Those familiar with my blog will already have noticed my appetite for titles which tend to be provocative and in which I try to link seemingly unrelated events or circumstances. This post is not different from the previous, but I hope that when you will have stopped reading this post the full meaning of the […]

“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 […]

The title is provocative, yet there are arguments that the promotion and distribution of blues was part of the marketing strategy that helped the record industry to survive in the twenties. The twenties were a decade of rapid socio-technological change and, apart from a short economic recession in the beginning of the twenties, and a […]