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125 On April 22, 1938, John Adam “Sleepy John” Estes arrived in Decca’s New York City studio, most likely coming by train directly from West Tennessee, where he was born in 1904 near Ripley, just north of Memphis on the Illinois Central railroad line. Estes cut eight titles that day, last among them “Special Agent (Railroad Police Blues)” (Decca 7491, 1938). “Special Agent” describes an encounter between an unpaid rail passenger and a railroad bull, one of the irregular police officers employed by the lines to eject tramps from trains.“Now when I left old Ripley, the weather was kind of cool,” Estes begins. Unfortunately, just as he swings aboard “that Night Express,” the singer is surprised by a vigilant bull. “I couldn’t hear that special agent, when he come tipping over the top.” In real life, Estes hoboed frequently (he may not have paid his fare to New York), so his song may be based on an actual incident. He fibs a little, though, ending the piece with an unusual plea: “Special agent, special agent, put me off close to some town, / Now I got to do some recording, and I ought to be recording right now.” Re-creating records in live settings is not quite a contradiction in terms, but it’s pretty close. Denying on a record that you are recording presents an unmistakable paradox. All of the previous examples acknowledge the peculiar qualities of oldtime records as musical events, particularly compared to live performances or oral traditions. But they all also imagine a certain compatibility between phonographs and folksongs, whether by dramatizing live performances or oral traditions; by embracing records as acceptable stand-ins for real folksongs; I Ought tO Be RecORdIng RIght nOw Chapter Six 126 | I Ought to Be Recording Right now or by framing them as self-contained musical events on a par with their live counterparts. Other records take a very different approach, foregrounding the antithetical qualities of phonographs and folksongs through expressions that would make ordinary sense in live settings, but that become strangely ironic or incongruous, even self-contradictory, when uttered on a record—for example, “Now I got to do some recording, and I ought to be recording right now.” Rather than reconciling folksongs and phonographs, then, many old-time records actually celebrate their incompatibility, discovering in that contrast a marvelous fund of perceptual dislocation or semantic disjunction. These items own up to an undeniable fact: despite its eminently human character—its constant reminders of the warmest conceivable personal relations—the old-time record is after all a thing, and a pretty odd thing at that: a shellac disc, holed at the center with a gaudy paper label, produced, purchased, and consumed like any other fashionable commodity. But unlike some such curiosities, the old-time record plunges participants into an existential quandary—especially participants accustomed to thinking of music as a natural outgrowth of their closest personal acquaintances and most familiar routines. Revolving 78 times a minute on a mechanical player, its grooved surfaces whispering to a vibrating stylus, this commodity/oddity reproduces through an inanimate speaker sound waves from a disembodied if recognizably nonmechanical, fully animate player/speaker (the recording artist). In so doing, it embodies a state of being— recording—irreconcilably opposed to the condition—not recording—of a record listener, or a live performer, or an in-transit railroad tramp. It is tempting to view this record-as-paradox idea as most closely related to the notion of records as self-contained events. Obviously, it too is emphatically self-referential, but with a major difference: rather than treating records as organic if distinct components of Southern tradition, this approach goes out of its way to highlight the format’s strangeness. At times, in fact, this frame enlists techniques from all of the other approaches, but always to different effect. Many items upend the direct approach, appealing to listeners not as a sign of the phonograph’s personable qualities—its potential as a folksingerby -proxy—but to remind them of its perplexities. Others suggest the dramatic approach, but with twists whose subtlety belies their fantastic effects: there is a world of difference between pretending on a record to be at a barn dance, and pretending on a record not to be on a record. Thus, while the record-as-paradox idea implicates other approaches to recorded performance, it does so only to undermine them. Some items recall both dramatizations of offstage activities (“Practice Night with...

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