From the Guardian:

Eric Clapton once described Johnson as, “the most important blues singer that ever lived”…[but] nearly 50 years after Columbia first packaged his work as King of the Delta Blues, we discover that we’ve been listening to these immortal songs at the wrong speed all along. Either the recordings were accidentally speeded up when first committed to 78, or else they were deliberately speeded up to make them sound more exciting. Whatever, the common consensus among musicologists is that we’ve been listening to Johnson at least 20% too fast. Numerous bloggers have helpfully slowed down Johnson’s best-known work and provided samples so that, for the first time, we can hear Johnson as he intended to be heard.

I, like many people, only know of Robert Johnson through Eric Clapton; I know Cream’s Crossroads a lot better than Johnson’s, and like it more too. But I love the fact that the figure of origin, used to authenticate electric blues by so many white electric bluesmen like Clapton, cannot now be disentangled from studio gimmickry. Part of the Clapton thing was that he was supposed to be taking the acoustic, rural, old, and black song of the Robert Johnson figure and making it young and white and modern and urban and electric. Rock and Roll as the electrified blues is every hack music journalist’s favorite cliche. And now it turns out that Johnson was himself playing games in the studio, that the authentic backdrop which your white bluesbreakers were trying to modernize was already always a function of industrial reproduction. Lovely. And yet, your music writers still can’t get over the desire to return to the original rural black acoustic singer — the completely unsupported sense that “he intended to be heard” as slow rather than fast — because of course, Johnson himself couldn’t have been the one who speeded up his playing on tape to make it sound more awesome. Only white people get to speed up and electrify his songs…

This is still under debate and the consensus is closer to the standard recordings than the slowed down ones. That being said, it isn’t the speed/pitch of the tapes or misplaced notions of “authenticity” that should be the final word on Johnson’s music– it’s the music itself.

There’s a great biography about Johnson, his peers and their myth called Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. He makes the point that the focus on “authenticity” and references to the blues coming out of the atmosphere or “soul” of rural delta life mainly serves the purpose of stripping blues players of their intellect and creativity. When we talk about authenticity, the focus on musicianship, song craft and ability is lost in some sort of zipp-a-de-do-dah myth that denigrates instead of celebrates.

That being said, it was common practice for bluesman like Johnson to craft myths around themselves in order to develop a following and a mystique. Think of it as a means of marketing before the era of music marketing. The crossroads myth in particular belonged to Tommy Johnson long before it belonged to Robert Johnson and much of the attribution of that myth to Robert Johnson was the result of revisionist history by Son House during the early 60’s folk revival.

Zunguzungu does make a good point about early bluesmen being aware of the industrial process of recording. Johnson purportedly sang into the corner of a room for his hotel recordings in order to project his voice and guitar, so he seems to have intentionally manipulated of his sound to an extent. He certainly didn’t live in an isolation chamber of Delta authenticity. Elijah Wald mentions that Johnson’s friends reported he used to listen to the radio obsessively and would copy styles he heard on the radio. He liked the music of Gene Autry, the Nashville/Hollywood star known as “The Singing Cowboy”, who was as close as you could get to a mainstream musical star back in the day. (EVEN WHITE MUSIC! OH NO! OUR NOTION OF AUTHENTICITY IS SLIPPING AWAY! )

Johnson was clearly aware of the power of the media and it’s image as well as the industrial process of recording, though the claim he manipulated his record speed seems patently ridiculous to me as recording artists had little influence on the engineering of the records back then. They just sang. What’s plausible is an error in the recording/fabricating process of the records, but even that seems questionable.

I’d like to call Clapton a wang. Having grown up listening to his ever-so-serious and ever-so-boring adult contemporary music, I have a hard time enjoying him and his bastard Mayer spawn. “He’s a wang!” I say, but… I don’t really think that’s relevant.

Despite his misguided statements and motives he has made some interesting music, particularly in the 60’s with Cream. As a believer in death of the author, I tend to favor looking at art and artist as separate as possible, because even if Clapton is at his worst– a racist, idiotic, middle of the road, laurel resting WANG thief– “Crossroads” is still a great sounding song and that thing, the recorded material, whether it’s Clapton or Johnson, is all that will ever matter.

Amy Winehouse lost the job of performing the theme song to the new James Bond film due to her inability to stay clean–the gig eventually went to the team of White Stripes’ Jack White and Alicia Keys

But according to the Telegraph UK, Winehouse is threatening to release the version of the Bond theme in order to show the flim (SIC) producers that they have “made a big mistake.”

Said Winehouse, “I guess they are going for clean-cut and boring. When I do release mine – and I am tempted to do it on the same day – this would be the bigger hit…If they change their minds, I’m waiting.”

Yes… those other musicians are such commercial phonies. They’re not indie enough to do the theme for a James Bond movie. The tabloid junkie British soul singer in the cleopatra make-up is obviously the “authentic” one. She’s going to prove she’s legit by selling more records– the true measure of a successful artist.