Robert Johnson - Classic or Dud?

But RJ - no. Not yet, anyway. Leaves me cold. My guess is that because his stuff pretty much became the founding template for how the blues element of classic rock worked, and because I don't much like the blues element of classic rock, RJ has been retro-infected with that dislike too. In the same way that my dislike of "Hey Jude" and my dislike of "Hey Jude" Beatleballad 90s rip-offs feed back into one another so that both increase.

Robert Johnson is great & I think he's pretty accessible to the casual blues listener. The Complete Recordings box set contains all of his recordings, and it's cheap - but I find it a bit unlistenable because the alternate versions of the songs are paired next to each other - so you have to listen to each song twice. (Just like the VU box set Disc 1, where All Tomorrow's Parties and Venus in Furs go on forever.)

Asking whether RJ is relevant or interesting as blues to the average listener seems a bit like asking whether or not Beethoven is relevant as a classical artist to the average listener. I guess I can't fathom anyone who claim to have no bias against either genre would say that they dislike either artist.

I guess my point was, are we approaching this as, if you're a beginner, don't listen because you won't get the nuances that made him great, all you'll hear is stereotype or uninspired meandering--or are we saying, intrinsically, we believe RJ is no good, and if you're a beginner, don't bother listening to this because, unless you're a blues afficionado who cares about pointless details, RJ sucks and really is just built out of hype, a la Pet Sounds to many popsters.

As a side note, per classical, I don't mean contemporary art music, so I'm not including composers, great as they may be, who are living or lived into the 20th/21st century.

Or rather "Is the mainstream of Blues music-making and tradition good?" I suppose.

I still maintain that it's an odd question, though, considering how canonical RJ's work is. I mean, if you didn't pick him, among a few others, who would you pick for a beginner? It's like not picking the Beatles if you wanted to initiate a novice into pop music. Sure, you may not like it, but it's undisputable that they are essential as a primer.

Because we're dealing with an "average intelligent listener" with no bias, one way or another, we can safely assume that he or she will either like or dislike RJ, but not necessarily that the opinion is automatically one way or another, since there are people on both sides of the fence. The question, then, is "Is RJ's work of enough substance, is there enough meat there, so that one can extract something to decide a valence on?"

And I think that question is moot considering how valued RJ is. While I find it odd that many people wouldn't like RJ and would like the blues, I don't think it's impossible. I would find it much more difficult to swallow if someone suggested that he was disposable/irrelevant, however. And I think that's what I would wnat to know as a tyro in search of blues clues.

Robert Johnson almost certainly not the best way into 'the blues', or even acoustic country blues - the tortured satanic whatsits that Marcus blahs on abt in 'Mystery Train' are not always easy to hear NOW, 70 odd years after the fact. Also, Johnson cld, even on record, be surprisingly jaunty and straight-forward - 'Red Hot', for example, is little more than a (great) food-related novelty song. I'd say Johnson's songs are best listened to sparingly, not more than one track at a time, or even on a mixtape where his strange, ghostly voice/playing may be thrown into greater relief. A basic knowledge of Johnson's (near) contemporaries - Son House, Skip James, Charley Patton etc. - wld also help the 'novice' to put RJ's work into some kind of context.

why wd people expect to like r.j. if they don't like blues? it's not like he's apart from the genre.

*actually i don't remember any but it's been a while so i'll give g.m. the benefit of the doubt.

$25!!!

yeah, the jsp boxes are k-ugly. but cheap!!

because everyone talks about him as if you WOULD like him even if you didn't like blues!!

i really like robert johnson now, though i didn't when i started this thread.

that's silly talk.

do you mean you'd never put him on your home stereo but you'd enjoy him on someone else's?

(otherwise...trying to figure out why someone would listen to music except for pleasure...)

(since i like pretty much everything ever it isn't usually a problem)

sigh.

FYI: A third photo of Robert Johnson has been discovered.

scroll to bottom of page: http://www.robertjohnsonbluesfoundation.org/

yeah, there was a story in vanity fair (I think) about that pic a little while ago? they've definitely proved it's him?

think this is another grail artifact for boomers/cream fans more than anything.
that site is very um...blueshammer. anybody heard steven 't bear' johnson?

I have not heard him, but just his appearance is enough to keep him on my must-miss list until further notice.

I would stay away from the Complete Recordings. Better fidelity can be found on The King of The Delta Blues Singers remastered from 1998 and Vol 2 from 2004. Also you gain the newly found take on Traveling Riverside Blues. It was found in the Smithsonian. Going this route also gets rid of the problem of having back to back takes to listen to, which I find quite annoying.

listening to robert johnson recordings sped up a bit was kind of heartbreaking

why?

too convincing, stole the magic

do you mean those slowed down versions, or ...?

yes er uh exactly, that's what i thought i said, or was trying to think, or some such. not functioning too well today, for various reasons. but yeah.

that

ha, ok, i was confused ... dunno, i listened to those and didn't really buy it.

but i can see how they might kinda make the released versions sound weird.

i guess i was/am convinced. the recordings sound so natural and "correct" at reduced speed. and a lot more ordinary, too. on first hearing them, my response was immediate: "this is how robert johnson actually sounded." tone & timbre, singing, playing & rhythms all suddenly made so much more sense to me. but rather than encourage me to re-explore his work, it just bummed me out.

not sure why. loss of otherworldliness, a sense that i should have been able to figure it out on my own, something like that.

i think maybe there's another thread where it's discussed, but I just don't get it: how could people who knew and had heard robert johnson play not have said that the records were ridiculously sped up. Someone like Johnny Shines, who traveled/played with Johnson was asked about him a bazillion times in the 60s. Wouldn't he have spoken up about the vast difference between what the records sounded like and what Johnson supposedly *really* sounded like?

sure, that's a reasonable speculative argument, but it's hard for me to effectively marshal the resources of my intellect against the evidence of my senses (especially since my intellect is of the sort to confuse sped up with slowed down). my "belief" in the authenticity/accuracy of those slowed down recordings was immediate and has proven hard to unmake.

yeah, i agree -- the slowed down recordings do *sound* plausible when you hear them, i guess it's just the overall concept I find hard to believe.

http://www.amazon.com/Centennial-Collection-2-CD/dp/B004OFWLO0 appears to sound a lot better than the Complete Recordings - can anyone confirm this is the final bees knees in Robert Johnson collectabilia?

Compared to this latest remaster, the 1990 edition sounds like it was recorded with two tin cans tied together with some really frayed string. I'm no audiophile, but the sound on this -- for late-30s recordings, especially -- is absolutely jaw-dropping.

I have to agree - this sounds great. And also, to answer the very original question, I think Johnson's great. It blew my mind when I first heard him. And in a general sense, blues is the single least-rewarding pre-postpunk musical genres to my ears. Select a random dozen albums from jazz or punk or reggae or soul or classical or "old-timey" non-blues stuff or avant-garde or odd ethnic folk musics and there's about a 100% chance that I'll enjoy those much more than a random selection of blues albums.

i did eventually come around to RJ -- rebought 'king of the delta blues singers' last year and found it fairly mesmerizing. it's an incredibly well-sequenced album. hearing 'stones in my passway' and 'hellhound' back to back is crushing.

aw man, srsly? was fully prepared to ignore this reissue. but if the sound is really all that improved ...

vinyl fake 78 thing is 300 bucks. 1000 copies. someone sent me a link to some sony store that is selling them? 10-inch records made to look like the 78s. that's what i meant by fake. they should have just made 78s.

heard the vinyl comes with a piece of johnson's soul, provided by lucifer himself. so, you know, worth the $$.

xpost: 443 dollars: http://www.myplaydirect.com/robert-johnson/details/5747793

oh, wait, that's because my location is Belgium. Changed to USA, it's only $349.

yeah and the company store has a "deal" where its "only" 300 bucks.

At that price, they'd better be autographed by the man himself.

ok i needed a couple hours, but i've gotten over the fact that i'll probably end up buying this thing. it better sound as good as Tarfumes says! jk. but yeah, i mean, johnson is amazing. anyone who gets really into the blues is, at some point going to get all challopsy and say no man, son house/tommy johnson/charly patton is where it's at man, but once you get over that, Robert Johnson is fucking incredible all over again.

is the whole "these recordings have been playing at the wrong speed" thing addressed in the liner notes of this new thing? would love it if that was laid to rest.

I just a/b'd the 1990 and the 2011 again, and the one thing that immediately struck me is how the new remaster captures the sound of the room. You can really hear the space around Johnson's voice, which just adds to the harrowingness of it all. Unlike many veil-lifting remaster jobs, this one actually adds a level of mystery.

(btw, I just have the 2CD dealie; that vinyl box is borderline offensive)

yeah 2cd version is nicely priced -- $15 at amazon.

The "wrong speed" theory was sort of debunked here, but it's not addressed either way in the liner notes. xp

yeah that wald article seems pretty definitive, but i just read something else that claimed they've been playing at the wrong speed.

Odd. I wonder how this is determined, seeing as how no one really knows how Johnson tuned, meaning, did he tune his guitar to a piano, a tuning fork, or neither?

Tried out some other contemporary (pre rock n roll) stuff and while I did like some tracks by people like Leadbelly or Blind Lemon Jefferson, there's only two artists I love everything by: RJ and Washington Phillips (who couldn't be more different from RJ. Not a great singer or musician (the longer songs are split up in two takes because he keeps speeding up and can't keep up after a while), and he sang these god fearing, honor your parents type lyrics, but he's so incredibly authentic that I'm moved every time.)

I've had the 1990 box since it was released, but getting the Centennial CDs as well now, thanks for the impressions!

re: the reason the speed question won't die -- it *is* interesting how much he sounds like son house when slowed down, so i think there's a little something there that convinces people (or at least makes them consider the possibility). but as wald lays out in that article, it really seems unlikely to me.

Sold on that 2-CD thing

Wow

Sounds good to me.

Used to think it was cheesy that Dion DiMucci painted a big picture of Robert Johnson and then had a picture taken of himself sitting in front of it but now I've warmed up to this.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/rip-mack-mccormick/

WBGO celebrating his birthday right now, a few days early, with some "Elgin movements" on the Blues Break.

i know i'm doing exactly what the marketing people want me to do but fuck it:

https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5ec55c9b3020048a55dc4c9b/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/Brother-Robert-Lede.jpg

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/05/exclusive-first-look-at-new-photograph-of-blues-legend-robert-johnson

third photo is a huge deal imo

Aww, new photo

Wait, what, another one?

an exclusive first look, the photograph is presented here as it appears on the cover of Brother Robert: Growing Up With Robert Johnson, Mrs. Anderson’s forthcoming memoir written with Preston Lauterbach, to be published by Hachette on June 9. In an excerpt from the book, Mrs. Anderson, now 94, recounts the day the photograph was taken:

I'm just about to get around to listening to Robert Johnson and I'm afraid a challenging opinion may be brewing.

Listening to the Centennial Collection mentioned upthread, which I somehow didn't know existed until yesterday, and holy fucking shit. Even on Spotify it sounds like a completely different set of recordings than the early 90s version, which I owned on cassette. I need to own this.

it's strange that, for a collection whose major distinction is that the songs have been remastered for unprecedented sonic clarity, they would design the cover with fake sepia and wear / tear (water damage?) + ye olde general store font, like it's a nitty gritty dirt band record or something

lol

I'm just about to get around to listening to Robert Johnson and I'm afraid a challenging opinion may be brewing.

― Wuhan!! Got You All in Check (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Thursday, May 21, 2020 8:56 AM

please check back in with this. very curious.

Listening to the Centennial Collection mentioned upthread, which I somehow didn't know existed until yesterday, and holy fucking shit

Has the speed been reduced on that one? I know that the "too fast" theory has been questioned but idk the "Complete Recordings" box set I used to own in the 90s always sounded sped up to me.

xp Just been listening to '26-'29 recordings of much less filtered blues / roots recordings and now I've got to the mid '30s, and the lomaxes have arrived and this astonishing variety of music has turned into capital-B Blues, as filtered through the prism of the taste of a couple of white guys with well-meaning but ultimately racist ideas about noble savages and the like. Lots of this music is good! but also it is much more uniform than before. I worry that RJ's music will be much the same as Kokomo Arnold or Big Bill Broonzy, just with a mythology added which I don't care about. But maybe I'll be wrong, who knows. Will know in a couple of months.

Has the speed been reduced on that one?

It must have been; it seriously sounds like you're sitting across from a guy who's playing an acoustic guitar and singing.

Does sound a lot different but a spot check of "Kind-Hearted Woman Blues" gives the exact same runtime.

Unless of course Spotify just put the same recordings retrofitted into King of the Delta Blues Singers.

I worry that RJ's music will be much the same as Kokomo Arnold or Big Bill Broonzy, just with a mythology added which I don't care about. But maybe I'll be wrong, who knows. Will know in a couple of months.

This is pretty much my experience tbh. As a kid my intro to this world of early blues was skip james, and by the time i got around to robert johnson i couldnt figure out why he was elevated as the great figure of this era & genre (other than he happens to be the guy who many influential 70s rockers were first introduced to). I like the records plenty, but dont find a lot there that I cant also get from a good number of other players around then. Especially if you're already well steeped in the sounds and figures of that era, I'd say dont go in expecting any major revelations.

https://i.imgur.com/IXkWAGS.jpg

Loool!

Like his stuff actually sounds like that

Haha, that it does.

There’s a famous Keith Richards quote about that

I first heard his songs in thee mists of childehood: Cream's cover of "Crossraods," Stones' "Love In Vaon" (credited to "Woody Payne," I think), Zep's "Traveling Riverside Blues," various folkies doing "Ramblin' On My MInd," Howlin' Wolf and a bunch of others doing "Dust My Broom"---then way into the 70s, heard some of his own pre-LP hotel room tracks made into an album, King of the Delta Blues Singers (with the rustic setting of the cover painting, his head down over his guitar, when nobody knew what he looked like): glas I heard all that as an intro, but by the time of the bag 'o' tracks on CDs, I was pretty well acquainted by how box sets and bootlegs could go beyond the conditioned sense of shape,no complaints.
Would like to read this recent book:
Blues legend Robert Johnson has been mythologized as a backwoods loner, his talent the result of selling his soul to the devil. Wrong and wrong again, according to Johnson's younger stepsister, who lives in Amherst, Mass. She tells his true story in Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, a memoir about growing up with her brother she published in June...Amherst is a long way from the Memphis of Mrs. Anderson's childhood, where she grew up in an extended family of siblings, half-siblings and the guitar-playing older stepbrother she called Brother Robert.

"Brother Robert and I used to do the buck dance," Anderson says. "Because you know he could move. People don't know. He didn't just sit and play like they showed him with that caricature."

Anderson's childhood — back then she was Annie Spencer — was steeped in the tunes played by Johnson and others, along with all the popular songs they listened to together on the radio.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/29/950794131/brother-robert-reveals-true-story-of-growing-up-with-blues-legend-robert-johnson

mists ov typos too, sorry!

Does the mystique survive the ease of getting hold of music by the artist in question.
& is there something there when you don't need to invest a lot of time tracking the music down.
I'd guess something, think he wasa bit of a powrful performer though kind of weird to hear something like i think its the 4th side of the double lp king of the Delta Blues singers where he's turned into what sounds like a jukebox and playing a number of different songs in different styles.

Great imagery in his toons anyway

Cos I think there wasa time when the quest was part of the experience. having to track down lps from some place in th ecentre of london or before taht from some place in the Southern states.
Or even having to wait to fgind out what the record you'd ordered more locally was going to be like, but it was going to take you however long to get there.
During which time you could dream about what the contents of this thing you'd been reading about was like.
Kind of different in a time when a lot of things are on youtube or spotify really.

Wuhan!! Got You All in Check (Camaraderie at Arms Length) at 7:00 21 May 20
xp Just been listening to '26-'29 recordings of much less filtered blues / roots recordings and now I've got to the mid '30s, and the lomaxes have arrived and this astonishing variety of music has turned into capital-B Blues, as filtered through the prism of the taste of a couple of white guys with well-meaning but ultimately racist ideas about noble savages and the like. Lots of this music is good! but also it is much more uniform than before. I worry that RJ's music will be much the same as Kokomo Arnold or Big Bill Broonzy, just with a mythology added which I don't care about. But maybe I'll be wrong, who knows. Will know in a couple of months

Zep's "Traveling Riverside Blues,"

This one is convoluted. LZ's "Traveling Riverside Blues" has no musical connection with RJ's "Traveling Riverside Blues" (tho Plant quotes a few lyrics from OTHER RJ songs a couple times), the music seems original to my ears.

Should be noted that "The Lemon Song" borrows lyrics from RJ's "Traveling Riverside Blues" (whose music is inspired by Howling Wolf's "Killing Floor".)

Robert Johnson's music was only quoted by LZ in "Custard Pie" (via RJ's version of "Shake 'Em On Down") & "Trampled Underfoot" ("Terraplane Blues") afaik.

So RJ as part of the um folk process, v good carry on (and be ready to explain and demonstrate in court, as John Fogerty and Charlie Daniels did, successfully enough)

Never found the mythical, supernatural claims made by Clapton et al to be true as far as RJs music, but maybe I had to hear it in the 60s, but he has a lot of good songs. I've read interviews with guys like muddy waters saying RJ scared them when they saw him play, but I wonder sometimes if that's to please rock writers interviewing them. Did read the good anti revisionist Elijah Wald book on RJ a long time ago and have recently been thinking of revisiting it.

I think there might be a bit of the ‘magical negro ‘ concept in claptons reverence for RJ

xxxp What I meant was, I'm so glad I got to hear and hear of him first of all in the 60s and 70s, cresting in that first (?) legit LP, before alll the hype peaked, before the floatation of takes on the CD set, and then the revisionism leading to anti-hype as another form of hype, aside from expectations too high maybe., which is certainly understandable and balanced view than kneejerk clickbait anti-hype of some.

Stevolende mentions the jukebox aspect---and as I put it on the Harry Smith vs. Alan Lomax thread, re Johnson and Jimmie Rodgers as traveling performers (RJ by reputation, JR also as recording artist)
... up-to-date and golden-oldies human jukebox sense: you better be ready with that stuff if the audience, esp. the drinking-dancing one, gets enough of the sensitive folk ballads and originals. Which is why I kept the bit about kid Robert and his sister listening to the radio in the above quote re her memoir.

The Cream version of "Crossroads" (also cut in the studio by Clapton as part of his 'Powerhouse' w/Stevie Winwood singing) is a lyrical mashup of "Crossroads Blues" and "Traveling Riverside Blues".

Dylan writes in Chronicles about getting his mind blown by hearing an advance acetate of King of... around the time of his own debut.

"Crossroads" also works as an old tymey/early bluegrass/folk stomp reimagining by the Turtle Island String Quartet, recorded in 1989.

The one Robert Johnson song that really strikes me as extraordinary is "Preaching Blues", which despite the downcast lyrics seems a lot more high-spirited and rhythmically startling than a lot of his other stuff.

Because John Hammond, no?

That was xpost to Dylan comment

I believe so.

parts of this have been discussed already in this and other threads and i haven't read that elijah wald book which probably has some answers but... taking for granted that so much received mythology about "The Blues" comes from the 60s folk and rock scenes- why was this specific style already, decades earlier, considered the only thing worth documenting from the musicians who have come to be known as bluesmen? (and women but it seems they were written out of the story almost as soon as it became a story) - since we know basically all of them had far more diverse repertoires? it's tragic how such a huge part of their music- and of pop/folk history- has been lost for commercial? or ideological? reasons (did "the blues" sell better than anything else at the time? or was it considered the only authentic black folk style by archivists?)

"Trampled Underfoot" ("Terraplane Blues")

Where is this quoted? I can see more of a connection to Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" tbh.

Left: blues singers were discouraged from recording pop or Tin Pan Alley songs at the time for publishing/copyright reasons. The record companies weren't giving publishing royalties to the blues songwriters, of course, but if their artists were recording published songs, the onus would have been on the companies to pay royalties to the songwriters. They preferred to encourage the blues singers to perform "original" songs, so the paying of royalties was irrelevant (most were just paid flat fees per song recorded).
There may well have been questions about whether the audience for blues records at the time would have bought songs in other styles, as well.

it's tragic how such a huge part of their music- and of pop/folk history- has been lost for commercial? or ideological? reasons (did "the blues" sell better than anything else at the time? or was it considered the only authentic black folk style by archivists?)

without being too presumptuous, I'd suggest you look into the work of the alan and john lomax or this collection of books:
https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Contributors/A/Abbott-Lynn

"They're Red Hot" seems like the one surviving recording of the other side of Johnson's repertoire

One of the worst things about the Lomaxes is how they claimed publishing credit on songs they recorded. Pretty fucked up.

But didnt leadbelly record a lot of non blues songs? I can't be sure if they were written by others or his own, but theres def a lot he recorded that wasnt blues.

I guess I don't really think of Leadbelly as a blues musician, he's more folk to me

Obv, not trying to downplay the focus on 'authenticity' by those marketing and selling the blues. As well as a kind of 'purity' that presumably means anything not done sufficiently authentic would get nixed.

*not deemed

I guess for many of these artists you need to weigh up what they recorded vs what they performed or had in their repertoire.

I can't remember the book, driving me nuts but can't place the name right now, but it dealt with a lot of those issues, but also acknowledged that the old bluesmen were canny themselves and they instinctively knew what an audience wanted, so they played up the aspects of their work they knew the white guys from New York wanted, just like when they played a bar where everyone was partying they didn't play the doomy stuff they played fun music

Right, yeah. Same way I'm sure when muddy or whoever is being asked about RJ for the umpteenth time, he prob knows what they want to hear. But... who knows, with a diff audience, how it might have gone. But i tend to think that most of these artists who got a second life in the 60s had already had one career life, and if you're looking for something resembling "authenticity", that would prob the period to look at.

is it the elijah wald book mentioned upthread? the abbott & seroff books on that link also look v informative

There's a book called Fakin it from 10 or 15 years ago that looks into various forms of authenticity probabl includingthe area of lomax and the definition of blues .

Interesting

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/15/music

this was the book I was talking about

https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/francis-davis/the-history-of-the-blues/9780306812965/

Interesting to think that the blues in the Mississippi Delta were actually pretty massively hip at teh time they were being recorded. Since they are seen as this archaic embodiment of ancient soul and history and all like that

folk prob also had something to do with the premium being placed on authenticity as being a guy with his guitar in overalls/sharecropping clothes, rather than urban guys using amps, etc.

not trying to be a jerk here but a lot of these questions about authenticity were simply not relevant/obviated by larger inequities in their time

as are questions of genre, which were much muddier waters (so to speak) in the year before this music had radio airplay

(and if you wanna hear musical diversity, search the Document label catalog - which is blessedly available on streaming services - and just click around)

have been doing a bit of reading lately about how many of those early delta slide guitar guys likely picked up their slide techniques from touring Hawaiian players. there was a massive fad for hawaiian slide guitar music in the late teens, in 1916 it was the #1 selling genre of record, and hawaiian slide players were touring all over the south in those years. a lot of the midcentury scholarship that ties those delta slide techniques back to west african instruments is actually thinner than you'd think, and likely influenced by popular received ideas about the primal, ancient folk-culture Authenticity of those delta blues guys. when in reality there are interviews with a bunch of them where they plainly describe themselves as playing 'hawaiian style' or mention getting the idea from seeing touring hawaiian guitarists, and never refer to things like the diddley-bow or other african folk instruments or styles.

Cool. Did you read the John W. Troutman book?

not yet but i ordered it! he seems like the authority on it

Even today people place great worth in 'pure' black genres, undiluted by outside influence, and following a clear 'untampered with' lineage.

Right just noting not sure what I was saying got across. When I say massively hip I was thinking in terms of trendy cutting edge new thing as opposed to what it came to mean to later often white students.
Guitar was apparently something that popularised thanks to widespread use of Sears mailorder too. & it's portability.

the vinyl box of the RJ centennial collection looks incredible btw. also looks incredibly expensive. supposedly was mastered separately from the CD/digital too.

https://www.discogs.com/Robert-Johnson-The-Complete-Original-Masters-Centennial-Edition/release/3701379

for those of you not on the deepfake thread, this one fucked with me quite a bit

Robert Johnson pic.twitter.com/re2gjgyFit

— SoulstationZebra (@SoulstationZeb2) March 1, 2021

Oh right, the anniversary set illustrating where the word album came from in terms of long playing sets.
Inherited one of those of Voice of the Xtabay fro my grandfather when he died.
Surprsed taht somebody would mass produce a set of Shellac discs when this set came out thoiugh. Obviously not going to be a reproduction of an existing set or is it?
Would anybody have been buying things like thsi in the wake of John Hammond trying to include Johnson in his big production at Carnegie Hall.

The Netflix doc on RJ is worth a look, really just to see his grand kids (cool to see Taj Mahal in it too), and a fresher look at the mythology around him. Might be as it's only 45 mins but its very scant on his actual recording career, more interesting on his life, before the inevitable clips of Clapton, dylan, the stones, etc at the end zzzz

Books, going into particulars while contextualizing in history etc: haven't read Peter Guralnick's Searching For Robert Johnson, but I'm told it's good (first published in 1989, don't know if he's updated it w some of the discoveries sense), I have read his Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues, Country, and Rock 'n' Roll, which provides really good perspective on interrelation of genres and subgenres (he's written a lot more, of course, but those might be most relevant to this discussion).
Also! Leroi Jones's Blues People: Negro Music In White America(1963) really broke ground on deep trans-genre, bluesoid studies:

1 Content
1.1 "The Negro as Non-American: Some Backgrounds"
1.2 "The Negro as Property"
1.3 "African Slaves / American Slaves: Their Music"
1.4 "Afro-Christian Music and Religion"
1.5 "Slave and Post-Slave"
1.6 "Primitive Blues and Primitive Jazz"
1.7 "Classic Blues"
1.8 "The City"
1.9 "Enter the Middle Class"
1.10 "Swing—From Verb to Noun"
1.11 "The Blues Continuum"
1.12 "The Modern Scene"
2 References
And Deep Blues, by Robert Palmer (the one in Insect Trust, not Power Station).
And Charles Keil's Urban Blues, travels with blues in the Southern Migration to Chicago etc. (Paul Oliver's The Story of the Blues is good on this, but he's more limited in taste than these others, like he doesn't approve of Buddy Guy).

https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/mack-mccormick-quest-to-find-real-robert-johnson/

Took me a few hours to read that whilst in the midst of doing some other stuff but well worth it.

that is a wild fuckin' article

It was incredible, even if you went in with a vague sense of where it was going, where it had to go. Reminded me of that one scene in Crumb where his brother shows the sketch book and it’s all one big blurry scrawl line for pages and pages.

That story broke my brane.

Crazy, and ultimately disappointing. I vaguely knew about McCormick and was under the impression that the manuscript would be the definitive record, so it's a shame how much of it is apparently garbage and moreso that McCormick more or less self-destructed. Hopefully the research related to Johnson's late sisters will see the light of day soon - crazy how McCormick ultimately did Johnson a huge disservice by obstructing so much that could've been released earlier.

"“Each of us are connected by an infinite number of threads,” he told me, a thought I considered particularly beautiful."

A beautiful thought. Also eek, can you finish anything with that kind of thinking?

Placing a link to this tl;dr overview review for future reference if needed: https://www.salvationsouth.com/hellhounds-and-phantoms-biography-of-a-phantom-robert-johnson-don-mcleese/

Thanks--the vetted, published manuscript of Book One, The Story of a Phantom, even if somewhat reined in by editorial concerns, seems like it does add to the trove of info, but mainly, I'm glad to know that the Texas box set is coming out this summer---also I still need to check that Henry Thomas album mentioned in Hall's saga.

Henry Thomas rules

Yeah so that and the box and the book and the Smithsonian trove have outlived the twistedness of McCormick, though products of the same--context.

mesmerised by this playlist of someone's estimations of the correct-pitch slowdowns of RJ songs. I think some are a touch *too* slow but not by much. They feel really vivid and plausible to me. I wonder if the record company wanted to make him sound less Black?
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqqAasxT-gbedDMhdI5xG8QqE3gDosJeA

I assume Johnson’s records were aimed at the “race” market so being “too black” may not have been an issue.

incredible Texas Monthly article, almost reminded me of the blues version of the play Proof in its bizarre unfurling.

this also inspired me to listen to Robert Johnson tunes again this week which is never a bad thing.

yeah I agree that the songs on that yt playlist sound a bit too slow. I like the Centennial Collection versions, you can compare them here for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUzl6kVIzZw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp9jeCpMz6g

Elijah Wald, who I trust, says:

"I have no idea why this story seems to surface every few years as if it were news, but we are clearly on another round. The claim was first made back in 2004 that all of Robert Johnson’s recordings were issued at a speed that was about 20% faster than he actually played. This claim reappeared in 2010 in an article published by the UK Guardian newspaper, which added the completely spurious claim that this is a “consensus” among musicologists. So, to start at the beginning: No, it isn’t. The virtually unanimous consensus among experts on prewar blues--musicologists and musicians alike--is roughly what I outline below. Some of Johnson’s tracks may have been issued at slightly inaccurate speeds (for example, recorded at 76 r.p.m. and played back at 78), but it is wildly improbable (bordering on impossible) that all of them have been issued at a single, consistent, wrong speed."

https://elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html

^ indeed, this was linked 11 years ago on this very thread - so "seems to surface every few years" is OTM x 1000

:-)

haha yeah

I mean wouldn't potential speed issues by a byproduct for lots of recordings from that early 20th century time-period, due to the technology of the time? and probably not deliberate at all?

hell, even Billy Joel's true debut album was accidentally recorded at wrong speed so he sounded more chipmunky than in later years, and that was the 60s/70s!

At first I was convinced by the 'sped up' theory, but now I think it's probably wrong. The slowed down recordings can seem more realistic at first, but this is just because it makes him sound closer to a modern singer. Most music was still unamplified in Johnson's time, so the average vocal style would have reflected that. A singer would have naturally sang with a brighter sound, since they would have always been fighting with background noise.
The slowed down recordings have a bassier sound that's closer to the 'hushed' vocal tones of a modern amplified singer, but I think practical considerations would have worked against this style in Johnson's era.

Ah, good point.

hell, even Billy Joel's true debut album was accidentally recorded at wrong speed so he sounded more chipmunky than in later years, and that was the 60s/70s!

― Trout Fishing in America (Neanderthal),

thx for the new dn

whether it's true or false, I strongly prefer the keening, eerie aspect of the non "corrected" (if this is even a correction)

otm. i like it the way it is!

Miles Davis's Kind of Blue - the most famous, best-selling jazz album ever - was out there at the wrong speed for decades.

Nobody ever asks if Robert Johnson wanted his recordings sped up.

DOS never says Excellent Command or File Name

Miles Davis's Kind of Blue - the most famous, best-selling jazz album ever - was out there at the wrong speed for decades.

it definitely was not as radically different as people are suggesting with Robert Johnson

Also, it was widely known at the time: as soon as any trumpeter attempted to play along with the record (as many, many trumpeters did) they realized, ok, either I’m out of tune or the record is.

Believe that is far from the only recording where that was the case, but maybe the most notable. Think in most case things are maybe a perceptible number of cents out of tune (fifteen plus?) whereas the Johnson thing was supposedly a different order of magnitude.

I think there was some old studio trick where they would have players turn down a half step and then speed up the tape for mastering, i guess it was supposed to pop a little more?

Yes, I may have heard of something like that as well.

Kind Of Blue is a mistake though I think, only one side had the wrong speed

I mean wouldn't potential speed issues by a byproduct for lots of recordings from that early 20th century time-period, due to the technology of the time? and probably not deliberate at all?

Correct, as is Wald. Pitch correction is always an issue with music of that vintage.

For example, when Sony had Phil Schaap produce that Louis Armstrong box set of the complete Hot 5's and 7's recordings, one of the things he actually got right was correcting the pitch. He even had the brilliant idea of getting Wynton Marsalis's help and having him confirm those pitches through his own musical ability. When I was reading about this in the liner notes, pitch correction was still a new concept for me. I then found John R. T. Davies's email address and asked him about it since I just bought the collection he mastered for JSP. (This was when he was still responsive to emails - sadly, his health declined soon after.) Great guy, he went through the trouble of explaining to me how any good mastering engineer will ALWAYS check for pitch when mastering 78-era material because that music will rarely be pitch perfect due to the way those records were manufactured. (IIRC back in the day, any good phonograph player would have a switch that allows you to adjust the pitch incrementally when you played back a record.) He always checked, using original sheet music but also through his own abilities as a musician. The one mistake he made was on "Cornet Chop Suey," which is a testament to Louis Armstrong's extraordinary talent. There were two possible keys - Davies pitched it lower because he tried playing the higher pitch, and it was tricky enough that he thought it was more likely Armstrong improvised his solos at the lower pitch. He later realized he was mistaken, but he did note that even Schaap had enough reservations that he included that track in two different keys, just in case Armstrong really did play it at the lower pitch. (Maybe some historian will uncover definitive evidence someday, but it's probably extremely difficult without Armstrong and anyone else from that time still alive to remember for us.)

I get the feeling some people think Johnson's records need to be lower or slower for reasons that have nothing to do with reality - like they're used to hearing blues (probably modern blues from decades later) in lower pitches and slower paces, and the music also becomes easier to play, so for some misguided logic, it MUST be 20% slower, but that's a ridiculous margin of error. I don't think those who remember and knew Johnson's music (not just on record, but in-person) ever made that argument about his records, and I'm sure they would've said something because enough historians and blues enthusiasts have grilled them many times over, playing Johnson's records for them and asking them about what they hear.

Also another major project that was pitch corrected for a box set in the '00s - Charlie Parker's Savoy and Dial recordings. Those date from the '40s whereas Johnson's came from the '30s and those Armstrong records came from the '20s. I only point that out just to emphasize how it's the format, not age, that's a factor.

Great posts, bitw!

For a split second I thought I was in some one thread reading about Ray and Dave Davies.

“Some things are best left unsolved”

“The solo on “You Really Got Me” was actually recorded 20% slower and then sped up.”

“‘Tired of Waiting for You’” was actually recorded by Ray using his Howlin’ Wolf voice.

LOL

Imagine an interviewer meeting Davies and hearing something like Burnett's voice coming out of his mouth. "Oh yeah, we always speed up my vocal track for our records! Didn't you know?"

xxpost Yeah, great posts, thanks bird--reminds me, that Down Beat used to/may still run ads for a tape recorder, with a slider, I think, so you could copy something you wanted to learn, and adjust the pitch accordingly, just to whatever increment sounded right to you---also, I've still got a solid state portable stereo from the late 60s (though now it groaaans when I play it), with 16-33/13-45-78 speeds, which used to be fairly common. Jerry Garcia told an interviewer about learning old-timey and bluegrass: he would turn the record speed down 'til the banjo sounded like bells.

that is, such a record player used to be fairly common.

I want one

lol wait this is just a fancy name for pitch control!

but for 78s you'd need something special

fascinating

The first item you will need is a suitable turntable with variable speed. This is because so many 78s were not recorded at exactly 78rpm: speeds of between 72 and 85 rpm are quite common, with a few higher or lower. Probably the cheapest option is a second-hand variable-speed Goldring-Lenco unit, one of the ‘GL’ series. They are still easy to find and relatively cheap. They always benefit from some basic maintenance, which will include a new idler wheel. (see end for details of suppliers). The biggest problem with the Goldrings is the incidence of rumble. That new idler wheel will help, as will removing, cleaning and re-greasing the main bearing. If you cannot tackle this yourself, many specialist hi-fi shops can do it for you. Other turntables types include the STD, which has a useful digital read-out, but which can be a nightmare to repair, since spares are hard to find. Many other types can be found that will play 78s, but not usually with the required speed variation. Garrard 301/401 as they stand only have something like a 3% variation, although can at some expense be modified by Loricraft to give very wide speed control. It is perhaps worth mentioning that the Goldring and STD turntables are capable of almost infinite speed variation up to 90 rpm and are thus ideal if you play Pathé discs.

https://www.therecordcollector.org/articles/aguidetoplaying7.html

how would you know if you were at the right RPM, just judgment by ear mostly and get as close as makes sense? or would there be a way to figure it out

I think that's why they use the sheet music as a reference?

ahhh makes sense

Remastered, mint test pressings. This is the best he's ever sounded, to my ears. You can buy a CD or download high-quality FLACs.
https://www.pristineclassical.com/products/pabl010

That's just a 10-song sampling. The same label also has the rest of his works here, but I didn't download these because I don't think they're from the same sources.
https://www.pristineclassical.com/collections/artist-robert-johnson/products/pabl001
https://www.pristineclassical.com/collections/artist-robert-johnson/products/pabl002

lol almost sounds too good tbh

oh man this sounds tremendous. I bought the LP everybody had when I was young & then had the complete on tape, the one that came out in the 90s, like a lot of people I spent a whole lotta time with those. Love hearing the noise cleaned up, it's just great -- you can hear the quality of his singing so much better

There's actually a lot of debate about these remasters among audiophiles. Someone in this forum writes that "anything that reverse engineers is fabricated and thus not the original recording anymore. It is a synthetic re-creation based on elements of the original recording."

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/pristine-audios-robert-johnson-transfers-of-test-pressings-made-from-original-metal-parts.1014579/

However they were achieved, I just found these versions to sound so dramatically different that it was worth mentioning.

always enjoy a furrowed-brow debate about what the most authentic reproduction of a reproduction is

For me, the difference between the 1990s box set and the "Centennial Collection" 2CD set that came out in 2011 was huge, and frankly good enough. Listening to the samples on the website was a little uncanny; I didn't believe what I was hearing.

Pristine Classical has a good reputation in the classical community for their remastering.

This description puts me off; it's not remastering, it's sonic Photoshop:

XR remastering was developed by Andrew Rose in early 2007 and has been in continual development and refinement ever since. Its aim is to go much further than simply “cleaning up” old recordings, using cutting edge technology and innovative, proven techniques to get as close as possible to the original sound heard in the concert hall or recording studio before it was corrupted by early recording equipment.

It starts with what has been termed elsewhere “tonal balancing”. Most of the microphones used to make historic recordings (and even more so the horns used in acoustic recordings) had very uneven frequency responses. We use advanced computer analysis of the tonal content of these recordings to “reverse engineer” and counter the impact of those tonal distortions. This results in a much more natural and realistic sounding recording, limited only by the other constraints of the original source (frequency range, noise levels etc.).

But this is just the beginning. We were the first to release recordings where wow and flutter – the inconsistencies of pitch common to all analogue playback systems, but particularly prevalent in older recordings – had been fixed using a ground-breaking German computer solution called “Capstan”. Its pricing means we remain one of the few companies working in this field to use it and its impact, particularly in piano music, can be immense.

Another innovation has been the use of a technique called convolution reverberation. A large number of older recordings were made in especially “dry” acoustics to combat the noisy, low-quality reproduction systems of the time. Yet we hear music in concert halls specially designed for acoustics that complement and enhance the sound of the musicians playing there. Convolution (a complex mathematical procedure) allows us to effectively “place” our recordings in some of the finest acoustic spaces in the world – renowned concert halls, opera houses, churches and cathedrals. When sensitively and delicately applied this can add an extra dimension and sense of sonic reality to even the oldest recordings. It’s a far cry from using echo or digital reverberation to try and hide problems in recordings!

There are many other steps involved in making an XR recording – it soon gets very complex, and it takes a lot of painstaking work to produce each of our releases. Over the years XR remastering has become increasingly recognised as producing some of the finest audio restorations around.

yeah but the older recordings are, to borrow your metaphor, pictures taken with cheap cameras under suboptimal lighting. you photoshop that to try to see what the photographer saw.

I think the question is whether the ends justify the means. We don't know what Robert Johnson really sounded like in that hotel room, or how the Hot Fives sounded in the Okeh recording studio in Chicago. The primitive recording equipment of the day tried its best to capture it, but could not do it justice. This still sounds pretty natural to me, whether it's been "Photoshopped" or not. It's not like it's fake stereo or some crap like that. I guess what I'm asking is, would Robert Johnson or his producer, Don Law, object to the sound on the Pristine remasters? We'll never know, but I doubt it.

Pfft. This guy is brazenly stealing Robert Parker's whole engineering shtick on vintage material from the same era, right down to his exact reasoning for doing so. Nothing new, nothing revelatory and every bit as dubious as it's always been. To be fair, it's a fun novelty, but in the way, say, Clint Eastwood's Bird tries to re-create a live performance that can only be known on a scratchy 78 recording - there's no shaking the fact that it's at best a simulation and at worst a forgery, which is how it sounds the more you listen to it.

yeah but the older recordings are, to borrow your metaphor, pictures taken with cheap cameras under suboptimal lighting. you photoshop that to try to see what the photographer saw.

I think what it boils down to for me is the recording, flaws and all, is the work of art. Nobody now living saw/heard Robert Johnson play live. And modern recording technology didn't exist back then. So you listen to the recordings that they were able to make, to the best of their abilities at the time, and you accept that the content is inextricable from the medium. I think cleaning up the original source material as best you can is not only permissible, it's desirable. But this goes beyond that into what amounts to colorization. You shouldn't colorize black and white movies because the cinematographers knew they were shooting in black and white and they operated accordingly. And you shouldn't add echo and reverb to make it sound like Robert Johnson was performing in a concert hall, when he was sitting in a hotel room, tucked into a corner, facing a single microphone.

There's actually a lot of debate about these remasters among audiophiles. Someone in this forum writes that "anything that reverse engineers is fabricated and thus not the original recording anymore. It is a synthetic re-creation based on elements of the original recording."

― TO BE A JAZZ SINGER YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO SCAT (Jazzbo)

authenticity narratives are super interesting to me. hmmm. let me kinda try to break down my feelings in text.

if something can be argued as being a new creative work, or at least a derivative creative work, my only real concern is whether that work was ethically sourced, if you will. if pristine classical was saying this _wasn't_ robert johnson's work, but their own original work, that would be objectionable (remember when somebody tried to do that with the beatles' records? applied some processing filter to it and claimed it as an 'original work' not subject to the beatles' copyright? very stupid.) if someone stole other peoples' copyrighted creative work and used it to feed a computer program to "enhance" robert johnson's work, that would be objectionable (some people don't find this ethically objectionable, but i do). neither seems to be the case.

so i'm inclined to judge it on its merits. the tradition of duophonic being seen as "fake stereo". my problem with duophonic isn't that it's fake, it's that it's not good sounding stereo. a stereo remix of "good vibrations", including the vocals, is just as "fake", i'd say, but it fucking sounds great.

doing an a/b with the 2011 recording, it sounds different i guess. idk. i'm a lo-fi head. i got an aesthetic preference for stuff that sounds bad. most people prefer things that sound good to things that sound bad, though. legit.

Pfft. This guy is brazenly stealing Robert Parker's whole engineering shtick on vintage material from the same era, right down to his exact reasoning for doing so.
Robert Parker was best known for creating fake, digital stereo reproductions of old mono recordings. Not the same at all.

most people prefer things that sound good to things that sound bad, though.

Yeah, but what's "good" in this case? "I want this mono recording of a dude playing an acoustic guitar in 1937 to have the rich, full soundstage of a Pink Floyd album from 1973" is not "good" to my mind.

seems a bit like colorizing a B&W film. would the filmmakers have used color if they could have? i bet in most cases, absolutely. but it still sucks to colorize a B&W film. idk about this at all.

Robert Parker was best known for creating fake, digital stereo reproductions of old mono recordings. Not the same at all.

I realize he called his label "Jazz Classics in Digital Stereo" (so logically it would make sense it would be exactly that - fake, digital stereo), but I had the Muggsy Spanier one for a while, and if you read the booklet, it has some notes that could very well be in all of his releases. Basically, the relevant part repeats a lot of what's bolded upthread - people listened to jazz in dance halls and concert halls, where the music reverberated off the walls! They didn't sound "dead" like they do on those old '78s - nobody draped carpets and blankets on the walls like they did in recording studios - so I'm putting back the ambience that you would have rightfully heard if you were there!

I'm sure the methods aren't the same, but that's exactly what they're both arguing for in print and you hear it too - far more than any modest stereo spread, the attempt at making this "live" sound from a dry sounding record is what stands out the most on Parker's CD's.

"I want this mono recording of a dude playing an acoustic guitar in 1937 to have the rich, full soundstage of a Pink Floyd album from 1973" is not "good" to my mind.
I certainly don't think the Pristine release makes Robert Johnson sound anything like that! If they sounded unnatural to me, I wouldn't be interested. You can’t tell me which versions are more “authentic” any more than I can, because none of us were in that room.

You shouldn't colorize black and white movies because the cinematographers knew they were shooting in black and white and they operated accordingly. And you shouldn't add echo and reverb to make it sound like Robert Johnson was performing in a concert hall, when he was sitting in a hotel room, tucked into a corner, facing a single microphone.

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson)

ok, if we're gonna dig into the weeds on this, i'm gonna start talking about doctor who

when they put out the doctor who DVDs, they would do "special editions" with new CGI effects. i think the CGI effects look like shit. i mean they literally replaced a shot of a wobbly hubcap with a CGI spaceship and i kind of prefer the hubcap. do i think they "shouldn't" have done it? well, for one, no, just because i like it doesn't mean they shouldn't have done it. for two, who fucking cares what i think? like what makes me the arbiter of what is and isn't a defacement of _real_ doctor who?

there are _so many_ examples of this from the show's history:

* replacing footage on the program as broadcast with newly created special CGI special effects
* colorizing a story originally recorded and broadcast in black and white and editing it to 45 minutes to try and gain a wider audience for that story
* manually colorizing an episode originally recorded and broadcast in color, but which no longer exists in color
* colorizing a story originally recorded and broadcast in color, using color metadata not visible in the recording, but which is still stored as part of a subcarrier signal
* colorizing a story originally recorded and broadcast in color by combining the color signal from a low-quality off-air color recording with the image from a high-quality black and white film print of the story
* using computerized techniques on a 25 fps film print of a program originally recorded and broadcast at 50 fps to give it the "look" of a 50 fps broadcast
* creating a new animated version of a "missing" story using the existing audio and creating new animated footage to let viewers see how it might have looked upon broadcast
* doing the above in black and white
* doing the above in colour
* replacing a recording by the beatles which appeared in the original soundtrack of a story with another recording, for copyright reasons
* cutting part of an episode because it contained a copyrighted performance by the beatles
* obscuring part of the audio of an episode because of its use of a highly offensive racial slur
* re-creating a few seconds of audio missing from all known recordings of the episode, including a recording of the original broadcast, by splicing together recordings of the actor saying the words in the missing line
* re-creating the video of 12 seconds of footage present on the original broadcast, but censored for overseas broadcast, and hence not part of the existing video recording

which of these "shouldn't" the copyright holders of the program have done? which of these are objectionable alterations to the original program?

personally, in every case, i'm in favor of what the people in question (often the erstwhile Restoration Team) did with these recordings. i have _personal aesthetic objections_ to the results of some of this work - some of the animations are pretty bad - but in no case do i think it's justified to say that the alterations to the original recording media _shouldn't_ have been made.

Wait, what just happened? tl;dr sorry. Nutshell: how does this stack up next to the latest Can reissues?

This whole debate goes way beyond primitive recordings from the 1930s and earlier. You’ll find countless number of rock & roll and R&B tracks from the 1950s and early ’60s on Spotify and Apple Music that sound dramatically different. They’re the same recordings, but one might be mono, the other stereo (or fake stereo). One may have a more solid bass sound, the other tinny. One may sound clear as a bell, the other muddy as the Mississippi. One might sound “dead,” another may have had excessive reverb added.
My favorite version of Little Richard’s “Rip it Up,” for example, sounds dead — no echo or reverb whatsoever — but it sounds immediate and slaps like crazy. The dead studio sound is actually pretty common for a lot of New Orleans-style rock & roll and R&B from the ’50s. That version sounds the most natural to me, but the much more common version you’ll find has reverb. Which one is the “right” one? Even the original label, Specialty, has released different-sounding versions. IDK, I just know what I like.

Did Elijah Wald weigh in yet?

A band is recording an album for my label at the beginning of March, and I'm considering putting out two versions: if you buy the CD (or the digital files from Bandcamp), you'll get stereo, but if you listen to it on a streaming service, it'll be in mono.

Not too sure about this one. It sounds a bit off and overdone to an 'uncanny valley' sort of degree.

It sounds like what it is, an attempt to turn Robert Johnson's recordings into something they are not.
They will always sound like they were done in the 1930s, because that is when they were done.
The convolution reverb is a strange idea. A musician doesn't perform the same way in a hotel room as a concert hall. I don't think you can just throw some convolution on and be done with it. And not sure if there is a need either.

The original recordings are distorted, sure. But in trying to reverse that, they are merely distorting the recordings a second time.

I actually do think you can say that the original 78 recordings are probably closer to what happened on the day. Think of it this way, the 78s add one layer of distortion, whereas these add a second layer of distortion. I think it is statistically very improbable that the second distortion brings us closer to what Robert Johnson would have sounded like in the room.

Not to come off as too much of a purist, I think the important point for me is that this one doesn't quite come off. I feel like other remasters have done a more tasteful job of cleaning up just the right amount without trying to make the recordings into something they're not.

A visual accompaniment to these new releases:

https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/sRzqqriSclw94h8ynDPV/sRzqqriSclw94h8ynDPV--1--5kczy.jpg
https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/qENHSP3bux9JsDCntYGs/qENHSP3bux9JsDCntYGs--1--otozz.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/zMMwiz5.jpeg
https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/JEVsJki59SYk7Dd14IJf/JEVsJki59SYk7Dd14IJf--1--kmtbm.jpg
https://cdn.openart.ai/stable_diffusion/af5110c27f02bc5a1e470ebb1bcb4db198554916_2000x2000.webp

Need one of RJ & Bonamassa shaking hands.

Lol

Dion DiMucci has a big Robert Johnson portrait he painted himself hanging prominently in his living room iirc

https://www.facebook.com/OfficialDion/photos/a.281029604934/403804609934/?type=3

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

It’s a far cry from using echo or digital reverberation to try and hide problems in recordings!

lol. some things never change.

this is an interesting project

thought I would hate it but to me it's ultimately more like Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old than George Lucas' special editions

Those samples sound pretty awful, the noise swells and shapes with the vocal so I feel like I've got sand in my ear and someone's riding the fader to mute the background.

tfw RJ comes on at the bar

What bars are you chilling at

Crossroads Bar & Grill

tfw RJ comes on at the bar but it’s Daniel-san playing live on stage but it’s actually Steve Vai

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/popular-music/article/robert-johnson-and-spectral-timbre-what-we-hear-what-we-construct/7B6943CD691551F06F1EF1D4CBCC9F49

Wow---gonna take careful re-reads, but/and it's pretty clear right off--thanks for posting. And some of those links!