax’s record appear to be part of an orchestrated whispering campaign directed at early white members of the union organizing and civil rights movements of the 30s and 40s — people like Lomax and Stetson Kennedy, who broke the power of the Ku Kux Klan in Florida in a series of articles in PM magazine and who, like Lomax, had to leave the country for 10 years to escape red-baiting in the 1950s:
December 5th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Certainly anyone can find fault with a white man attempting to chronicle & record elements of black culture. The Lomax’ may have been racists, liars, perpetrators of falsehoods & all around uncouth characters (& again they may have been none of these). . . which should have no bearing on the final truth that they recorded music & artists that no one else did & left an amazing legacy. This school of historical deconstructionism has to be met with a deeper perspecive & level-headedness. It is a school of too many petty people with a myopic idea of the real value of history, bringing it to the level of the national enquirer.
December 5th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Anyone can find fault with anyone and anyone can sow suspicion. That’s the easy part.
Both Work and the Lomaxes did important work that deserves to be celebrated in a positive, responsible fashion based on an honest assessment of the facts of the historical record.
Making inaccurate assertions and invidious comparisons does John Work no favors, and in reality deeply dishonors his memory.