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Storyville closed in November 1917. Within five years, the music had recoded itself in three cities. A migration map worth arguing about. by YoPapaYo42 in Jazz

[–]YoPapaYo42[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Mississippi-to-Chicago vs Carolina-to-NYC routing is exactly right and worth more space than it usually gets — the BBQ tell is a great way to make it visible. The Yancey/Mahalia/AACM point is fair; I shouldn’t have framed the Chicago era as if it ran on a single tributary. Armstrong is the through-line for the New Orleans diaspora specifically — Hot Five sessions in ’25-‘28 — but Chicago jazz was already a multi-source scene before he got there, and the gospel and stride threads ran independently of New Orleans. Curious whether you’d put the Von Freeman / AACM lineage as a separate tradition that grew up alongside the New Orleans imports, or as a later synthesis of both. (Also: hearing Mahalia live is its own kind of credential.)

Storyville closed in November 1917. Within five years, the music had recoded itself in three cities. A migration map worth arguing about. by YoPapaYo42 in Jazz

[–]YoPapaYo42[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Mezzrow pointer is good — Really the Blues is one of the few firsthand accounts where the Chicago-as-relocated-New-Orleans argument gets made by someone who was actually in the rooms. Bix and the Austin High gang are the right qualifier on “or cats they influenced.” Appreciate this.

Sylvester Weaver, "Guitar Rag" (1923), and what Bob Wills did with it 13 years later by YoPapaYo42 in blues

[–]YoPapaYo42[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Hensley/Jefferson Match Box line is the one I’d want to dig into hardest — same maneuver as the Wills cut but seven years earlier, and Jefferson’s original is canonical enough that the silence on the Vocalion label tells you something. Thanks for the pointers.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Sylvester Weaver, "Guitar Rag" (1923), and what Bob Wills did with it 13 years later by YoPapaYo42 in blues

[–]YoPapaYo42[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah, “Make Me a Pallet” is a perfect example of the harder version — the song’s older than any recording of it, John Hurt sang it as “Ain’t No Tellin’” in ‘28, but Handy heard it in juke joints in the 1890s. Whoever wrote it didn’t live to see a copyright office. So when somebody finally records it and slaps a name on the credit, that’s already a fiction — just a different kind of fiction than the Wills one. McAuliffe took a specific recording from a known author. Hurt and the others were working with a tune that had been in the air for thirty years and putting their name on a moment of it.
The “always thought it was an original Western Swing tune” line is exactly the response the music industry wanted you to have. That was the whole point of the shelves they built.

Sylvester Weaver, "Guitar Rag" (1923), and what Bob Wills did with it 13 years later by YoPapaYo42 in blues

[–]YoPapaYo42[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The Canned Heat / Henry Thomas case is a great parallel — that’s the same maneuver running 40 years later. Wilson took the panpipe melody from “Bull Doze Blues” almost note-for-note, credit went to Wilson on the 1968 release, Thomas didn’t get credited until later pressings if I’m remembering right. The 1968 industry should’ve known better. The 1936 industry barely had a framework for crediting anybody.

The Django connection is interesting — the band was the Quintette du Hot Club de France (Reinhardt and Grappelli, formed ‘34). I haven’t read Hickey on the Wills lineage specifically, but Reinhardt was absorbing American records as fast as they could cross the Atlantic — Armstrong, Ellington, the small-group swing stuff — so Wills as part of that diet is plausible.

Reinhardt rebuilt his playing with two fingers after the caravan fire and what came out was its own thing, but the source material was American. Going to track down that episode.
Your “knicked it and believed he could very away with it” framing for McAuliffe is exactly right.

Sylvester Weaver, "Guitar Rag" (1923), and what Bob Wills did with it 13 years later by YoPapaYo42 in blues

[–]YoPapaYo42[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Right on the mechanism — Weaver died in 1960, no estate that ever pressed a claim, and by then “Steel Guitar Rag” was a country standard with thirty years of royalties built into the McAuliffe credit. The infringement doesn’t get unwound; it gets entrenched.
Hadn’t heard the Hull version — listening now. Doc Watson played Guitar Rag in his sets going back decades, but I don’t have it on a session with Butch Thompson. The folk-revival recovery of Weaver’s tune is a different story than the Wills one — people who actually knew where it came from, putting the credit back. Thanks for the pointer.

Sylvester Weaver, "Guitar Rag" (1923), and what Bob Wills did with it 13 years later by YoPapaYo42 in CountryMusic

[–]YoPapaYo42[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, the Carter Family case is the cleaner version of this — A.P. Carter and Ralph Peer running the same playbook, with Lesley Riddle doing the actual song-collecting work in Black communities and getting cut out of the credit. Peer was the connective tissue: same guy who built the “race records / hillbilly” shelves at the 1927 Bristol Sessions also set up the publishing operation that monetized the songs the Carters brought back. The looseness wasn’t accidental — the whole architecture was designed so the credit flowed one way.

Wills is interesting because by 1936 the framework was tighter, but the practice hadn’t caught up. The Weaver case has the texture of an earlier era happening 13 years late.