sweartotellthetruth

Swear to Tell the Truth for Tuesday, April 30, 2013 (1:00-2:30 pm)

The feature will be a selection of blues artists of the 1920s. Emphasis on guitars rather than pianos. (We avoid using the misleading term “country blues”.) We’ll be playing tracks recorded between 1926 and 1931. A surprising number of the artists who recorded in this time period never recorded afterwards and the recording industry of the 1930s was much different from the industry of the previous decade.

While the record companies could create a studio sound about the classic and vaudeville singers who made records in the twenties, blues and country records by southern artists on stringed instruments in the late 1920s had less of the studio and the songwriters’s hand in them. What came out on record was more exactly what the performers brought with them. This began to change significantly in the 1930s with the shift to combo sounds and, sometimes, studio groups who backed different artists from one session to another.

On the show: 

Blind Lemon – Jaybird Coleman – Peg Leg Howell & His Gang –  Sleepy John Estes – The Two Poor Boys – Katie Webster – Spade Cooley – Original Sloth Band – Jackie Shane & Frank Motley – and others, of course.

Listen to the program at FM 93.3 in Hamilton or on CFMU online at cfmu.mcmaster.ca. The program will be available to stream or as a podcast until May 27th.

Contact Us

To reach us with comments or queries, write us at sweartotellthetruth@gmail.com.

You can also follow the program at sweartotellthetruth@nosignifying on Twitter.

Next week (May 7th)

Our feature on Louis Jordan, tracking the full extent of his career as a recording artist. Louis Jordan can justly be called the father of Rhythm & Blues and the dominant figure of R&B’s classic era. He influenced many artists in the blues field not just as a musician and singer but as a performer.

Still waiting to hear about the soon to be available CFMU app, which will allow people to listen to CFMU programs on mobile devices.

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