Dead Voices: Phonography, Archaeology and Materiality

Richard Elliott, ‘Dead Voices’ presentation, June 2014

Dead Voices: Phonography, Archaeology and Materiality

Paper presented by Richard Elliott at ‘Musical Materialities in the Digital Age’, University of Sussex, 28 June 2014

This paper focuses on a range of issues affecting popular and vernacular musics

in the era of recorded sound. It seeks to highlight the ways in which recording adds lateness, or posthumousness, to musical creation. Edison originally

conceived the phonograph as primarily a memorial device and this aspect is still crucial to understanding sound reproduction. As a way of making concrete such philosophical concerns and of connecting to the broader project reflected in this

panel, I first consider the uses to which song collectors put recording technology during both fieldwork and in early studio recording sessions in the UK and USA. I

follow this with a consideration of how, with the growth of the record industry and the spread of recordings as the primary means by which many people came to know and understand vernacular music, the notion of collecting shifted from one

in which human beings were sought out for their songs to one in which recordings themselves were prized. The paper therefore engages briefly with

debates around phonography, the archive and memory work, as well as making reference to figures involved in song and record collecting, such as the Lomaxes, Moses Asch, Harry Smith and Joe Bussard. In terms of lateness, the focus here

is on the extent to which recordings and the voices contained within them are seen or heard as living or dead. As objects, recorded artefacts enable voices to

live on and artists to ‘enjoy’ posthumous careers. But of equal interest are the ‘lives’ of the objects themselves, which maintain a strange hold over consumers, demanding that we not abandon them, or that we at least mourn their passing.

Records gave voices an afterlife and people, in turn, give records an afterlife.


Dead Voices

As is often pointed out, Edison’s early predictions for the phonograph did not

grant as prominent a role to the recording of music as they did to the ability to the device to enable letter-writing, dictation and education. In his essay ‘The Phonograph and it Future’ (1878) Edison emphasized the importance of accurate

reproduction of testimony, whether legal, political or familial. The phonograph could be an accurate witness, forging a still-important connection between

memory and recorded sound.


However, more important perhaps than the device’s specific use was the ability

for recorded sound to become a business. As the phonograph and the gramophone became primarily connected with music, this business aspect is

point quickly evolved an already existing debate about various types of sound and music (real, fake, canned, live, authentic, inauthentic, artistic, commercial, and so on).

One of the quotations I’ve been constantly drawn back to during our project

[Ritual, Remembrance and Recorded Sound] is the following one from Christopher Small’s Music of the Common Tongue:

'Records have a dual nature, in that, while they are undoubtedly things, and things with a saleable value, they are bought in order to turn them back into

actions, that is to say performances, and for most people they are valued only so long as the performance they carry is itself valued; only the archivist values them as things in themselves.’

(Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue, p. 403)

This observation, made on the way towards Small’s theory of ‘musicking’, of music as process rather than thing, makes a lot of sense. But for me, it tends to

lead toward a false binary that recalls the speech/writing binary deconstructed by Jacques Derrida.

[slide accompanied by explanation of bullet points, not reproduced here]

Evan Eisenberg takes a more dialectic approach in The Recording Angel, a book about things people do – processes they go through – but also indubitably about

the value of recordings:


‘With tempting dialectic, funk suggests the following: music, having started out as

ritual, having then become a thing, now becomes a thang. The difference is profound. A thing is what you possess, a thang is what possesses you. A thing

occupies space, a thang occupies time and preoccupies people. A thing, above all, is private, a thang can be shared. As thang, music is again communal and celebratory.’

(Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel, p. 69)

Another aspect which I think is missing from both these observations is one that takes us back to Edison’s predictions: remembrance. To take another quotation,

and one that moves me closer to my case studies, Tony Russell, writing more than forty years ago, assessed the importance of old blues and folk recordings as

follows: ‘[T]he whole business of 'oral tradition' is being reshaped by new media; to scorn

the record is to ignore one of the most potent diffusers of folk-usable material [...] the enthusiastic response with which the early phonograph discs were greeted,

even among the poorest country people, proves that their advertisement as 'old time tunes' was fair. What southerners wanted to hear on record were, as an OKeh catalogue put it, 'melodies (which) will quicken the memory of the tunes of

yesterday'; melodies, that is, sung and played in traditional mode by musicians steeped in tradition.’

(Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites and Blues, 1970)

Writing, recording, documenting. These are processes too, things people do and

which will have unforeseen results, effects and affects. Documenting goes beyond being merely the device by which we ensure re-performance; documenting is also about individual and collective memory – and here I would

disagree with Eisenberg in that I wouldn’t draw such hasty distinctions between the individual and the communal. Personal memories, like personal rituals, are

collective anyway in that we all have them; to ‘intrude’ on someone’s private memory/ritual is to recognise in the other one’s own privacy and to therefore be aware of privacy as a shared quality.

What I think all these commenters would agree on, however, is the possibility of

recordings to bring dead voices to life again. And here the maker of recordings is able to pass the burden of witnessing and documenting on to new generations of listeners. We are able to witness the dead in a manner not so far removed from

that imagined by Edison.


Tom Waits, introducing the collection People Take Warning!, writes:

‘People stay alive in the stories we tell about them. These songs are the broken

shovels mended with bailing wire and the warning on old medicine bottles: they are the unheard voices of the poor singing about being poor.

Now the musicians that played on all these tunes reside in the same dimension of those days they were memorializing.

So, as the needle drops into the groove, the dead take that same needle and together we are knitting them all a new suit of flesh. And while the song plays we

believe these dry bones can live’

These songs come from collections and from collectors. In my contribution to the Ritual, Remembrance and Recorded Sound project I trace the evolution of

collecting from field recording to record collecting and back again.

[the following slides accompany an unscripted account of collecting and recording, not reproduced here. The scripted part of the talk resumes below.]



Reissues

The ‘Harry Smith Anthology’ can be seen as the ur-text of popular music reissuing, especially in the domain of American vernacular music. The combination of (pseudo) ethnomusicology (what we might call phonographic

fieldwork), rare record collecting, curation and philosophical reflection makes him something of a father figure to collector-curators like Joe Bussard, collector-

artists like Robert Crumb and Terry Zwigoff, and collector-philosophers such as John Fahey, Pat Conte, Ian Nagoski, and Dean and Scott Blackwood. The writer and cultural critic Luc Sante described the anthology as ‘a late milestone in the

folk-lyric stream of tradition’ and as ‘a treasure map of an ancient and now-hidden America’, noting: ‘In 1952, when its contents were only twenty or twenty-

five years old, they must have already seemed ancient. Now the culture they represent has entirely disappeared from the acknowledged face of the nation, although … it continues to lurk in its subconscious, the secret sharer of its

violence and yearning’ (Anthology 1997 reissue notes, 30-31).

With regard to remembrance and recorded sound, then, the anthology can be seen and heard as a place of last, lost and late things. It can be seen, heard, felt, smelled and tasted if one is able to access an original. And for those who are not,

these material factors are simulated in the latest reissue which comes courtesy of Mississippi Records.


Then there is Revenant, the label created by John Fahey and Dean Blackwood in

the mid-1990s to reissue obscure and out-of-print recordings and even imagined-but-never-released projects such as the fourth volume of Harry Smith’s

anthology. ‘John whispered the name to me—Revenant—like it was a powerful, secret thing.

I had to look it up: “a spirit who returns after a long absence.” John liked its Freudian connotations but told me that mostly he thought it sounded cool. I did,

too. I liked ghosts as much as anybody. Ornette, Beefheart, Dock Boggs. The names seemed incantatory, like if you said them to yourself enough times something big might happen. They were a few of

the archetypal figures around which the whole Revenant “raw musics” concept coalesced.’

(Dean Blackwood, text in ‘About’ section of revenantrecords.com site)


Materiality: Listening, Accessing, Recording

Following on from the foregoing, we should consider the experience of listening to this music on different formats and via different platforms. For example, the

difference between listening to a record on a 78 on an old gramophone, or a later radiogram, or reissued on vinyl, cassette, CD or MP3. Not just the different formats but the different fidelity of the playback devices, speakers, headphones

etc. A certain amount of phenomenological exploration could be carried out (and I am starting to try and analyse my experience of listening to 78s on a portable

gramophone). Even when we don’t have time for such study (and it is a feature of the increase and availability of access platforms that we don’t tend to spend time just listening), we should still note that there is clearly a different sound to music

coming out of a Victrola or a Decca than there is coming out of a hi-fi, a car stereo, a computer or a phone. As time goes on the possibility for the

simultaneity of all formats increases, even as older technologies are marked for obsolescence.

For a long time musicians have been recording music to sound old, deliberately ageing it to create old-sounding music in digital perfection. The use of analogue

recording technologies by Third Man Records is of note here. Third Man records in analogue (and direct to disc) as well as reissuing music previously reissued by Document: the Mississippi Sheiks, Charlie Patton, Blind Willie McTell. The 78

Project provides a detailed digital booklet accompanying its LP of recordings made on an old 78-cutter, emphasising a painstaking craft approach to recreating

old music. A number of things spoil the ‘perfection’ of the programme, showing we can’t go back in time. Consumers access the recordings via YouTube on a computer or via a vinyl LP or MP3s; most won’t have gramophones.

At the same time it’s important to note that people are able to listen past the

formats and playback devices, to connect to music. While issues of materiality


and fidelity may matter a great deal to audiophiles, media archaeologists, materialists and a significant cohort of music fans, there are still a vast majority

for whom access is access and sound is sound no matter what form it takes. Jonathan Sterne’s fascinating book on the MP3 shows how technologists have

been able to play on the human capacity to make sense of reduced signals when it comes to understanding mediated sounds, whether through telephones, televisions or iPods. And this returns me to the speech/writing dichotomy again.

Is the fetishization of format another way of evoking the metaphysics of presence? Is the thrill of the perfomative moment in which I hear a musical

recording in a way that exceeds the everyday equivalent to the process of musicking so beloved of Chris Small?

Dead Voices: Phonography, Archaeology and Materiality

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