Almost all record labels in 1920s were owned by white people, yet blues music emerged mostly because of Afro-Americans. To what extend did these white owners shape the blues music in this era? Were black musicians forced to adjust their music by the white owners with the purpose to sell more records? Also, were white musicians told to alter their music when it sounded to black?
The American record industry in the 1920s was fundamentally owned by not only white people, but those from cities in the north of America. And those people did have to alter the blues in order to record it using the technology they had at the time, and they did have a set of preconceptions about what the public wanted - the blues recordings of the 1920s were released by record companies aiming to have hits.
But first some context. Let's take W.C. Handy, the writer of the song 'St Louis Blues', and the person who first spread the idea of 'the blues' in American popular culture. Living in an era when sheet music was still more important than the then infant recording industry, he wrote ‘St Louis Blues’ which was prominently published in a sheet music form that sounds more like ragtime to us today. Did Handy take liberties with the form of the blues in his version of it? Sure - but which ones?
In his autobiography, he famously told a story about first hearing the blues played on the train platform in Tutwiler, Mississippi in 1903. As a result, these days, there's a certain mythological importance attached to the Mississippi Delta blues, with a general belief that it's the closest that we get to the original 'pure' blues - Tutwiler isn't very far away from the sharecropping farms where many of the Delta blues musicians grew up.
A couple of years earlier, Charles Peabody, an archaeologist, was fascinated by the songs sung by workers on one of his digs in Coahoma County, Mississippi, and wrote a paper on it in 1901, where he appears to be describing the blues - however, Peabody was discussing the music from memory, and there were no recordings at the time, so it's hard to be sure. Handy’s and Peabody’s accounts are essentially most of the historical record on the earliest origins of the blues - nobody was really interested in the opinions of the generally illiterate actual blues musicians making the music at that point, what with the deeply systemic racism of the Jim Crow era in the South.
So it seems as if Mississippi might be the origin of the blues as we know it (there are commonalities with some African musics but the blues are a distinctively American form). But remember that this is a folk music of a people who were enslaved, and that the grandparents of the first crop of recorded blues musicians might well have been bought and sold and transported states away on a whim. In the antebellum period, plantation owners did not like to hear their slaves singing mournful songs, and if the blues already existed at this point, it was something of a private music. So we simply don’t know much about its history in the 19th century. This also means that we don’t really know what it ‘really’ sounded like before the recordings or where it really came from, and so we’re taking educated guesses on the kinds of changes than white record company producers would have made to the music.
Initial blues recordings (like Mamie Smith doing 'Crazy Blues' in 1920 or Bessie Smith doing 'Downhearted Blues' in 1923, one of the first big blues hits), were typically sung by strong-voiced female singers - Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Lucille Bogan being the most prominent. The lines between jazz and blues were often blurred during this period, and these blues recordings usually had jazzy backing; for example, Ma Rainey recorded with Louis Armstrong in 1924 (see 'See See Rider').
There's a few possible reasons for this jazziness, related to the record labels. Perhaps the record companies couldn't quite understand that there was an audience for more rural forms of the blues at this period, given their dim understanding of black people in the South, or perhaps they were just trying to give it more of a pop sound, seeing that jazz was just pop music in 1923. But also it’s entirely possible that these recordings were simply a pretty good indication of what the music typically sounded like in this period, unless you lived on a farm in Mississippi - plenty of black people lived in cities or course. We have a tendency to idolise the acoustic blues recorded by men a few years later, for our own reasons that often misunderstand some of the intent of the music. And distinctions between blues and jazz weren't something that black audiences necessarily cared about when they just wanted entertainment and something to dance to.
It would take until 1926 for what we’d now see as ‘purer’ blues music to be recorded - i.e., black men playing acoustic guitar and singing. Initially this was Blind Lemon Jefferson, from Texas - his first big hit being 'Long Lonesome Blues' in 1926. Blind Lemon Jefferson's success led to a search for more rural Southern music, which the record companies saw as being 'down home' music - they could package it as sell it to northern audiences with roots in the south - down home.
This wasn't a specific craze for the rural blues of black people, and included white musicians too. In August 1927, Ralph Peer, who had recorded Mamie Smith in 1920, did a session in Bristol, Tennessee recording white rural folk musicians Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family; these artists turned out to be so popular that they developed into what we know call country music. It's also in this period - around 1928 - that you get the first recordings of blues musicians from the Mississippi Delta like Tommy Johnson ('Canned Heat Blues') and Charley Patton ('High Water Everywhere').
Because these recordings were made during a period where there was something of a craze for down home music, and because the record company by 1927 was well aware of the thirst for novelty, these acoustic blues artists like Jefferson or Tommy Johnson or Son House were very much encouraged to record a) new material that hadn't already been heard by blues audiences, and b) the portion of their repertoire that sounded most downhome, that was the most rural (i.e., that was the most primitive). Additionally, one big difference between the recorded blues and what the blues might have sounded like live in a jook joint in Mississippi in 1932 is that 78rpm records had a very limited length; no Robert Johnson song is longer than 3 minutes. However, live recordings of, say, Son House, in the 1960s show him very much stretching out his recordings to become over ten minutes long in some cases. It's very likely - especially from the quite abrupt endings of 1920s blues recordings - that music that unfolded over a longer period of time was necessarily truncated for recordings.
Modern blues scholars like Marybeth Hamilton or Elijah Wald argue that much of the repertoire of the Delta musicians who recorded the blues was not the blues - they would have played the hits of the day, including Tin Pan Alley showtunes and versions of ragtime and jazz (you can hear Robert Johnson do a rag like 'They're Red Hot' which is a world away from the grim 'down at the crossroads with the devil' stuff). Ted Gioia points out that many of the slicker blues musicians - Charley Patton, for example - likely played in minstrel shows or medicine shows, playing deeply racist songs like 'Jim Crow'; W.C. Handy himself spent time playing in a group that attempted to subvert blackface minstrel shows by actually having, you know, genuinely black faces. And because as professional musicians they would have very often been making party music, chances are that 'They're Red Hot' is more indicative of Johnson's live repertoire than some of the slower blues that sound more 'pure' to us.
However, these musicians were very happy indeed to record what the record companies wanted, because a hit might have been a ticket out of the Delta to somewhere like 'Sweet Home Chicago' (as Robert Johnson titled one of his songs). That hit might mean they could escape the backbreaking cottonpicking work that they had to do outside of their music career (to quote Ted Gioia, 'B.B. King once estimated that he had journeyed some sixty thousand miles behind a plow before his music freed him from bondage to the land').
All of which is to say that it's hard to tell the difference between what is actually the most 'pure' Delta blues and what white people wanted the most pure Delta blues to sound like, given their exoticisation of the Mississippi Delta blues as the most purely African-American music. So there are debates in the literature as to whether the narrative of bluesmen selling the soul to the devil is something that white record company owners pushed in order to sell the music - as Marybeth Hamilton argues - or whether the idea had roots in rural black culture of the era - as Ted Gioia argues). Ultimately we don’t really know what the music in its ‘true’ form sounded like - there’s no live recordings of Robert Johnson or Son House performing for their usual audiences in 1932, but it is a mistake to think that they were one trick ponies, or that their music was necessarily a purer form than what you hear Bessie Smith sing - it’s of course possible that blues music started in urban areas and spread to the country, and that country people simply adapted it to the instruments they had at hand.
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