During the Blues boom of the late 1920′s practically all of the talent lived and worked in the Southern States, whilst the record companies and their studios tended to based in the North. So every year each of the major labels would embark on a tour of likely cities or large towns in the South, armed with mobile recording facilities, searching for unsigned singers and recording new songs by those they’d already signed on previous visits. And when they left, the artists would get on with their lives again until the next visit.

Columbia Records usually visited twice a year - in Spring and in Autumn. In the first visit in 1927 they came across Robert Hicks. Robert was working as a chef in a barbecue restaurant in Atlanta and performing in his spare time, often in the same restaurant. That will explain why his first recording was called ’Barbecue Blues’. In their wisdom Columbia decided to photograph Bob in full chef’s gear to promote the song and rechristen him, ’Barbecue Bob’. They knew what they were doing and ’Barbecue Blues’ became a very big hit, selling 15,000 copies and making Bob Columbia’s biggest Black star up to that point.

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In Gus Cannon you can trace almost the entire history of early 20^th Century black American music.

He was born into poverty in 1883. By 1900 he’d already made his own banjo (supposedly from an abandoned saucepan and a raccoon skin). He’d taught himself to play it. Then decided he’d work out how to play ‘slide banjo’ with a knife blade as the slide. And he’d run away from home, eventually spending several years as a musician in travelling Medicine Shows which used music to attract customers to listen to the pitches of the quacks.

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Like many pre-war blues men, Sleepy John got around by hitching free lifts on trains. Usually this meant jumping onto (hopefully) slow moving trains and hiding away in the empty freight carriages for free. Given that a phenomenal amount of pre-war blues men were blind, this could help explain why many of them seemed to simply disappear without trace mid career. When Sleepy John recorded this song about hitching and getting ditched from freight trains by the Railroad Police while on the way to a recording session, he’d already lost one eye in a baseball game accident.

Also like many pre-war blues men, Sleepy John disappeared for 20 or so years from around 1941. He did make a brief reappearance in 1952 but as he disappeared again soon afterwards, everyone assumed he had then died. He was eventually rediscovered in the early ’60′s, by then blind in both eyes and desperately poor. He made a triumphal return at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival.

‘Special Agent’ is not his most famous song but it is the one that shows off his wonderful and wonderfully expressive voice best. I guarantee after hearing it you will never be able to say or hear the word ‘manifest’ again without remembering this song.

Released 1938.

Available on practically every Sleepy John compilation but best to buy the definitive Document Records CD ‘Complete Recorded Works In Chronological Order Volume 2, 2 August 1937 – 24 September 1941′: Amazon

With Papa Charlie Jackson we’re right back at the birth of recorded blues. But not quite.

First of all, although Papa Charlie was probably the first man to release a self-accompanied blues track on vinyl (in 1924), he wasn’t actually the first artist to do so – several female singers had beaten him to it. Yes, the recorded blues was in its first few years a female phenomenon.

Secondly, although he recorded that blues track in 1924, Papa Charlie wasn’t really a true blues singer after all. Before he started recording he was actually a fairly well known street singer and busker in Chicago. Being a busker he played requests and therefore needed to have a wide variety of styles other than blues in his repertoire – from vaudeville to traditional songs to comedy songs to ‘white’ songs. And when he started recording, all these styles were evident in his songs. Blues was only one style he adopted and if you listen to even his most blues-like recordings it’s apparent that he just wasn’t as emotionally intense a performer as was necessary to be considered a bona fide late 192o’s blues singer. This accounts to some extent for why he has never got the acclaim he deserves in the history of the blues.

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