Turn Me On, Dead Man

A recent article by John Gibbens suggests that Robert Johnson's recordings have been long played back way too fast. This is intriguing, particularly in light of how influential Robert Johnson's recordings, 41 tracks recorded in two sessions in the late 1930s, have proven to be.  Keith Richards tells the story of when he first heard Robert Johnson, he thought two guitars were playing.  Gibbens bases his argument in part on how difficult it would be to play as high up on the fretboard given the key of Robert Johnson's recordings. Only two photos of Robert Johnson are known to exist. The photo of Robert Johnson on the cover of the CD box set Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings shows him with a guitar where the neck joins the body at the twelfth fret. Another photo shows Johnson holding a guitar where the neck joins the body at the fourteenth fret. The opening phrase of "Walking Blues," given the key of the playback, would require Robert Johnson to reach up to the sixteenth fret. It would have been difficult for Robert Johnson to play "Walking Blues" accurately so high up on the fretboard. Gibbens goes on to speculate that since "Walking Blues" is based on "My Black Mama" by Son House, and that he may well have played it in the same key as Son House. That would mean slowing down the playback by 20 percent, lowering the key of "Walking Blues" by three semitones. He applied the same reduction in speed to a few other tracks and audio examples are given at the bottom of the article.

Speculation about the proper playback speed of Robert Johnson's recordings has been a topic of discussion for some time. This forum discusses possible means for determining the actual playback speed. This discussion includes an interesting comment by Dave Rubin, author of Robert Johnson - King of the Delta Blues: Guitar Transcriptions and Detailed Lessons for 29 Songs (Guitar School). Rubin states that Robert Johnson's recordings were sped up when the recordings were first released on LP in the 1960s. Engineers wanted to put the recordings into "natural" keys without realizing that Robert Johnson often employed nonstandard tunings and keys. Rubin listened to original 78s that had been calibrated to the proper, slower speed. If I read him correctly he suggests that a more accurate correction would be about a semitone, which would be noticeable but nowhere near the 20 percent reduction in speed that Gibbens suggests. Rubin claims that the person who owned the 78s and had properly calibrated them was Steve LaVere. The odd thing is that Steve LaVere wrote the liner notes for the 1990 release of Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings which maintained the acclerated speeds of the LP releases. Rubin mentions that the 1996 reissue of Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings "basically reflects these corrections," but the running times of the tracks look very similar to me. Strange all around.

In recent years, Pristine Classical remastered Robert Johnson's recordings and provided some notes on how this process was carried out.

I have also, in preparing this release, been able to make minor speed corrections to some of the tracks, basing my conclusions on analysis of electrical mains hum harmonics found buried in many of the tracks, and repitching to between 0.2 and 2.5% (where a semitone is approximately 6%).

I don't know if it will ever be possible to determine the correct playback speed of Robert Johnson's recordings precisely. Reducing the playback speed by 20 percent sounds way too slow to me. Still, the basic argument that Robert Johnson's recordings have been sped up is plausible. To my ears, this YouTube video of "Cross Road Blues" sounds about right. The duration of this playback is 2:40, as opposed to 2:28 from Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings. This constitutes a 7.5 percent speed reduction and lowers the key of "Cross Road Blues" by about a semitone.

Radio station WNYC has made available a podcast of an interview with Jon Wilde about this issue on the program Soundcheck. John Wilde posted about the speed of Robert Johnson's recordings on the Guardian Music Blog recently.