Robert Johnson (1911–1938) is the most venerated of all pre-war blues musicians; the veneration borders on hagiography. Recently published revisionist literature has constructed a sociologically realistic portrayal of a professional musician working among other musicians for a contemporary audience in a specific historical context. This has left unexplained, however, the veneration granted to his music by the audience for his records from the 1960s to today. This paper presents the case that these two bodies of fact can be connected and the one serve as an explanation for the other. As Robert Johnson learned his craft from records and radio, and polished his songs to be recorded, he effectively developed a ‘for-the-record’ aesthetic that made his music sound different to that of his Delta contemporaries and many others who used musical techniques honed in performance for an audience. Decades later, when a ‘for-the-record’ aesthetic was the taken-for-granted standard in popular musical culture, Robert Johnson's records sounded better than those of his contemporaries, and the audience from the 1960s to today has had a reason to think that he and his music were special.

This paper considers references to Oklahoma in blues recordings from 1924 to 1941, and the paradox that, although the reality of life for African-Americans in that state was little different from life in the Deep South, the recordings usually speak of migration to Oklahoma in optimistic terms. The notion that the Indian Nation (a.k.a. ‘the Territory’) had been a refuge for runaway slaves is rebutted, together with the conclusion that optimistic references in the blues preserve this idea as a collective memory. What is being recalled is rather the period between the Civil War and statehood (1907): the former slaves of Native Americans in Oklahoma became tribal members, gaining the civil and property rights accorded to tribes-people, and the black townships movement offered the prospect of autonomy and self-government on the frontier. Two songs which take a negative view of Oklahoma's Jim Crow reality are also considered.

Several authors have observed that rock music sometimes features a kind of independence or ‘divorce’ between melody and harmony. In this article, I examine this phenomenon more systematically than has been done in the past. A good indicator of melodic-harmonic divorce is cases where non-chord-tones in the melody do not resolve by step. I argue that this does occur frequently in rock – often with respect to the local harmony, and sometimes with respect to the underlying tonic harmony as well. This melodic-harmonic ‘divorce’ tends to occur in rather specific circumstances: usually in pentatonically based melodies, and in verses rather than choruses. Such situations could be said to reflect a ‘stratified’ pitch organisation. A particularly common situation is where the verse of a song features stratified organisation, followed by a chorus which shifts to a ‘unified’ organisation in which both melody and accompaniment are regulated by the harmonic structure.

This article examines the politics of the Neapolitan rap band 99 Posse. Growing up in a city characterised by high unemployment and crime, individual band members independently gravitated towards far left politics, and emerged in late 1991 as the house band of the ‘Officina99’, an autonomist squat in the east of the city which gave the group its name. This article examines their political commitment through their songs, covering subjects from youth unemployment to the exploitation of casual workers. Another theme is how, over a decade, their initial denunciation of ‘communism’ mutated into sympathy. It is argued that the reason for their huge success – apart from their rather controversial decision to sign up with a major multinational such as BMG – lies in their ability to make these themes relevant to disaffected young people.

Jimi Hendrix was often characterised by his exotic appearance and extravagant performance, but underneath these trappings was an extraordinary guitarist who managed to transform some of the key elements of blues and rhythm-and-blues traditions. An important feature of Hendrix’s music is his characteristic use of the seventh chord with a sharp ninth, or the augmented ninth chord, now often referred to as the ‘Hendrix chord’. This paper examines some ways in which Hendrix used this chord by surveying and drawing comparisons between various instances. It is not necessarily the fully voiced version of the chord that Hendrix used, but interval combinations drawn from or related to it, with particular timbres and articulations. Together these define what might be called a ‘sharp ninth sound’. Through register placement, timbre, articulation, and chordal function, it is intimately tied to the blues idiom, adding a blues tonal element. This is one aspect of Hendrix’s music, then, that shows his deep roots in the blues.

‘Back-Water Blues’, composed by Bessie Smith and recorded by her on 17 February 1927, has long been associated in the popular mind and even by some writers with the great flood of the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries that occurred that year. This is historically problematical because that flood began two months after Smith recorded her song. Through an examination of Smith's touring itinerary, the testimony of fellow entertainers who toured with her, newspaper reports, and other documents, it can be shown that the song was composed about a flood of the Cumberland River that struck Nashville, Tennessee, on Christmas morning, 1926. The lyrics of the song are interpreted with respect to the events of that flood.

A re-examination of Bessie Smith's first two released blues recordings – ‘Down Hearted Blues’ and ‘Gulf Coast Blues’ – demonstrates that her interpretative originality and expressive individuality were evident from the start of her recording career in 1923. The micro-components of Bessie's early vocal tendencies are revealed through full transcriptions of her vocal line on each of these recordings combined with detailed description and analysis of the pitch content, the main rhythmic and melodic characteristics, and the melodic-harmonic and text-music relationships. The method demonstrates that, although Bessie's phrases display some similarities with each other, they constantly vary in imaginative ways, matching her with true jazz improvisers.

This study focuses on the five known African-American topical songs dealing with the two hurricanes and ensuing floods that took place in Florida in the summer of 1928. The first is a commercially recorded blues song and the others are unreleased Library of Congress sacred recordings, which are transcribed and analysed here for the first time.

This paper considers the Mike Figgis film Red, White & Blues as a history of blues music in Britain. The film was produced as part of a series celebrating the centenary of the blues, and not unnaturally its British focus begins with the 1950s and 1960s. The paper argues, however, that it is an incomplete history because it fails to consider how the British blues genre and scene developed subsequently. It also argues that the film focuses too much on the memories and performances of the musicians. It fails to consider the industrial context in which any ‘new’ genre can emerge, and pays almost no attention to the role of its consumers, the audiences and fans across the country that were an integral part of its development. The paper suggests that research into that aspect of the British blues scene would complement the various documentary accounts of the music and musicians.

This selective listing concentrates on Paul Oliver's writings on music – therefore, references to books and articles on architecture have been omitted. For reasons of space, Paul's numerous record, book and concert reviews, published in journals such as Jazz Monthly, Audio & Record Review, Melody Maker, and Blues Unlimited, have not been included. For similar reasons, I have chosen not to include the many entries Paul contributed to the following encyclopedias: Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide to the First 50 Years, 1917–1967, ed. A. McCarthy, A. Morgan, M. Harrison and P. Oliver (London, Hanover, 1968); The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie (London, Macmillan, 1980); and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, ed. B. Kernfeld (London, Macmillan, 1994). However, I have included entries from The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, as examples of Paul's more recent writing. Also omitted are details of the radio programmes made for the BBC from the mid 1950s to the late 1990s.

Thank you to Paul for his help with this bibliography.