Bluebird Blues

By: Terry Currier

Article Reprint from the January 1998 BluesNotes
Blues in History Index

The 1920s was the Golden Decade for Blues music and recording. Almost every recording company was making trips to the South to record Blues music. As Blues fans, we can be thankful that this happened, even though, usually, their motivation was for the money and not the music.

Then came the 1930s and the Great Depression. Jazz became the popular music for Black music listeners. The end result was inevitable. Due to the declining demand and a shortage of money, there was less interest in recording Blues music. Some of the major recording companies still made some Blues recordings, but less time and effort was put into the recording process. Instead of making sure they had the best take of a song, they were more inclined to just make one take. To try to assure that the one take was decent, they used more in-house musicians as a backup band. These were musicians they knew were no nonsense people and would get it down the first time. This might have taken away some of the feelings of the music and sterilize the recordings, and it probably did to some degree. However, if you look at who some of the in-house players were, you know why many of the end results were so incredible.

Victor Records was one of the major companies who continued to make regular Blues recordings during the 1930s. Let's take a look at some of the changes they made because of economic changes and a decline in consumer demand.

Records in those days were 10 inch, 78 RPMs consisting of one song per side. Whenever you hear or read that so many sides were cut, it is the same as saying so many songs were cut. The exception to this is when the song is very long. Then they were usually labeled Part One on one side and Part Two on the other side.

Blues records in the late 1920s were about 75 cents each. During the Depression, record sales dropped tremendously. Victor, like many other companies, dropped their prices a bit - especially on their Blues releases. They transferred the Blues records to the Bluebird label and sold them for just 35 cents. In order to still make money at these prices, Victor trimmed everything to the bone. Besides going to the one-take a song method and using in-house musicians to backup the featured artist, they went from cutting four to eight sides a day to jamming in up to 40 songs in a day.

The Bluebird label recorded mostly Blues and Jazz and only occasionally recorded anything outside these boundaries. Lester Melrose was the man who found most of the talent for Bluebird. He was both talent scout and recording producer. For the most part, he had a monopoly on the Chicago Blues market, where Victor was based. He was savvy enough to listen to many of the label staff musicians and use them to find some of Bluebird's best talent. One such musician / talent scout Melrose used was guitarist, Big Bill Broonzy. The staff musicians at Bluebird were top-notch, and in addition to Broonzy, they included Blind John Davis (piano), Roosevelt Sykes (piano), Washboard Sam (washboard), and Ransom Knowling (bass), among others. The faces changed, but they always had the best. Even though they used their cookie cutter approach to making records, some of the finest Blues records of the 1930s were on Bluebird. If an artist lasted for awhile on the label, they sometimes were given more latitude and had more flexibility to "do their own thing" or bring in outside musicians.

Bluebird had some impressive names record for the label, including: Memphis Slim, Big Maceo, Bill "jazz" Gillum, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Tommy McClennan, Sonny Boy Williamson (John Lee), Robert Lee McCoy, Bo Carter, Lil' Grew, Lonnie Johnson, Walter Davis, Leadbelly, and Big Bill Broonzy.

Bluebird all but ceased making Blues records in 1942. Like many other raw materials, shellac, the material used to make records, was being rationed because of the United States' entry into World War II. Later that year, J. C. Patrillo, the President of The American Federation Of Musicians, ordered a ban on all recording. The Patrillo Act lasted almost two years. Bluebird came back to life, but so did many new, independent labels. As the new labels started to flourish and take away some of the marketplace sales, Victor decided it was time to shut down the Bluebird division of Race Records.

Some of these old Bluebird recordings surfaced through the following years and later through RCA who purchased Victor. In the 1970s, RCA began reissuing many of the Bluebird catalog on LP. However, after just a short period, they stopped reissuing and the titles that had come out were soon out of print. This past year, RCA put out the first in what is supposed to be a continuing effort to reissue Bluebird recordings on compact discs. These will continue unless sales fall off RCA's projected expectations. These are some very important recordings that have not seen the light of day for some time. Most of them focus on individual artists and some feature unissued sides and takes. They include: Memphis Slim, Big Maceo, Tommy McClennan, Robert Lee McCoy, Bill "Jazz" Gillum, Tampa Red and Sonny Boy Williamson. A collective work of four women Blues artists include Memphis Minnie, Mississippi Matilda, Kansas City Kitty, and Miss Rosie Mae Moore. I would like to hope these will stay in print for years to come, but history says, "better pick them up now while you can!"