Robert Johnson....playin' too fast???

http://www.forcedexposure.com/product_images/YAZ2069.JPEG

Slide or no slide, Patton had no problem reaching above the 14th fret it seems...

V

and who would have recorded their complaints for posterity?

there is little oral or other history that records the response of the audience to blues records of that time... we have to judge their response and enthusiasm mostly by the cycles of pressing and of ads taken out by the record labels. also most of the correspondence of the record labels was lost or destroyed, so we probably wouldn't know if 100s of people wrote in to complain about johnson's records sounding too high-pitched.

that said i'm not sure what i think about this. the slower recordings don't sound especially unnatural to me, and certainly in certain moments they do seem to make johnson's connecting to his forebears more evident than previously, but one could consider that a kind of experiment as opposed to a revelation of the truth.

Well, believe it or not, some of them are still kicking around. After all, Johnson was playing right up until he died in 1938, which wasn't that long ago. Why don't we ask "Honeyboy" Edwards, for example, who played with Johnson back in the day? He's in his 80s now.

Back in the news - heard about in on today's Soundcheck from WNYC, where they talked to Jon Wilde of the Guardian who wrote about it a few weeks ago (available here: Robert Johnson revelation tells us to put the brakes on the blues).

It's an interesting idea, and a fun one to play with regardless of it's relevance.

ha, why is this suddenly back in the news again? has anything been actually figured out since this thread started six (!) years ago? anyway, i listened back then, and wasn't really convinced.

No idea - I guess Jon Wilde just discovered it, and the WNYC crew thought it interesting enough to talk about. I'm not convinced either, but it's a good way to blow an hour flipping back and forth.

oh yeah, i think it's interesting, but also kind of horrifying ... what if they found out that, i don't know, Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives were supposed to be played this slow!

The Tepid Fives would suck.

However, Blind Willie Johnson would be even more apocalyptic, if that's possible.

ha, totally.
i guess i can see robert johnson's record label speeding things up a *bit* to make things a little more peppy, but nothing that radical -- he's pretty much unrecognizable in those clips. why even record the guy if you didn't want someone who sounded like that?

holy fuck, that wilde blog post is infuriatingly terrible. everything is rong in terms of fact. it's like a guy in a bar bullshitting to make a more impressive story.

Jon Wilde has worked for Melody Maker, Blitz, Loaded, Uncut, the Independent, Esquire, Uncut, Elle, Marie Claire, GQ and is a regular contributor to the Mail on Sunday, the Guardian and Quintessentially

unbelievable to me that he has got so much work

agree that the original speculation and the slowed down versions are interesting.

i guess just his thing saying "musicologists agree" is misleading -- has there really been any agreement on this issue?

no. he's basing it on the six year old piece linked above in the OP, and discussions thereof since.

And now, nearly 50 years after Columbia first packaged his work as King of the Delta Blues, we discover that we've been listening to these immortal songs at the wrong speed all along. Either the recordings were accidentally speeded up when first committed to 78, or else they were deliberately speeded up to make them sound more exciting. Whatever, the common consensus among musicologists is that we've been listening to Johnson at least 20% too fast. Numerous bloggers have helpfully slowed down Johnson's best-known work and provided samples so that, for the first time, we can hear Johnson as he intended to be heard.

just bullshit. how does he get to write for the website of a national newspaper? do they pay him?

On one memorable occasion, Peel distinguished himself by playing an entire side of Fripp and Eno's No Pussyfooting backwards.

no one remembers this. it's just a story.

When Kind of Blue was first released on CD it received ecstatic reviews despite the fact that Miles Davis' trumpet was at the wrong speed on half the tracks.

wrong and nonsensical.

in comments he says Only two, possibly three, photos of the great man exist. No capo in sight. He had lovely long fingers though. Beautiful they were. Of course the OG article itself contains and refers to a photo with capo.

how do you get to be a writer of any prominence writing like this? just amazing to me.

http://www.matadorrecords.com/matablog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/harvey_head_big.jpg
ITEM! Famed jazz singer Richard Johnston played his music too fast!

cant wait for the Bad Brains controversy 50 years from now

i take back the "no one remembers this" part, i don't know that's bullshit

There was a doc about Stiff Records on BBC Four recently where somebody said Dave Robinson was convinced that Radio 1 slowed everything down (??!) so he purposely sped up all his acts' songs after they'd been recorded by like 10% so that it would be the "right speed" on the radio..!!

Interestingly enough, the globalgroovers blog posted "correct to his ear" versions on May 21 - right before this Guardian piece. His are not slowed 20% (I don't think even close to it) but they do sound pretty good. The voice in particular.

Is the story that Peel *accidentally* reversed that LP? Because that would be very hard to do, and you'd have to start off by cueing the record in the center.

I believe Peel played it off a reel to reel tape.

Ah, ok.

Also, a 20% change in speed is a lot, has to be more than the examples in that original post.

It is funny though -- I have never been a huge fan of RJ compared to others from that era, and I kinda feel like those records always seemed a little trebly or something & his voice did always seem a little off somehow, unless this is just the power of suggestion (very possible). So on the one hand, it makes some sense. But it's weird that different sessions would be changed in just the same way too.

as someone who's never listened to much Robert Johnson (the mythologizing always put me off), I have to lol at the people upthread saying the slowed-down versions sound "unnatural" when, in fact, they sound about as natural as can be.

- I have never been a huge fan of RJ compared to others from that era, and I kinda feel like those records always seemed a little trebly or something & his voice did always seem a little off somehow, unless this is just the power of suggestion

same here. The slowed down recordings make him seem more like a follower of Patton, more in line with the rest of the tradition. But maybe I'm projecting that. I've always liked the songs more than the performances.

Patton often played in open 'A' instead of the more frequently used Hawaiian open 'G' presumably so the sound would be a bit brighter. I suspect Johnson would have gone for a similar tonal effect rather than the opposite.

Pretty good takedown of this theory: http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html
And hey, it's the dude's 100th birthday or something this year! cue the reissues: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/legendary-bluesman-robert-johnsons-100th-birthday-on-may-8-2011-inspires-two-centennial-sets-116398629.html

There's a lame tribute to Johnson out now by jam band Big Head Todd & the Monsters. They do have Honeyboy Edwards, Hubert Sumlin and others guesting on it, but Todd's singing of Johnson songs is terrible.

cant wait for the Bad Brains controversy 50 years from now

― apparently not the band, but the lifestyle (jjjusten), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 6:50 PM (11 months ago)

hahaha

On one memorable occasion, Peel distinguished himself by playing an entire side of Fripp and Eno's No Pussyfooting backwards.

no one remembers this. it's just a story.

The full story is on the 2CD version of "No Pussyfooting", along with both tracks also played backwards, and one of them played half-speed.

Also, how "exact" were those old 78rpm record players? Those old blues guys might have just adjusted the gramophone's speed to play it the way they thought it should be.

when you slow down bad brains to the correct speed they sound just like toots and the maytals.

haha

Except for the hardcore songs that sound like Sabbath.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwEeyttneKM

Holy shit that sounds exactly like GG Allin!

The Robert Johnson story just showed up on my Facebook feed, 10 years after it was first discussed here, with an October, 2014 date like it's a new theory.

yeah it pops up from time to time. guess it works for the clickbait era. it is a dumb theory.