Mythmakers say Robert Johnson's blues sound was a sham

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Mythmakers say Robert Johnson's blues sound was a sham
July 7, 2010
By JOE KLOPUS
The Kansas City Star


We have so few facts about blues man Robert Johnson, and his music cuts so deeply, that people were bound to make up some legends to fill in the gaps.

The old one is that he sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads to play and sing and write songs so well, and that the devil took him before his 28th birthday.

Now there’s a new one. Some would have you believe that, although Johnson left us more 40 recordings before his death in 1938, we have the wrong idea of how he sounded.

The new myth, advocated by some British music-lovers and passed along as truth by more than one journalist who should know better, says that Johnson’s record company sped up his recordings. The real Robert Johnson, they’re saying, was as much as 20 percent lower in pitch, 20 percent slower in tempo and a bit different in timbre than what we’ve been hearing.

And in case you’re wondering, yes, someone’s trying to sell a “corrected” Johnson CD. (If you must, do a computer experiment with the Johnson recordings you already have instead of wasting your money on this disc. Just use a program such as Audacity to slow them down.)

Why are they making this claim? To their ears, Johnson simply sounds better at the slower speed. The voice is deeper, the guitar more ringing — and the music, which goes to the edge of what one musician can do, simply sounds more believable, to them.

But that’s about the only argument in their favor.

Never mind that the other musicians who heard Johnson in person — people with great ears for music, including Robert Lockwood Jr., Johnny Shines and David “Honeyboy” Edwards — never seem to have noticed or remarked upon the alleged discrepancy between Johnson on records and Johnson in person.

Never mind that by the time Johnson’s 78 rpm records were made in 1936 and 1937, the speeds of recording equipment were well standardized. (Fifteen years earlier, recording speeds were all over the place.) Never mind that if the equipment were really so far off speed, a professional recording engineer would surely have noticed and done something about it.

Never mind that we don’t seem to have evidence of any other recording from the same company in the same period being sped up. Why would the company single out Johnson, then an obscure artist who sold relatively few records to a limited audience, for this treatment?

It makes little sense to regard this so-called discovery about Johnson as anything but fantasy. Scholars have done a respectable job of stripping away myths about Johnson. But here we go building a new one.

Maybe in another decade or two, people will be slowing down their James Brown and Marvin Gaye records and claiming new discoveries about those. Really, Marvin couldn’t have nailed all those high notes, could he?

Myth-making never sleeps.