Analysis Of Elijah Wald's Cross Road Blues

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Elijah Wald wants to make sure people do not mistake the surge in popularity of Blues music in the 1920s as untainted folk music that comes directly from the people who are going through hardship and oppression. When in reality it was just produced and distributed by record companies to exploit the idea of prolonged cruel treatment of African Americans around the 1920s. The blues was adopted and exploited by professional singers and songwriters that wanted to make the genre universally accepted so they could make the most profit. Singers and songwriters changed their styles and voice to adapt to the growing popularity of blues music, “I guess I would have done anything to get recorded – it just happened to be a blues contest, so I sang the …show more content…

He doesn’t have a raspy timbre in the song but he is changing the intensity in his voice as he finishes each sentence, he trials his voice off as he is finishing each sentence. There is a myth on how in this song Johnson sells his soul to the devil and how he sounds fearful in the song because he is scared of giving his soul up. Wald believes that the lyrics of the song do not support that and is being misinterpreted from another blues singer, Tommy …show more content…

Their songs were still produced by large record companies, and even though the songs were not blatantly racist, white women singers and songwriters would have never chosen to sing or write what these women were singing about. The queens sang about prostitution, sex and other crude things just because they were African American and these are the songs that were chosen by the white record companies. Such as “Organ Grinder” by Clarence Williams, she starts off by humming a riff that sounds similar to a soft slide note on a guitar and she sings the song so eloquently especially with the polyrhythms from the piano in the background. She emphasizes the words “organ grinder” all throughout the song. It is only when one finds out what organ grinder actually means, that one suddenly realizes that she is praising her lover’s male sex organ in the entire

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