We've been on a bit of a journey these last few weeks - the roots of slide guitar in West Africa, the diddley bow, Tutwiler station, and last week the unexpected Indian thread that runs all the way back through Hawaii to the ancient Vichitra Veena.
This week I want to look at something that changed everything. Not the music itself, but the moment the music got captured. The first recordings. And what happened next.
Before the record
Before recording technology arrived, music only travelled as far as a person could walk or ride. What W.C. Handy heard at Tutwiler station in 1903 had been developing in the Delta for decades, passed from player to player, porch to porch, juke joint to juke joint. Nobody outside that world knew it existed.
The technique, the feeling, the blue notes — all of it completely invisible to the wider world. Extraordinary music going nowhere.
Sheet music and what it couldn't carry
Music had been spreading across America long before the record industry arrived. Sheet music was the dominant medium, and it was big business. W.C. Handy, the same man who woke up at Tutwiler station in 1903, went on to publish St. Louis Blues in 1914 and became one of the most successful music publishers in America. He understood better than most how sheet music could carry a song across the country.
But sheet music could only carry so much. It could capture the notes, the rhythm, the structure. What it couldn't capture was the thing that made slide guitar extraordinary — the blue notes, the squeeze between the frets, the microtonal inflections that lived between the written notes. You could write down the skeleton of a slide guitar piece. You couldn't write down its soul.
Recording changed that. For the first time the actual sound — not an approximation of it, not a skeleton of it, but the real thing — could travel. And when it did, it took everything with it. The feel, the attack, the blue notes, the silence between the notes. All of it preserved exactly as it happened.
Race records — accidental archivists
From the early 1920s, the record industry started targeting Black audiences with what they called "race records" — separate catalogues, separate marketing, often on separate labels. It was a cynical commercial decision. But it had an extraordinary unintended consequence.
It created an archive.
Record companies sent talent scouts fanning out across the South looking for artists to record. They were looking for a product to sell. What they left behind — without really intending to — was a document of a musical tradition that would otherwise have vanished completely.
We know what Blind Willie Johnson sounded like because someone pointed a microphone at him in 1927. We know what Robert Johnson sounded like because a talent scout tracked him down to a San Antonio hotel room in 1936. Without those sessions, without those commercial decisions made by people who were mostly interested in making money — none of it would exist.
Sylvester Weaver — 1923
The first slide guitar ever captured on record was 1923. A 26 year old guitarist from Kentucky named Sylvester Weaver, recorded in New York City using a knife on the strings.
He recorded two tracks. Guitar Blues and Guitar Rag.
Guitar Rag went on to become a standard. It got picked up, passed around, recorded by others, and eventually became one of the foundational pieces of the slide guitar repertoire. I teach it. If you've spent any time with me you've probably heard me mention it.
And here's the thing — it only exists because of that one recording session in 1923. Without the record, Guitar Rag would have been just another piece that Sylvester Weaver played at juke joints in Kentucky and nobody outside his world ever heard. The recording is the reason it's still being played a hundred years later.
Robert Johnson wasn't trying to be Robert Johnson
Here's something that might change how you think about the Delta blues.
We have this image of Robert Johnson as a Delta primitive — a mysterious figure who sold his soul at the crossroads, playing raw, isolated, deeply traditional music out of nowhere. It's a compelling myth. It's also mostly wrong.
Elijah Wald's book Escaping the Delta makes this case beautifully. Johnson wasn't trying to preserve a tradition. He was trying to escape one. He wanted to sound like Leroy Carr — a smooth, urban, piano-led singer from Indianapolis who was essentially the pop star of the blues world in the early 1930s. Both Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf said the first song they ever learned was a Leroy Carr song.
Johnson had heard Carr on record. That's the point. Without the recording industry, Leroy Carr's influence would never have reached a young man in the Mississippi Delta. Records made it possible for a musician in one place to hear what was happening somewhere completely different — and be changed by it.
Johnson was also listening to Bing Crosby. And Hawaiian guitar. And gospel. And everything else the new technology was putting in front of him. He was a young man with his ears wide open, absorbing everything he could find — not a folk artist trapped in one tradition.
What we hear on his recordings as raw Delta blues was actually Johnson trying to modernise, trying to reach beyond the Delta, trying to sound like the records he'd been listening to. The fact that it sounds like nothing else on earth is what makes him extraordinary. But he wasn't trying to be a primitive. He was trying to be a pop star.
The part that isn't so good
The record industry preserved the music. It also exploited the people who made it.
Most artists signed away their recordings for a flat fee. Robert Johnson sold his masters and saw almost nothing from them. The race records industry extracted enormous commercial value from Black musicians while paying them a fraction of what was fair. Many of the artists whose recordings we treasure today died in poverty.
It's worth knowing. The archive we're so grateful for came at a cost that wasn't paid by the people who benefited from it.
What this means for your playing
I think about all of this every time I teach Guitar Rag. That piece is a direct line from a recording session in New York in 1923 to a student sitting with a slide guitar today. The technology preserved it. The music did the rest.
And the Robert Johnson story matters too. Because he wasn't a purist. He was listening to everything — absorbing influences from every direction the records brought him — and then finding his own voice within all of that.
Which is exactly what you're doing.
That's not so different from what Johnson was doing.
Three things worth your time:
Sylvester Weaver — Guitar Rag (1923) — find it on YouTube. The first slide guitar on record. Rough, barely captured on the equipment of the time, but the technique is right there fully formed.
Leroy Carr — How Long How Long Blues — the song that both Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf said was the first they ever learned. Smooth, urban, piano-led. This is what Robert Johnson was listening to and trying to sound like. Hear it and your image of the Delta blues shifts a little.
Robert Johnson — Cross Road Blues — now listen back to Johnson with fresh ears. Hear him as someone who absorbed everything available to him and made something completely original out of it. That's the goal.
If you want to learn Guitar Rag properly - and understand where it sits in the slide guitar tradition - it's one of the pieces I teach in the Slide Success programme.
See you on the back porch!