PARADIGM SHIFTS
“If the blues was money I’d be a millionaire”
I taught the History of Education courses, Western Ed. and American Ed., at Duquesne University for the forty years I worked in the School of Education. I often wondered what the monks who copied and illustrated manuscripts ("manu" meaning hand and "scribere" meaning writing) felt when mass produced Bibles printed on machine presses ended their monopoly in the 16th century. I use this example to introduce the persistent problem of new technologies that cause significant shifts in how something works or is made or is regarded because I think that we are all vulnerable to the displacement those holy men so long ago must have felt when their life vocation was changed by the printing press. Blues music has had many printing press-like technological changes. The specific questions for this in article in our BSWPA newsletter is how changes in recording technologies changed the ways blues singers and bands made money.
There are many similar historical examples of entire systems being displaced or eliminated by a paradigm shift, an almost totally different way of doing some human activity. Guns replaced long bows, agriculture replaced hunting/gathering, autos replaced horses, and recording technologies appeared. Blues specific one included: Records replaced passing the hat at fish fries, radio displaced church picnics, the electric guitar almost eliminated the stand-up bass, amplifiers replaced blues shouters (Joe Turner has come and gone), royalties replaced passing the hat on Hastings Street, clubs supplanted the Apollo theaters and the other circuit venues, TV displaced radio and movies, 45s eliminated 78s and were complemented by LPs and 8 tracks and DATs and CDs and DVDs and MP3s and file sharing sites. Every one of these changes had an impact on how blues players were paid.
The Carnegie Library in Oakland some years ago had a small exhibition of many of the recording technologies that had been used in the USA. I saw Edison cylinders, wire recordings, piano rolls, plastic records at 78 rpm, then 45s, then LP 33s. They had a Wollensak tape recorder, 8 tracks, DATs, CDs, DVDs and other engineered inventions that all recorded sound and pictures in a remarkable range of ways. Every new machine or technique influenced how blues artists were paid.
Although we would not likely confuse many of the early blues pioneers with monks, we can still wonder what their feelings were when different technologies appeared during their careers. How did they adapt to the requirements of the new media? How did Bessie Smith react when she was called from her church roots through the Negro theater circuit to appear only once in a motion picture film. Smith made her only film appearance, in 1929, in a film titled St. Louis Blues, after W. C. Handy's song. (Wikipedia entry “Bessie Smith.”) What does Honeyboy Edwards think about when songs he performed in juke joints 60 years ago on an acoustic guitar reappear on a 2010 CD or even on You Tube?
I think about these things because the technological changes mentioned briefly above have serious implications for the future of blues music. Many commentators recognize that many musical genres may disappear or be sequestered as niche interests: barbershop quartets, klezmer music, throat singing, Inuit drum dances and songs. Is the blues fated to remain a historical curiosity when our last generation of pony-tailed white guys and their ladies pass on to those Green Acres in the sky?
One of the biggest impacts of the last 2 decades has been the erosion of income for singers and bands. I do not know any singer or band in Western Pennsylvania (granted I don’t know all of them) who earns their total income from performing and record sales. I once encountered one of my graduate Education students who had gone on to full-time teaching and singing the lead in a local group that had all of its members as full time teachers! The lead singer in my favorite Pittsburgh blues group is a police officer. In some ways this mirrors the situation in the 1930s through the late 1940s for blues singers. In a system that resembles the NCAA basketball playoffs, thousands of singers and bands were recorded on Okeh, Bluebird, Columbia, Paramount and Decca in the hope that one or two records would ‘hit’. Records were analog and were distributed physically: out of appliance stores, automobile trunks, groceries and street corners. When Chuck Berry recorded ‘Maybelline” for Chess records, the first pressing was for 10,000 records instead of the usual 1,000 copies. Records cost a nickel or a dime; phonographs $30. Berry made $10,000 from a classic record that sold tens of thousands of copies! Bo Diddley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry got 1/10 of a cent for every record sold. Berry’s record has Alan Freed listed as co-writer, so Freed could siphon off some of the writing royalties that should have gone to Berry. Howling Wolf’s estate had to sue after his death to recover the tens of thousands of dollars due him.
After World War II, several paradigms shifted. Women stayed in the work force. Those percentages have increased every year to the present day. More people owned TVs than bathtubs. The Baby Boom started. The struggle for racial equality continued. Many teens in the 1950s worked out their own system of racial respect with the music. That "devil’s music" brought blacks and whites together on the common ground of blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll. One of the oddities of the last fifty years has been the shift of financial and audience support for classic and modern blues from mixed race audiences to mostly older white people.
How did the players make money? Earlier, I used the NCAA metaphor to visualize a system where a select group of blues players could handle the discipline of the recording studio and the life style of the touring life that emerged as they became stars. There were thousands of very competent players and singers in those days but, like today, very few made a full time living through their music. Even in the 1950s, Alan Freed and other white disk jockeys were organizing caravan style R+B shows because, like today, that was a way to turn the hot record from the radio into arenas full of ticket buying teens. Even today, hundreds of local people will crowd the Byham Theater for the R+B revival shows whose acts they may well have seen in the old Syria Mosque fifty years ago!
It is the emergence of digital and electronic media transmission systems that interests me today. The CD/DVD/MP3 technologies and the WWW/Internet music sharing software seem to me to be a paradigm shift as monumental to today’s musicians as the Gutenberg bible was to the monks. I write all this as a way of asking historically based questions about the future of our beloved blues music. This was partly stimulated by an Atlantic magazine article by Megan McArdle titled The Freeloaders: How a generation of file-sharers is ruining the future of entertainment. (The Atlantic, May 2010, Vol. 305, No. 4, pp.34-36). McArdle points out that the overall revenue for US record labels has been continuously declining for a decade. People buy fewer and fewer CDs/DVDs/MP3s. McArdle argues that today’s music lover would use free file sharing sites out of a sense of entitlement that their electronic entertainment should be free. We remember Napster but the current sites are ‘torrent’ sites (u torrent); even You Tube can be used to download music clips. See also Hypem.com)
An interesting distinction emerged; ‘analog’ things like books or movies or CDs or concert tickets probably must be paid for, because they are tangible and therefore ‘real’. Electronic/digital events that consist of electrons moving through wires or wirelessly, such as movies and TV shows on an Internet site, or music available from a file sharing site should be free (and if it isn’t, it’s OK to steal it because it’s a small crime and everyone is doing it and it’s only electrons)! It would be interesting to hear from the amazing set of blues groups in our area as to how much of their music is stolen and how much income they lose.
In many ways 2010 resembles 1910 or 1935. A blues musician gets noticed enough to get a few 78/CD recordings out which in turn attracts fans to shows at the clubs and theaters where the real money is made. In 2010 the cliché is that the first CD costs $3000 and all the rest cost 50 cents. Like the Chess Brothers in Chicago, our local bands sell self-produced and locally made CDs at their shows for $10-15 hoping to supplement their fee for the gig. It is possible to find for sale some local music on Internet sites like Amazon; Chizmo Charles 1999 CD is there. But the ease of electronic file sharing, the competing modes looking for that scarce entertainment dollar and the reluctance of the industry to adopt newer business model makes the future of recorded blues music and live acts more and more difficult. We may be the generation that witnesses the collapse of newspaper and book publishing and the recorded music industry simultaneously.
~ By V.Robert Agostino
