“Blues blows the vacuum tubes of the radiola” (radiola was the name that RCA gave to its early production radios). This could have been a title in the Chicago Defender journal of 1922. It could have continued saying that: “Since the intense and high pitch voices of some country blues artists blow out the vacuum […]

After the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, the blues wouldn’t be the same anymore. For a start, the record business, as other businesses, tumbled down to sales which would hardly go beyond 5 % of what it was before. The blues and black music market would be particularly hard hit. However, […]

One can seriously ask the question to which degree the emergence of the recorded blues could not be considered as a pure consequence of luck following risk taking by white entrepreneurs driven by pure financial and economic necessity! When the singer, songwriter and vaudeville/minstrelsy artist Perry ‘Mule’ Bradford finally succeeded in 1920 to convince Okeh-records […]