In his long article in Harper’s last year, “Unknown Bards”, John Jeremiah Sullivan makes the case that the mediation of records, and indeed their fetishization, was not only present very near the beginnings of the post-reconstruction era blues music that became the object of the feverish reification of authenticity, but indeed enabled this music from the very start. The myth of the “lost” blues greats requires that the recordings were secondary, even haphazard afterthoughts that, to our good fortune, ended up preserving essential music – but essential music the very essence of which lies outside of (predates) the recording.
Sullivan points out that records were already the very connective fiber of many of these early bluesman, who much like the rabid collectors who would “rediscover” the recordings later, came to the music not by chance encounter with other musicians on some Southern porch, but by seeking out their records. The myth was built into the story, mediated by wax.
1 Comment
January 4, 2009 at 6:18 am
I’m on some southern porch. You should try mine sometime.