Richard Shurman

[When I was in college at the University of Chicago], these legendary blues artists used to pick me up at my dormitory and drive me to their gigs to tape record them, keep an eye on me, and drop me off at home, and if I needed to be protected÷I mean I never had any serious problems, but I knew they were there. I mean one of them actually lied to his manager that he was going to take a tape away from me so I could keep recording. People were very nice, it was a very open scene, that was one of the nice things about it÷you know, you get this Îrock star complexâ and blues artist donât tend to have that, they tend to have a much closer kind of relationship with the audience, they donât set themselves up above people so much and they donât isolate themselves as much.

I used to make a lot of tapes in clubs back in those days, that was kinda what lured me in. Actually the first Îstudioâ thing I did was because I had just made a tape in a club and a person who was doing a record with a Maxwell street harmonica player asked me if I could bring my tape recorder, which was better than the one he had, to his basement.

I just got into [studio work] because a lot of my friends were into it and some of the people in the business knew that there were certain artists I got along with really well, and I knew a lot about some artists and their repertoires, so they would bring me into the picture to help work with people. The more I started learning the more I started just doing it myself. I learned a whole lot from Bruce [Iglaur], we did a whole lot of projects together. I learned more from him than anybody.

The whole concept of a producer didnât exist back in the old days when people were going out doing field recordings. Thatâs basically what people like Lester Melrose and Williams were doing in Chicago but they werenât being called that and the phenomenon of a producer came along later as the studio environment got more sophisticated. I think that as it becomes a more complicated technical environment that captures the music, sometimes the focus tends to be less on just the people who make the music happen and more on the people who are capable of running something thatâs like the cockpit of an airplane, and Iâm not always sure if thatâs good or bad, thereâs always the danger of the music being subordinated to the technology and thatâs something you have to be careful of.

Thereâs always been some of the field recording ethos, [the effort to preserve the sound without changing it], and Iâve got an undergraduate degree in anthropology so I understand all of that, the stuff about interjecting yourself and all that. You know, in a way thatâs true but I find that some of these new southern labels, I mean they may seem to do that, but theyâre bending the blues to a conceptual framework too. I mean, you can bring a definition and find people that fit that definition better than other people and in a way thatâs similar. You know, naturalism is what you make of it.

I tend to look at it that a producerâs job is not to dominate, but to be prepared to do whatâs necessary to help the artist get the best out of themselves. Some people have it more together, I mean I love it÷itâs not that Iâm lazy÷but the less work I have to do because the artist had the concept together, thatâs great, but itâs not equal. I mean, the last project I did, the guy knew pretty much how every note needed to sound and all I had to do was help him execute it, just get it on tape well and all that stuff. But the project before that, the guy came in and I had to keep asking myself whether the person really wanted to be doing the project. There was no preparation or motivation. And in a case like that sometimes you just have to help pull things together, get the material together, get the arrangements together, figure out who the sidemen are going to be, so I always tell the artists, I promise to try it your way first if you promise to listen to what I think about it.

Also, if you are recording an artist who is basically pristine, or hasnât recorded in a long time, or has never recorded, you know theyâve got their whole stage show that, subject to its quality, you can record. But, when youâre dealing with an artist whoâs recorded six or seven albums, over a period of about that many years, youâve probably recorded almost every lick and every song that they do on stage. Yet theyâve got to have a new record out just to keep the embers glowing, keep their career going, and the company needs stuff in the catalog. In that case, you have to be more creative to come up with something to record, because youâve done the bandstand stuff.

Itâs different communicating when youâve got the energy of the audience to interact with as opposed to a relatively sterile situation [of the studio] where basically the main interaction is with the band and the producer. Thereâs a vibe that gets going there, and some people thrive in that situation more, but some thrive live. I mean I know some artists who would rather be in an empty room because they donât like to feel like theyâre being judged while theyâre playing, but I work with Johnny Winter, and he basically plays to show off. I mean, heâd be happy if there were 50 women in front of him while heâs recording. Heâd be in heaven. But the vibe is a big difference, and of course the studio is a more forgiving environment in a lot of ways because you can stop in the middle of a song and start again, itâs easier to set up an environment where you can control the peakage between instruments, and you can do overdubs and repairs if you need to. Basically when recording started out the idea was to capture a live performance as faithfully as you could, now with the studio you can go way beyond that, but I think for good blues recordings you still want to capture a credible live performance, not something that feels completely that it was synthesized in the studio. you still like to have call and response, you still like to feel like thereâs some spontaneity there, and not playing along with a quicktrack, or I know times when people have started to quicktrack or even overdub the drums. I would never want to work that way. I like to get a band playing with each other as much as possible.

Part of the charm of blues is when blues was more culture-specific music during the prewar period and early postwar period. There was a lot of jargon, a lot of slang just like all the voodoo references, like mojos and john the conqueror roots, I mean Willie Dixonâs songs were full of those kinds of allusions to the folk tradition and voodoo tradition and black cultural experience, but when blues became a larger commodity and people were trying to sell it to a larger market, those things were looked at as a hindrance because it was felt that the kind of people who would be hearing these tunes wouldnât understand the references and that could be a bad thing.

One of my favorite artists of all time, who is unfortunately dead, is a guy named Johnny Hartzman. He and I had a pretty good talk about [the way blues changed when it came to the city] and the way he said it pretty much sums it up: everythingâs faster and louder and harder. And that reflects the pace of the city and it just reflects changing times, things are faster, cycles are shorter, people talk louder, people talk faster, people walk faster, and thatâs definitely a big part of it. And of course the amplification has been associated with the urban situation but Iâm not so sure thatâs as straight of a correlation as people sometimes think, I mean if the music had stayed in the country, I suspect it still would have been amplified because people were still getting together in loud rooms down there where they needed to hear the music, so I think it still would have become that way. You hear stories about people like Sonny Boy Williamson who used to amplify themselves in ways like hooking their mic up to a jukebox and stuff like that or [artists who] played through some kind of a public address system so you know, I kind of suspect that amplification would work itâs way into the music even if it hadnât coincided with the great urban migration. Certainly the city tended to have more sophisticated bands and things going on, and some of that sophistication spilled over. Blues did become more of a band music, and the whole subject matter changed, you donât have a song about picking cotton if you grew up in Cabrini Green, itâs just as tough, but itâs a different life.

Somebody quoted Leonard Chess about what was important in a song, and he said, Îdrums drums drums.â When he would actually intervene back in the early days of Chess [Records] and interject himself into the music, he would kick the bass drum to give a song more oomph. I think thatâs definitely a part of it, as it became more of a city dance music and a jukebox kind of music, the beat became more important and the role of the rhythm section. Part of that was with the technology too, when youâve got one mic up in a big room, if you listen to old recordings, the definition in the pieces of the drum kits is just nonexistent. When youâve got nine tracks of drums in a 24 track recording, you can hear every fiber of every brush on the cymbal. It makes a difference. But the importance of the beat in the music became much much more ascendant. Critical, letâs put it that way. The ultimate expression of that exaggeration was rock and roll where the beat was the center. the composition of the bands [also changed]÷you had more horn players and saxophonists, harmonica and slide guitar sort of fell by the wayside, horn sections filled a lot of those kind of roles instead÷although that too was probably kind of overrated, a lot of harmonica players were trying to play like the horn sections anyhow, and a lot of guitar players tried to play like horn players.

Basically [the first people to record blues] were eastern European Jewish immigrants recording black people who had gone to the same population centers. I think that kind of changed over time because the demographic was different on both sides of it, you had the black people who had grown up in the city and you had the immigrantsâ children who were much more mainstreamed into American society, too. And also maybe suburban society because you know, Leonard Chess grew up in a Polish ghetto and Marshall Chess grew up out in Skokie or something like that, so there was a certain symmetry to that kind of difference. And I think maybe the people who had the companies lost a little bit of touch with roots in the same way that the artists lost touch with roots, or that the roots changed. You know, on both sides of the fence it was disappearing generations, although I think that the people who started the companies tended to disappear with a little healthier bank account than the artists who built those bank accounts did.

Hereâs a little example: [blues artist] Arthur ÎBig Boyâ Crudup who came out of the fields, and worked in the fields his whole life÷even in the last couple decades of his life he was a migrant workersâ crew chief, heâd round up these guys and oversee them while they were picking whatever the crops were÷he never really saw much of anything. Dick Waterman has some very poignant stories of trying to get him his royalties. Anyway, he came to Chicago and recorded all of these immortal songs that people are still covering, and with decent legal protection his family would be set for generations and generations from the songwriting royalties, but during the time that he was recording these songs that made him a household word in the blues community, he was living in an abandoned packing crate under one of the El stops on the south side. You know, he was living like this, who got the money? Thereâs case after case like this.

I started thinking about this when Billy Boy Arnold, who was a Chicago harmonica player, talked to me about this, and his point was that even within the black community there are levels of differentiation and stature and they have to do partly with what part of town people live in. The west side was always more hardscrabble, more impoverished, more recent southern migrants, there were parts of the south side that were more established, had more of a thriving black culture, maybe more like vintage Harlem. The west side never really got that progressive of a level of black community together. Billy Boyâs point was the difference between the blues people, I mean his differentiation was the jazz people, but basically the blues people were the ones who came from the south and werenât educated, werenât cultured, were more impoverished, and tended to live more on the northern part of a black community, like in the thirties or forties numbered streets. The jazz people would tend to live a little farther to the south where the homes were newer and nicer and the communities hadnât been black as long. I mean even today, the average jazz club in the city is further south than the average blues club, I mean the blues street was maybe 47th street and the jazz street was 75th street. I think itâs important to recognize that distinction thatâs always been the case, and the way the blues people fit into their new communities where they live. Within their group of people who had moved up there they had stature, but within the community at large I would suggest that they lost stature when they moved to the cities. I mean a blues person out in the country was somebody÷he might be the one person who was lucky enough to avoid picking cotton every day, although the plantation owners didnât like to see that happen, they liked to make those guys work because you didnât want anybody setting an example of a way to avoid it. They didnât want a paradigm that provided an alternative. So a blues person who was doing good, he could come to a plantation, lay up, find a woman who would like him because he had a few dollars in his pocket, let her take care of him, and lay around until Friday night, Saturday night, when the dances rolled around. Up in the city within the blues community, yes, there certainly was that kind of stature, but within the community at large, the average blues singer was pretty much looked down upon. So, there definitely was a perception there, the jazz people always thought they were more, you know, more sophisticated further along the social ladder and things like that than the blues people who came during the migration and after the migration. Thereâs definitely some snobbery involved in that, itâs much more pronounced if you go to Detroit, if you say jazz itâs like Îof course,â if you say blues, itâs like Îtuck your shirt in and shine your shoes, then come back and talk to me.â