When NASA was preparing to launch the Voyager spacecraft to research the outer planets of our solar system in 1977, they realized that Voyager was eventually going to drift off into the cosmos and might eventually pass near other solar systems like our own. While we humans are mostly known for our brilliant hindsight, we occasionally display incredible instances of foresight as well. The Voyager Golden Record was one of them. With the earlier Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft, NASA had included a small plaque with a depiction of a male and female human and information about the location of our solar system in case either craft was found by intelligent life several millenia down the road. For the Voyager program, NASA decided to include more. Using a combination of audio and visual media, the Voyager Golden Record was designed to represent what life on Earth was like for the benefit of any curious extraterrestrials who may stumble across the spacecraft on its travels. By the time Voyager reaches another solar system that may host intelligent life, it will have been beyond our range of contact for many thousands of years, but aliens studying the Golden Record may be able to establish contact with whatever form of civilization may still exist on Earth. Or, if not, at least they could learn that there is other life in the cosmos and gain insights into what that life may be like.
To assemble the Golden Record, NASA appointed Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan and a small team to choose an array of music, images, and sounds. Somehow, within a limited window of time, Sagan's team produced a selection that offers a surprisingly comprehensive view of life on Earth. The musical pieces and recorded greetings represent cultures from across the globe. The "sounds of Earth" and the images included on the record represent everything from the natural world to man's greatest achievements to everyday human occurences like the sound of a kiss or the appearance of a supermarket.
For part of my portfolio project in Dr. Falcone's ethnomusicology class, I am supposed to provide an annotated list of what I would include if I were compiling something similar to the Voyager Golden Record. I do not for a minute entertain the notion that I could by myself compile a better representative sample of the sounds and images of Earth than what Sagan's team put together. I can think of very few ways their selections, particularly their music selections could be improved upon. If I were asked to reevealuate the project, I would keep almost all of what was on the record and make only a few minor substitutions. So, you may ask, how am I going to complete this assignment if I don't have any good ideas for how to assemble my own comprehensive Golden Record?
Fortunately, modern technology has given me a cop out. In 1977, analog was the only way to record lots of data in a small space. The Golden Record team was able to get ninety minutes of music onto one record, but they couldn't add an additional record because it would have added more weight to the spacecraft. In 2013, with the staggering abilities of digital compression, I can fit several months worth of music into a lightweight hard drive that fits in the palm of my hand. Now I do not know how well digital technology would hold up on a journey of several thousand lightyears across the galaxy compared with a sturdier analog record, but if it would be possible to put Earth's 2013 message to the aliens onto some sort of digital device, the amount of data we could include would be immense. And we could include not only images, sounds, and greetings, but also more detailed translation guides and all manner of scientific diagrams that would show the current state of our technology and scientific understanding. We could also include literature, movies, and all manner of things that would simply have required too much data to share on an analog disc. So perhaps the best solution for a 2013 voyager successor would be to include a Golden Record with the most important items, and then a digital device with whatever additional content we wished to share.
At this point in my life, it is highly unlikely that someone would ask me to oversee the whole project. I am simply not experienced enough to be able to select the most essential items from the necessary broad array of disciplines. The only two subjects I currently know enough about to be considered any sort of expert are blues music and geography. For the potential vast trove of digital data, it would be quite possible to compile a series of individual playlists focusing on various broad categories of music, ranging from Western popular music to traditional East Asian music, and within some of the broadest categories, further subcategorizations could be made. If Western popular music were broken down into subcategories, the blues would have to be one of them. The blues itself is far from the most popular music, but it has been such an important part of shaping other Western styles (mostly American in origin), such as jazz, R&B, soul, and rock and roll. So there is my very long and highly complicated explanation of why I am focusing on the blues for my Golden Record assignment.
For this list, I have tried to strike a balance between tracing the development of blues music and highlighting some of the most famous and influential performances. I have done my best to organize these performances in chronological order, with the exception of those that demonstrate the early influences that led to the development of the blues, which are of course grouped at the beginning of the list regardless of performance date. I also limited myself to no more than ninety minutes of music so that the playlist could fit on an actual version of the Golden Record.
So here, finally, is my list of items for the blues playlist on the hypothetical future spacecraft:
1. West African Drumming--The origins of blues music, the rhythms, the bent notes, the unique instrumental styles, lie in West Africa, where many different tribal traditions, as well as the occasional Islamic influence, were funneled through the slave ports in present-day nations such as Ghana, Guinea, and Senegal along with the unfortunate human cargo. The polyrhythms present in African drumming provided an important basis for the rhythmic emphasis of blues and jazz music. A good example of a selection to include is the track entitled "Akuapim Drumming" from the collection The Norton Jazz Recordings, which features a performance from a tribe in Ghana.
2. West African Stringed Instruments--African music is about much more than just drumming, as I learned when I saw the Malian band Ngoni Ba perform with American banjo player Bela Fleck. Stringed instruments are an important part of West African music, just as the stringed guitar is the dominant instrument of the blues. For early blues players, a guitar was cheap and portable, but stringed instruments also have the advantage of allowing a musician to bend notes and create tones similar to the human voice, an important part of African music. A good example of a selection to include is the song "Tamalah" from Corey Harris's album Mississippi to Mali featuring Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure. On this album, Harris traveled to Mali to explore the roots of the blues and found a rich musical tradition in Mali, once the home of West Africa's most powerful empire, which combined Sub-Saharan and Islamic influences.
3. Lining Hymn--One of the early precursors to the blues in the American South was the African American spiritual. While whites discouraged the performance of traditional African music, they could hardly complain about blacks singing Christian-themed songs. However, African Americans sang hymns in a very different manner from whites. Instead of singing in unison, they sang in polyphony, with each singer embellishing the theme slightly to make a more compelling whole. Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax recorded an example of such a hymn on his expedition to the Mississippi Delta in the early 1940s, and it appears on the album Blues in the Mississippi Night.
4. Work Song: Don't You Hear Po' Mother Callin'?--Probably the most important and most immediate precursor to the blues in the American South was the African American work song. Blacks working in the cotton fields, the levee camps, or the prison farms would invent a snatch of song and embellish it with their own vocal nuances to express themselves as they worked. Such songs provided the themes for many early blues songs. Work songs allowed blacks to vent about their troubles in a nondestructive and even a creative manner. Alan Lomax recorded several work songs during his 1940s Delta expedition when he visited Parchman Farm, the notorious Mississippi state penitentiary. "Don't You Hear Po' Mother Callin'?" is sung by a gang of prisoners led by two inmates nicknamed Bull and Hollie Dew as they work, and the accompanying percussion is the sound of their hoes striking the ground.
5. Pony Blues--Charlie Patton--By the time Charley Patton recorded "Pony Blues" in 1929, the blues had already been around for at least a couple of decades, probably more. However, so had Charley Patton, who probably wrote "Pony Blues," his most successful song, sometime around 1910. Patton lived in the Mississippi Delta, a floodplain in northwestern Mississippi that was home to some of the best cotton-growing land in the South. Perhaps because jobs on cotton farms and in levee camps in the Delta drew blacks from elsewhere in the South, the the Mississippi Delta produced an extremely high concentration of great early blues musicians. Charley Patton became the first "star" of the Delta blues scene. His performance style was flamboyant, his guitar playing was highly accomplished, and his gruff voice was very commanding. His music and performance style influenced many other blues musicians who grew up in the Mississippi Delta, from Robert Johnson to Howlin' Wolf.
6. My Black Mama, Pt. 1--Son House--Son House was another important and influential figure in the Delta blues. His performance style was far more conservative than Patton's, but his singing and guitar playing were no less captivating. He was one of the main influences on Robert Johnson, who would take many Son House guitar figures and adapt them into some of the most familiar licks in the blues. This is a rare example of Son House's playing from his earliest recordings.
7. St. Louis Blues--Bessie Smith--For this performance, I am deviating slightly from chronological order because it was recorded before either of the two previous selections, but I wanted to include the Delta blues first because of its foundational influence on so much of the rest of the blues tradition. Bessie Smith's version of the W.C. Handy-penned classic "St. Louis Blues" falls into the category known as Classic Female Blues, which was the first type of blues to be recorded. Although labeled blues, Classic Female Blues was actually an intersection of blues and jazz, which were much more closely related in the 1920s than they are now. The singers sang in a blues style, but many of the musicians were jazz musicians, such as Louis Armstrong, whose cornet graces this performance. The performances were decidedly more urban and clean than the Delta blues and other country blues styles. However, the Classic Female Blues was still an important period in the early development of both blues and jazz.
8. Cross Road Blues--Robert Johnson--Robert Johnson has become a legendary figure in the history of the blues. Despite his few recordings, he transformed the way blues was played twice. Music researcher Eric W. Rothenbuhler claims that Johnson was the first country blues musician to develop a "for-the-record" aesthetic, and this led him to take the freeform Delta blues pattern and craft coherent performance pieces and then innovate the guitar techniques necessary to perform such songs in a solo setting. When Johnson's work was rediscovered by young British musicians such as Eric Clapton and Keith Richards in the 1960s, his worked was a major catalyst for the more blues-influenced bands among the British Invasion.
9. Call It Stormy Monday--T-Bone Walker--In addition to being on of the most covered blues songs of all time and an all-around excellent performance, 1947's "Call It Stormy Monday" features an early example of the electric guitar in the blues. Walker's style is heavily jazz influenced, which may be part of the reason that he was the first blues musician to adopt the electric guitar. He knew Charlie Christian, who had pioneered the electric guitar in jazz bands, where the amplification allowed the instrument to be heard over loud brass sections. Unlike other blues musicians in the 1940s, Walker took advantage of more than just the volume of the electric guitar, becoming one of the first to develop a playing style that took advantage of the unique capabilites of the instrument.
10. I Can't Be Satisfied--Muddy Waters--One of Muddy Waters's first recordings for Chess Records upon his arrival on the Chicago blues scene, "I Can't Be Satisfied" signalled a new energy in Chicago Blues. Blues musicians had settled in Chicago before the war, but the new wave of migrants who flooded in after World War II, many of them from the Mississippi Delta, brought with them a new sound that would grow into the classic Chicago Blues sound that we know today and that would also have a huge influence on rock and roll.
11. Boogie Chillen--John Lee Hooker--"Boogie Chillen" has much the same significance as "I Can't Be Satisfied," altough it was recorded in Detroit rather than Chicago. It also introduces John Lee Hookers unique rhythmic sense that includes a trademark style of guitar boogie that has since been adopted by many musicians and bands.
12. Shake, Rattle, and Roll--Big Joe Turner--"Shake, Rattle, and Roll" is one of the most important songs in the transition from blues to R&B to early rock and roll. R&B developed toward the end of World War II from a combination of bluesy rhythms and big band instrumentation. Later, in the mid 1950s, musicians such as Ike Turner, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry would place a greater emphasis on guitar and pump up the lively rhythms even more to produce rock and roll. "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" was a big success for Kansas City R&B shouter Big Joe Turner, and it charted even higher when it was covered by the early rock band Bill Haley and the Comets.
13. Mannish Boy--Muddy Waters--One of Muddy Waters's biggest hits, "Mannish Boy" demonstrates the Chicago Blues sound that emerged when electric guitar was paired with amplified harmonica, played in this example by Little Walter. "Mannish Boy" is also one of Waters's best vocal performances, and it demonstrates an overt African American masculinity that goes far beyond what would have been acceptable in the South at that time.
14. Smokestack Lightnin'--Howlin' Wolf--Howlin' Wolf was Muddy Waters's main rival on the Chicago blues scene in the 1950s and '60s. His gruff voice and the playing of his guitarist Hubert Sumlin inspired many white blues-rock musicians. Like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf displayed a strong masculinity is his singing and performance style.
15. How Blue Can You Get?--B.B. King--While the Chicago blues sound of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf was fairly rough, B.B. King was developing a smoother sound with a broader crossover appeal. His horn-driven band was punctuated by fluid guitar playing and powerful singing, which are demonstrated well on this 1964 performance recorded live at Chicago's Regal Theater. And if aliens tens of thousands of years from now are wondering how to work an audience, they could do not better than to follow B.B. King's example.
16. Hoodoo Man Blues--Junior Wells with Buddy Guy--Hoodoo Man Blues was one of the first Chicago blues LPs, and it also signaled the arrival of a new generation as major players on the scene. Guitarist Buddy Guy had been playing electric guitar from a much earlier age than his forebears, and his sophisticated style shows it. Both he and Wells also had a more urban mindset that was much less strongly influenced by the rural South.
17. Born Under a Bad Sign--Albert King--Few guitarists could get as much out of a single note as Albert King. His hit Born Under a Bad Sign was recorded at Stax Records in Memphis, which normally recorded soul artists, and there is a bit of a soul flair to the horn accompaniments in the song. Albert King was one of the main influences on some of the guitarists who would go on to be recognized as all-time greats, such as Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
18. Crossroads--Cream--To truly tell the story of the blues, it is necessary to include some of the rock and roll music that was most strongly influenced by the blues. As Muddy Waters once sang, "The blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll." At no time were blues and rock more closely intertwined than during the British Invasion. Young British guitarists found blues records that had been discounted by many of their American counterparts and used their ideas to revitalize the young genre. No rock musician has been a stronger advocate for the blues than Eric Clapton, whose guitar playing drove the band Cream. With Crossroads, he took a Robert Johnson song and updated it with a driving rock rhythm and a highly electrified guitar part, while trying to remain true to his idea of what Johnson's music meant.
19. Voodoo Child (Slight Return)--Jimi Hendrix--"Voodoo Child" is a rock song, not a blues song, but it is an inspired extension of the paths that electric blues guitarists had laid before the intensely creative Jimi Hendrix. Something about the rhythm and the feel of the song is inherently bluesy, even if it definitey rock and roll. It is an excellent example of how an innovator can take a set of tools laid before him and create something entirely new, yet somehow still recognizable.
20. The Thrill Is Gone--B.B. King--"The Thrill Is Gone" was the biggest hit of B.B. King's career, and it demonstrates the ability for a blues artist to cross over into popular music territory. King's guitar playing and the overall feel of the song are very bluesy, but the smooth performance, especially with the backing strings, adds a pop element that propelled the song up the charts and has made it one of King's best remembered and most enduring songs.
21. Texas Flood--Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble--Texas Flood in 1983 was the album that signalled a resurgence in the popularity of blues music. With the end of the '60s, blues lost its black audience to soul music and its budding white audience to rock. Very few major blues artists emerged in the 1970s; instead, the few popular blues musicians were those who had already achieved widespread recognition in the '50s and '60s. Then, in 1983, a young white guitarist came along and dazzled audiences and fellow musicians with his incredibly accomplished guitar playing that was comparable to rock greats such as Jimi Hendrix. But despite his music's strong rock element, Stevie Ray Vaughan remained loyal to the blues throughout his career. His influence can be heard in the playing of multitudes of young guitarists who have emerged in the last two decades.
22. Damn Right, I've Got the Blues--Buddy Guy--Since embarking on a solo career toward the end of the '60s, Buddy Guy's guitar playing has displayed an increasingly strong rock influence while maintaining strong blues roots. In 1991, Buddy Guy re-entered the blues spotlight with the release of Damn Right, I've Got the Blues and several subsequent records. Next to B.B. King, he is probably the most recognized blues musician still living, and he is probably also the most accomplished living blues guitarist. "Damn Right" is a good example of how a blues musician from the classic Chicago Blues era has made a successful transition to a more modern and rock-oriented style and remains relevant to this day.
23. Jonny Lang--Lie to Me--Many talented blues musicians have emerged in the last two decades, but without more hindsight, it is difficult to tell whose music will stand the test of time. One of the most likely candidates is Jonny Lang. Lang began singing the blues and playing guitar at age fourteen, and released his breakthrough album Lie to Me two years later. While blues in the '70s, '80s, and early '90s had been dominated by older musicians (with the notable exception of Stevie Ray Vaughan), In the mid '90s Jonny Lang and fellow teenage blues guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd paved the way for younger musicians to launch successful careers in blues music, and now in 2013 there are many more nationally recognized young blues musicians than at any time since the 1960s.
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