[HN Gopher] Mack McCormick's Long, Tortured Quest to Find the Re...
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Mack McCormick's Long, Tortured Quest to Find the Real Robert
Johnson
Author : tintinnabula
Score : 35 points
Date : 2023-04-10 06:02 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.texasmonthly.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.texasmonthly.com)
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| In high school when I should have been listening to grunge, I was
| listening to Led Zeppelin (and similar) and wondering about the
| influencers to all those 1960s British rock bands... which lead
| me to Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, and loads of others. By college
| I had a blues show on the campus station, and every night I
| signed off with Johnson's Traveling Riverside Blues. In fact when
| I then switched over to do the classic rock show.. I signed off
| with Zeppelin's rendition of Traveling Riverside Blues.
|
| I had this classical guitar teacher who had achieved some
| prominence in the music world, having written and performed the
| guitar music as part of a nationally syndicated radio program. I
| asked him one day if we could work on the blues and he said
| something like it was "stupidly simple and not worth the time"
| yet here we are a century after Robert Johnson still celebrating
| him, while that guy is an unknown. There's something really
| magical about this music, which is why it transformed into rock
| and roll and crossed the Atlantic twice and can be heard in
| samples and as fundamental sounds in music today.
| shove wrote:
| Haha "stupidly simple" except RJ sounded like he was playing
| two guitars simultaneously and people heard the rumor he'd sold
| his soul to the devil in exchange for guitar skills and
| collectively decided "this checks out"
| ilamont wrote:
| What a great read. Loved this:
|
| _The birthplace of jazz wasn't far away, so Mack hitchhiked to
| New Orleans, where he met an inscrutable record collector named
| Orin Blackstone, who was working on a set of books called Index
| to Jazz. Blackstone asked the teen to be the Texas editor of the
| final two books and find jazz and blues 78-rpm records made in
| the state. The meeting changed Mack's life. He had never liked
| being an introvert, and now, working as a field researcher, he
| was pushed to connect with people, hitching out into the rural
| areas around Houston and knocking on doors, looking for old
| records._
|
| Sometimes, those little serendipity encounters lead to
| opportunities that can truly change the course of your life.
|
| But the guy was also quite devious. Inserting "hoaxes" into
| research notes as an insurance policy against people who might
| cross him?
| SpaceL10n wrote:
| I dug into old blues a few years ago. Robert Johnson came up
| again and again. I decided to give him a listen and have liked
| him ever since.
|
| It won't keep you on your seat. It all starts to sound the same
| after a while. The recording quality is abysmal. They all sound
| like he was standing too far away from the microphone.
|
| Despite all that, he is a cultural treasure. I can close my eyes
| and feel the era when I hear his music. The ambience of those
| scratchy, distant, tinfoil recordings was just what the doctor
| had ordered.
| cschmidt wrote:
| Another interesting article on the topic here:
|
| https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/a-scandal-is-taking-place-in...
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(page generated 2023-04-10 23:02 UTC)