Chamblee54

The most recent episode of Radiolab is Crossroads. It is about Robert Johnson, who played the blues. The legend is that he went to the crossroads of Highway 61 and Highway 49 in Clarksdale MS. At midnight, the devil came down, tuned his guitar, and gave Robert Johnson the ability to play the blues like no one had ever heard. In return, the devil claimed the soul of Robert Johnson. (It was near Clarksdale, on Highway 61, that Bessie Smith was in a fatal car crash.)
Radiolab takes a look at the story. Before they are through, there are several Mr. Johnsons. One was messing around with a married woman, whose husband gave Mr. Johnson poisoned whiskey. Another one had syphilis. An old blues man tells the story of a bluesman who shows up one day with his playing incredibly improved, only it was not Robert Johnson. Another story was that Mr. Johnson married young, and his wife died in childbirth, and that was what made him a guitar superman. In the end, we really don’t know much about the man, except for the recordings he made.
Another radio show, The Delta Blues at Full Speed, asks a few questions about the recordings. Some say they are as much as 20% too fast. When you slow them down, they sound better. One commenter said that if a man was going to sell his soul to the devil, then his voice should be lower.
A later radio show, Robert Johnson and Studio Alchemy, has another “expert” who says that the recordings are probably pretty accurate. The discussion goes on to the concept that all recordings, to one degree or another, are fictions. Music recordings originally sought to record the sound of the artist. When the creative potential of the studio became apparent, the finished recording became a work of art in it’s own right, where the sound engineer was just as important as the players.
There was an ad campaign once, is it live, or is it memorex? The idea was that the tape had a sound so clear that you could not tell it from the original. The thing is, what the tv viewer heard was a recording, which was probably not on memorex. The copy embedded with this post is transferred to digital somehow, which distorts the slogan of the commercial even more.
While PG was listening to these radio shows, he was editing pictures from The Library of Congress. Some of these pictures are included in this feature. This is another example of how editing, after the fact, can affect how you perceive a unit of merchandise. Some say that the only thing that should matter is how the product makes you feel.