Pioneers of the Blues Revival

Robert M. W. Dixon

Robert M.W.Dixon Interview I was born in Gloucester—in the UK, of course—on the 25th of January 1939. I was brought up for the first few years in Stroud, a little town in the Cotswolds. At the age of eight we moved to Nottingham, and I spent my formative years in Nottingham. How I got interested in all of this, there was a trad [traditional] jazz boom in the 1950s in England, bands like Ken Colyer and Chris Barber and Mick Mulligan. Chris Barber had Ottilie Patterson as a singer with his band. I remember she sang “Weeping Willow Blues” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” by Bessie Smith. I had that version of the record before I had Bessie Smith. Mick Mulligan had a man named George Melly who sang with him. So I originally got interested in jazz. I didn’t know very much about the blues. In the late 1940s and early 1950s before there were many LPs, microgroove records, a number of small companies were reissuing 78 rpm records in England—a company called Tempo, another called Jazz Collector—and I was buying these, and I started making lists of all the Jazz Collectors. I mean, I bought Jazz Collector L20: Ma Rainey, “See See Rider Blues” and “Jealous Hearted Blues.” And then there was a very exciting piano record by Jabo Williams, “Jab Blues” and “Pratt City Blues” on L51. And so I was making these lists. Now, there wasn’t a full discography of all the original recordings of blues. There was this thingcalledJazz DiscographybyAlbert McCarthy and Dave Carey, which got as far as L and then it sort of petered out. By then, of course, I got interested in looking at the original records—the original issues—and doing discographies on the original issues. Then I was interestedinbuyingrecordsthathadn’t been reissued. There was a wonderful magazinecalledVintageJazzMartproduced by Trevor Benwell, who was an air traffic controller at London airport and a wonderful jazz collector. And he putoutthismagazinethatcameoutthe fifth of every month. And they had a Robert Dixon, 1996. Courtesy Robert M. W. Dixon. 122 robert dixon series of lists of records, and normally the lists of records were auctions, so you put in a bid. The prices were not great at that stage. You could get a Sleepy John Estes for about fifteen shillings, which is about two dollars. So I started buying records. I then went up to Oxford to study mathematics, and I didn’t have much money, of course. So what I was doing was buying records, often from the States, and I bought an early tape recorder, a Telefunken tape recorder—this was about 1958 or so—so I’d record the records and then sell them. I’d sometimes make a slight profit, but the main thing was that I had the music. I’ve always had the kind of mind that likes to catalog everything and know where everything is. The details of the records of the American companies, some of them were available. This was an important thing in my getting together with John Godrich, because we formed a very important team. There was one lady called Helen Chmura at Columbia Records, and she had mimeographed out the complete matrix listings and the complete issued listings of all the records on Columbia and OKeh in the 1920s and 1930s. These had come in before my time, but they’d gone to a couple of English collectors called Bill Wyatt and Derek Coller. The Decca Record company’s interesting. In 1934, just as America was coming out of the Depression, the English record company called Decca formed an American branch, and they were putting out records for thirty-five cents. You had to do that to sell. Back in the twenties seventy-five cents would be the normal price, although there were also dime store records pressed on very poor quality shellac for thirty-five cents and things like that. And they started a series for, I believe it was called then, the “Negro market,” which were put out in a special series. They were called “race series.” And Decca started a race series in 1934 with the number 7000. It got to 7910 by the time it finished in the early forties. And I was trying to make a complete list of these. There were no company files we could get to there, so IadvertisedinVintage Jazz Martforinformation,andat thesametimeJohnGodrichhadadvertisedforthesame thing...