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Welcome to the
“Steady Rollin’ Man” page. The ideas here, along with
some other interesting ones, can also be found in The
Nightingales Code: a poetic study of Bob Dylan.
There are
links to the musical examples, as fairly low-resolution MP3s, at the bottom
of the page.
There is a
CD containing 24 tracks of slowed-down Robert Johnson, which you can buy for:
- £6.00 (including P&P) - UK
- £7.50 (including P&P) - Europe
- £8.50 (including P&P) - Rest of World
Click on the cover below to order:
Steady
Rollin Man
A Revolutionary
Critique of Robert Johnson
An abiding mystery
about Robert Johnson is the rpm conundrum. Is it true, as a Japanese musician
told me it is widely held to be in Japan, that Robert Johnsons records
play way too fast? Should he actually sound much more like his great mentor,
Son House?
One guitar tutorial
book, Country Blues Bottleneck Guitar by James Ferguson and Richard
Gellis (Walter Kane Publications, New York, 1976), proposes that Robert
Johnsons Walking Blues is played with the guitar tuned
to G (i.e. so that the open strings play a chord of G major D-G-D-G-B-D,
from bass to treble) and with a capo on the fourth fret. This means that
the opening phrase, played an octave higher than the open strings
i.e. twelve frets down the neck from the capo has to be played
at the sixteenth fret. On the kind of guitar that has the neck joining
the body at the fourteenth fret like the one that Johnson is holding
in one of the long-sought-after photographs of him, reproduced above right
this means manoeuvring the slide above the fingerboard a good inch
beyond the end of the neck. On a guitar with the neck-body join at the
twelfth fret, as in the photograph reproduced above left, it means stretching
even further a most uncomfortable position that would make it hard
to play accurately.
There are four other
Johnson tunes in the book. One, I Believe Ill Dust My Broom,
is given in an arrangement by Taj Mahal; the rest follow the original
recordings, and all of these are supposed to be capoed at the third fret.
The only other piece in the book to be played with a capo on the third
is by the Georgia-born Tampa Red. The pieces by the other Mississippi
Delta slide players in the book Bukka White, Bobby Grant, Mississippi
Fred McDowell are all played open or, in one case, with a capo
on the first fret.
Now if we turn to
the song on which Robert Johnsons Walking Blues is based,
namely My Black Mama by Son House [example
1], we find that on his recording of it in 1930, he plays in open
G, capo on the first. What happens, then, if we slow Johnsons record
until it is in the same key as the song its modelled on? [example
2] And what if we bring the rest of his records down likewise,
so that those pieces that sound as though theyre capoed on the third
would actually be played with open strings? This means lowering the key
by three semitones, a quarter of an octave.
If my maths and physics
are correct (if !), since a recording playing at half its original
speed will be exactly one octave lower in pitch (the frequencies of the
soundwaves being halved), then a reduction of quarter of an octave would
involve slowing the recordings by quarter of 50 per cent, i.e. 12.5 per
cent. So, by my calculation, these slowed down recordings run at 87.5
per cent of the speed at which they normally play, the equivalent of a
33-1/3-rpm record playing at approximately 29rpm.
But I wasn’t
working by numbers, only by ear and guitar, and here’s the method
(bear in mind that I did this in the last century). I played my King
of the Delta Blues Singers LPs (the 1980s reissue, with both the original
volumes in a single, budget package) with the pitch control on the turntable
turned as low as it would go, and taped them on a variable speed cassette
deck with the pitch control turned as high as it would go (which would
give an effect of further slowing when the tape was played, or copied,
at standard speed). A copy at the desired pitch could then be made by
dubbing from this first cassette onto a second, with adjustments to the
first deck’s pitch control.
And after all that
fiddling what came out of the speakers? For me, a music transformed. The
sound of a man, first of all: this dark-toned voice would no longer lend
credence to the youth of seventeen or eighteen that Don Law, the only
person to record him, thought he might be. Now, especially in the dip
of his voice at the end of a line, we can hear the follower of Son House,
and the precursor of Muddy Waters. Hear him pronounce his name in Kind
Hearted Woman Blues [example
3] now he sounds like Mr Johnson, a man whose
words are not half-swallowed, garbled or strangled, but clearly delivered,
beautifully modulated; whose performances are not fleeting, harried or
fragmented, but paced with the sense of space and drama that drew an audience
in until people wept as they stood in the street around him [example
4]. (The wordless last lines of Love in Vain [example
5], in this slowed form, are the work of one of the most heartbreaking
and delicate of blues singers.) This is a Steady Rolling Man, whose tempos
and tonalities are much like those of other Delta bluesmen. Full-speed
Johnson always struck me as a disembodied sound befitting his wraith-like
persona, the reticent, drifting youth, barely more than a boy, that Don
Law spoke of: the Rimbaud of the blues [example
6]. Johnson slowed down sounds to me like the person in the recently
discovered studio portrait: a big-boned man, self-assured and worldly-wise
[example 7].
It works for me, but listen for yourself.
As for why and how
it could have come about, Ive no idea. But if all the recordings
should really play at 87.5 per cent of their current speed, that wouldnt
make them exceptionally long. The sixteen cuts of the first Robert Johnson
LP, King of the Delta Blues Singers, have an average duration of
two minutes 38 seconds. This is noticeably shorter than, for example,
the sixteen cuts on an LP collection of Leroy Carrs blues from 1932
to 1934, which average just over three minutes; or of the twelve cuts
on a collection of Blind Willie McTells blues from 1935. On the
other hand, it matches, almost to the second, the average duration of
sixteen tracks recorded in May 1937 by Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Joe
Williams a month before poor Bobs last session.
But this is up-tempo, good-time blues, as suggested by the title of this
Williamson/Williams LP Throw a Boogie Woogie. Two of the
songs in this compilation became rocking Blues Boom standards in the 1960s
Good Morning School Girl and Please Dont
Go.
Similarly, on a two-CD
set that collects all of the 42 masters cut by the rugged Delta musician
Tommy McClennan between 1939 and 1942, the average length is only a wee
bit longer than Johnsons, around two minutes fifty but McClennan
is another purveyor of the boogie, a much simpler artist than our Robert
chile. When he was recommended for his first recording session by
the duke of pre-war Chicago blues, Big Bill Broonzy, it was surely because,
despite the rude country style, McClennans ever-driving beat and
bragging personality could still cut it with the juke-joint dancers
something that Love In Vain and Come On In My Kitchen
werent likely to do.
If the theory Ive
advanced is not completely crazy, a possible motive for speeding up Johnsons
records might have been to try to make them more exciting for an age in
which the Delta tradition he came out of was already a thing of the past.
Perhaps there are
scientific tests that could be applied to the sound that might establish
its original frequencies to the qualities of the voice, for example,
like the vibrato, which at full speed sounds to me like an alien nasal
flutter but at slower speeds like a proper musical ornament; or perhaps
to the decay time of the guitar notes.
Robert Johnsons
records occupy a place of unique esteem in the heritage of 20th-century
popular music. In addition to their innate artistic excellence, they exerted
a huge influence on the subsequent development of the blues, and on the
other forms, like rock, that drew on the blues. They are universally acclaimed
by critics: Greil Marcus, for example, the dean of rock writers, while
he might not be so blunt as to tag the first Robert Johnson LP as The
Greatest Album Of All Time, certainly regards it as An Album Than Which
None Better Has Been Made. This cultural prestige is reflected in the
continuing demand for Johnsons music: the 1990 CD box-set of The
Complete Recordings, with an expected sale of about twenty thousand,
sold half a million. If the records are, in fact, distinctly inaccurate,
perhaps we should be told.
Postscript
The ideas outlined
above are presented to stimulate further debate and investigation. Its
quite possible, for example, that my detuning of Johnsons records
by a tone and a half is too extreme. Perhaps he did not habitually play
with open strings, as I have assumed, but favoured the use of a capo most
of the time. Observant readers will have noticed that in one of the two
photos at the top of the page, his guitar has a capo on the second fret.
Johnson is known to have travelled widely and appears to have absorbed
many other styles in addition to the Mississippi Delta blues which provided
the original matrix for his music. His practices, therefore, cant
be ascertained solely by those of his Delta models, mentors and contemporaries.
Id be glad to hear the thoughts of you blues aficionados and appreciators
out there: johngibbens@touched.co.uk
PPS,
Feb 2014
I’ve just found
this YouTube video of Dave
Van Ronk, performing Mississippi John Hurt’s ‘Spike Driver
Blues’, and if you watch the interview segment at the end, about
the 7-minute mark, he provides the first direct evidence I’ve heard,
from the horse’s mouth as it were, of a 1930s blues recording being
speeded up. (I assume he’s saying that the tune was mechanically
speeded up, rather than Hurt just being told to play it faster –
otherwise why would he talk about the voice being higher-pitched?)
Examples:
2. Robert Johnson, Walking
Blues, last verse, slowed down
5. Robert Johnson, Love
in Vain, last verse, slowed down
6. Robert Johnson, Crossroads
Blues, as officially released
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