Description
Before there was the bluesman there was the songster and it was these travelling troubadours who helped lay the foundations for the development of the blues.
This selection features variations on traditional ballads about legendary characters Stagger Lee and John Henry. These became standards in the repertoires of songsters, both black and white, who shared a similar colour-blindness when it came to the racial origins of a tune. Frank Hutchison and Dick Justice were both white performers whose styles were heavily influenced by black musicians, in particular Luke Jordan whose featured track Pick Poor Robin Clean is a gambling song masterpiece. Like Jordan, many other well-known East Coast songsters such as Blind Blake and Peg Leg Howell worked with travelling shows, which became a major factor in the spreading of the blues. Many of these shows were operated by vendors of patent medicines who would attract crowds by putting on a performance. As these shows began to disappear and recorded music and dancing in duke joints became popular, so the older songster style became less fashionable.
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