Johnson's field recordings of music were saved on unstable wax cylinders such as these. |
Guy B. Johnson
cylinder recordings of African-American music
20 songs, collected 1925-1928
That’s
the case with this collection of cylinder recordings found after being mislabeled
for 55 years. They are the sound equivalent of field notes, and they are
thought to be the earliest field recordings of African-American music.
For
information, I turned to the indispensable Brenda Nelson-Strauss, who
meticulously analyzes the material in her “Tracking Down a Legend: Guy B.Johnson’s ‘Lost’ Cylinder Recordings” in the April 1989 issue of Resound. She gives as complete a sense
of content and context that is possible to do in print.
In a
nutshell, Johnson was a research assistant at the Institute for Research in
Social Science at the University of North Carolina, and worked on several folk-music
projects, most notably his John Henry: Tracking
Down a Negro Legend in 1929. From 1925 through 1928, he gathered material
at a number of locations in the American Southeast. These recordings served a
purely non-commercial function, a research tool, something he
could play back, study, analyze, and write about. The notes were, literally, his notes.
These
were songs sung by ordinary people, primarily spirituals. Better ears than mine
can peruse the excerpt posted at the National Recording Registry here and
identify the pieces. Out of the underlying haze of scratch comes a call and
response sounding like “Jesus on the Mainline,” incomprehensible voices
echoing, choruses rising in rudimentary harmony. One brief phrase sounds like a
precursor to “Wade in the Water.”
The casual impressions in the wax are defaced by cracks, mold, and the pressure of use.The songs are trying to rise out of their
matrixes, to come back to life. They are fuzzy and distant, but I play themagain and again. I am trying to imagine who was there, and what they really
sounded like.
The
last excerpt sounds amazingly like shape-note singing, which is a primarily Caucasian
Christian tradition. If anything was capable of permeating the boundary between
black and white culture at the time, it was music.
The National Recording Registry
Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the
National Recording Registry in chronological order.