The Robert Johnson thread got me pulling out those 15 or so 78s I pulled from the thousands of 78s I dug through at the flea markets. The one that got me most was "Those Gambler's Blues" by Jimmie Rodgers. the song is in the "St. James Infirmary" family of songs that were so popular then 0 Jimmie did two of them and this one is the better of the two. In fact, it's his best vocal performance he ever recorded. Even if you don't know the guy singing is dying of tuberculosis and coughing up blood and chunks of lung between takes, the vocals on this song really hit you.
One thing that's done masterfully here - as Jimmie always did - the controlled voice crack - one of many things you didn't hear on records before Jimmie Rodgers. When you hear country and bluegrass singers do it when they wanna get bluesy, that's Roger's legacy. Even my grandpa did it when he sang. In this recording, there's a ginormous amount of them, some obvious, some very, very subtle. When I do it, it works, but I can't always make it happen. Any body got advice how to get better control of intiating the crack? I know you can do stuff to avoid the crack - I do the Louvin Bros. trick of drinking Worchestershire sauce just before singing something that's in a key too high and there's a danger of an unwanted crack. Maybe there's something you can do to make it happen.
I'm also interested to know how the voice crack works, you know, the mechanics behind it. I figure if I know how it works, I might be able to better initiate it.
There's also something going on that I hear on Rodger's vocals that I haven't figured out what it is yet. It's in his pitch selection, there's something about it.
Anyway, here it is, what I deem to be Jimmy Rodger's finest vocal performance.
---------- David
____________________ At the time of his birth, it was widely accepted that no one man could play that much music so well or raise that much hell. He proved them all wrong. R.I.P. H. Cecil Payne Elk River Institute for Advanced Harmonica Studies
"I ain't gonna sing no 'Home on the Range.' No. sir. Not if it means I rot in here another month. I'm gonna sing what I'm a gonna be! A free man in the morning!" Andy Griffith (as Lonesome Rhodes, "A Face in the Crowd).
Last Edited by on Jul 19, 2012 8:23 AM
Nice track. I have one or two Jimmie Rodgers cuts that I got in a compilation, but it lo74A1E0C8D365A38E8DF6531A46EC1C82506F27666472D35117401B3
[Edit]
Wow, the captcha mangled my post. What I said was: I'm going to study Jimmie Rodgers a bit. He is a really interesting character as one of the first "country" recording stars, but he clearly also loved the blues. But "blues" as a genre was marketed to a black audience. Dave, perhaps you know something from your late grandpa Cecil about how much blues had taken a foothold among the southern white culture by, say, the beginning of the 1920s. This is a story I didn't know anything about until a recent radio documentary that I posted about in a recent thread. Once the recording industry began dividing up music for black (jazz/blues) and white (country) audiences around 1920, that began to shape the broader musical culture. But in the South, how influential was blues before that?
To address your question, Jimmie was a yodeler, right? I think that would explain his control over the voice break.
[Edit again] Just read more of the Robert Johnson thread, and you know a lot of that history from your own research. I'm curious about what you have to say about my question.
Last Edited by on Jul 19, 2012 11:28 AM
There was a huge amount of musical ideas trading back and forth between black and white culture - far more people usually like to admit. It's a huge and excellent question that I might have to answer in more than one post. In Rodger's case, you can see it anytime somebody plays a guitar and sings black or white. In the 1920s, you had some options. You could play a banjo and sing. You could play a guitar. You could play something else. Whatever. After Jimmy, everybody was backing themselves on guitar. But before that, it was huge. People aren't born with predjudice, they have to be taught and the most free imparting of musical ideas is between adults and children. My family is an example of that with five generations of musicians. When you see white recording artist who really had the blues, they usually have the same story - the Lynyrd Skynyrd "Ballad of Curtis Loewe" is a good representation of this dynamic - they hung around some black musician when they were kids. With Bill Monroe, it was Arnold Schultz. With Hank Williams, it was Rufus Payne. With Frank Hutchison, a West Virginian and the first white man to record blues, he used to go down to a place in Logan called "Black Bottom" - it's where the Shoney's is now - where the black miners lived. Young Frank sat and listened to these black musicians, one in particular that he listened to most was a very old black bluesman and the scholarly folks speculate that his blues was so old, it was pre-blues blues, which makes for an interesting dynamic, that our closest connection with 19th Century pre-blues blues is the recordings of a white man from West Virginia. These kids were mesmorized by these black blues musicians during their formative years. My grandpa was a bluegrass musician, but he knew the basics of blues that made it awesome. He learned that from Bill Monroe - so even in that case, the influence of Arnold Schultz, who never recorded, influenced my grandfather a great deal. I grew up in the whitest place, I think, in America. My graduating class in high school was all-white. When my grandfather grew up, it was even whiter than that, but he was still influenced directly by black music, namely from listening to DeFord Bailey on the Grand Ol' Opry. I asked him about this a few weeks before he died. He said "Nobody cared that he was black. Hell, you couldn't tell on the radio, anyway." This was a culture with predjudice, but you could listen to black man play music and enjoy it. Isn't that an incredible dynamic?
more to come
---------- David
____________________ At the time of his birth, it was widely accepted that no one man could play that much music so well or raise that much hell. He proved them all wrong. R.I.P. H. Cecil Payne Elk River Institute for Advanced Harmonica Studies
"I ain't gonna sing no 'Home on the Range.' No. sir. Not if it means I rot in here another month. I'm gonna sing what I'm a gonna be! A free man in the morning!" Andy Griffith (as Lonesome Rhodes, "A Face in the Crowd).
Last Edited by on Jul 19, 2012 1:15 PM
One thing that helped music drift across societal barriers was you didn't have to interact with someone to be influenced by them. You didn't even have to look at them. You could just hear it.
We only have recorded evidence of this exchange from the 1920s, when record companies started recording rural artists. The exchange of musical ideas was so pervasive at that time, it had to have been going on long, long before that. I would suspect even as far back as slavery days.
For a lot of these white kids, the blues was like a drug. They kept coming back and back, listening to it and the wheels turning in their little heads as they laid the foundation for what they would believe music should be.
It wasn't just the kids, either. As a young man, Jimmie Rodgers picked up two things in the Southern railyards - tuberculosis and the blues. Jimmie was fairly respectable in good social standing. He had to be or they never would have let in the Masonic Lodge - he was raised long before anybody had ever heard of him. But he worked with blacks every day and they were his friends. Jimmie had the hardest and most dangerous job on the railroad and I would imagine he would have the respect of his coworkers and he respected them, too, regardless of color. I don't know if he played with them or not. I would guess yes, but there's little info about those days, but he certainly picked up the blues from those guys. I could go on forever about this stuff, Bill Monroe touring with DeFord Bailey, or the time back in the 1950s that Bill Monroe ran into Albert Collins at a gas station and stopped and talked to Albert about how much he loved his music.
I'm gonna lay something down for you to digest. When Jimmie came out with Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas), it was huge - so huge there were almost a dozen sequels, people couldn't get enough of those records. Huge. Sold records out the ying yang. How would he become this superstar singing blues to a white audience if that white audience didn't already have some exposure to blues forms, which of course they had, if nothing else there were a lot of white bluesmen recording in the 1920s.
I think I've got a pretty good understanding of how black music influenced white society at that time, what I'm listening for now is white influence on black music -and I'm sure my even mentioning that will raise some eyebrows, but it happened. When I listen to black music from the 1920s, I hear influence of white church music, but even more so, Scottish and a number of other white influences.
Listen to white guys from the 1920s. Listen to black guys from the 1920s. You'll find some white guys playing only "white" stuff. You'll find some black guys playing only "black" stuff. You'll find some white guys playing a lot of "black" stuff. And lastly, you'll find a lot black guys playing a lot of "white stuff" and of all these guys, these black guys have been totally forgotten. There were some hellaciously-talented black fiddlers back in the 1920s. I present you with this black fiddler:
But even from a purely blues standpoint, it is a terrible to forget these guys. Just as these black fiddlers played a lot of white music, they also played some incredible blues on the fiddle.
You might recognize this one. Bill Monroe recorded it in 1958. Robert Johnson borrowed the tune for "Come On In My Kitchen."
---------- David
____________________ At the time of his birth, it was widely accepted that no one man could play that much music so well or raise that much hell. He proved them all wrong. R.I.P. H. Cecil Payne Elk River I
Last Edited by on Jul 19, 2012 1:13 PM
You can hear the white influence in some of the black female blues vocalists of the 20s (folks like Mamie Smith). Their vocal style was somewhat show-tunish and operatic, and for this reason I think they are not very popular or known among blues fans today. Although their records were big hits back in the day.
The singers who sounded more down-homey and rough (i.e., black) -- like Bessie Smith -- are the ones we prefer today.
Also, the classical influence is very prevalent in old-timey black church music. Most folks associate black church music with the more bluesy-sounding gospel, but there is a whole other tradition that has a more classical influence, hymns and whatnot. At my mom's church this style is sung regularly along with the more rollicking gospel music.
I just read a book -- Escaping the Blues by Elijah Wald -- which makes the case that the line between "black music" and "white music" was a lot less defined in the era preceding recording music. Meaning musicians actually played all different styles, and didn't get pigeon-holed until the recording era when record companies began putting them into a box for marketing purposes. So although we classify folks like Robert Johnson as blues players, when they performed live they actually played a variety of styles, including stuff we think of as "white."
Tom, Thanks for turning me onto that. I'd never heard of him. I can see that he was an even bigger influence on Hank Williams. Hank borrowed a great deal from him.
---------- David
____________________ At the time of his birth, it was widely accepted that no one man could play that much music so well or raise that much hell. He proved them all wrong. R.I.P. H. Cecil Payne Elk River Institute for Advanced Harmonica Studies
"I ain't gonna sing no 'Home on the Range.' No. sir. Not if it means I rot in here another month. I'm gonna sing what I'm a gonna be! A free man in the morning!" Andy Griffith (as Lonesome Rhodes, "A Face in the Crowd).
Hi David. I loved that Jimmie Rogers version of St James Infirmary & that controlled voice crack was obviously no effort.But he was a great yodeller. When my voice cracks it hurts & for the life of me I cannot just make it happen. I'm off to see a vocal coach today & I will ask her. Would be a neat trick to include in these soulful tunes. ---------- HARPOLDIE’S YOUTUBE
Last Edited by on Jul 20, 2012 5:28 PM
I'm always amazed how many versions of St. James Infirmary there are.
He's doing a lot of mini-slides vocally. He's also not going to the expected resolution note much. 'Never found a pal like me,' and 'good god she was lying there dead' going up instead of down, and it sounds like guitar is modulating into a major key for a couple seconds, and the plucking suddenly sounds more ukulele like there. It sounds more like the Cab Calloway version than the Satchmo version. Satch seems to explode into the beginning of the lines. The vocal line here is very deliberately kept very even, even when the timbre suggests he is doing a crescendo, like he pulled off the mic.
this is a very deep and rich thread. i think i'll be up late tonight studying it more.
some things that jumped out at me right away were the idea of while players being influenced by black players and what that speaks to me of. that inherent racism except when it came to "real" gut felt music. i saw that in western ny state as a child for sure.
that voice crack i have never even thought about. i hear virtually NO one do that these days. while i impart emotion to my vocals and hear many others do the same this seemed almost theatrical to me.
more as i study this deeper. ---------- http://www.reverbnation.com/jawboneandjolene
Dave Payne: "what I'm listening for now is white influence on black music". Well those couple of Jimmie Rodgers tunes that I mentioned I have from a compilation were actually from a Howlin' Wolf CD set as an extra disk of his influences (perhaps speculatively). It makes sense that radio would have broadcast Jimmie Rodgers and other white artists to black ears (assuming rural music made it to radio, which if Jimmie was so huge would be a good guess). That would have at least stirred the mixing pot some. ----------
