Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900-1960

Echo and Reverb

Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

© 2005 by Peter Doyle

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doyle, Peter, 1951–

Echo and reverb : fabricating space in popular music recording, 1900–1960 / Peter Doyle.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ), discography (p. ), and index.

ISBN-13: 978–0–8195–6793–2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0–8195–6793–0 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978–0–8195–6794–9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0–8195–6794–9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Popular music—History and criticism. 2. Sound recordings—Production and direction—History. I. Title.

ML3470.D69 2005

781.64′149—dc22 2005013310

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce the following:

Catfish Blues a/k/a Rollin’ Stone (Muddy Waters)

© 1959, 1987 (renewed) WATERTOONS MUSIC (BMI)/Administered by BUG

All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.

My Blue Heaven (Walter Donaldson/George Whiting)

Donaldson Publishing Co. (ASCAP)/George Whiting Publishing

Swing, Brother, Swing by William E. Cantrell, Quinton M. Claunch

© 1936, 1961 (renewed) by Universal Music Corporation / ASCAP

Used By Permission. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

Voice of a Fool, The by William E. Cantrell, Quinton M. Claunch

© 1958 (renewed) by Irving Music, Inc. on behalf of Jec Publishing Corporation / BMI

Used By Permission. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

When the Lights Go Out (Willie Dixon)

© 1954, 1982 (renewed) HOOCHIE COOCHIE MUSIC (BMI)/Administered by BUG

All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.

Every effort was made to contact the current copyright holders of the works cited in this volume.

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Harnessing the Echo

3. Way Out There: Hillbilly, Blues and Jazz

4. Blue Shadows on the Trail: Space and Place in the Imagined West

5. And as the Sun Sinks Slowly in the West …: Sobbing Guitars, Distant Horizons and the Acoustics of Otherness

6. How Near, How Far?: Inner Voices, Weird Space and the Ghostly West

7. Off the Wall: Blues Recording at Sun and Chess Studios, 1947–1954

8. Train I Ride …: Rock ’n’ Roll Echo

9. Train Kept a Rollin’: Popular Music’s New Territories

10. Conclusion: Race with the Devil

Notes

Bibliography

Discography

Index

Acknowledgments

Ross Gibson, Noel King, Phil Hayward, Jon Fitzgerald, Rob Bowman and Neil V. Rosenberg generously commented on early versions of this manuscript. Susan Fast offered detailed and knowledgeable responses to successive later drafts, and Tony Mitchell gave sound advice and encouragement. Anne Bickford, Bruce Bongers, Robert L. Campbell, Michael Finucane, Phil Hayward, Bruce Johnson, Richard Ruhle, Neil V. Rosenberg, John Whiteoak and others helped with many elusive facts and references and offered important corrections. Raymond Devitt provided an uncannily accurate on-call reference service for all matters related to twentieth-century popular music. Sue Doyle cast a knowing eye over numerous drafts, and Bridie Doyle offered invaluable assistance with the proofing. My deepest thanks to them all. Any errors of fact or interpretation, of course, remain entirely mine.

I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance given this project by both the Media Department and the Division of Society, Culture, Media, and Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Sometime in the late 1940s, Foy Willing and the Riders of the Purple Sage, a Los Angeles–based western band recorded the song Blue Shadows on the Trail for the Teleways radio transcription service. The recording begins with two bars of accordion and vamped rhythm acoustic guitar, after which three male voices sing Woo-woo-woooo in falsetto, the voices coming in two beats apart, with each singing a little lower than the preceding one, and each progressively more off-microphone. The last voice seems to be coming from far off. The voices cease and an electric steel guitar comes in, further still off-mic and featuring a slow vibrato. The lyric begins with all the voices singing a close-knit, Tin Pan Alley–style harmony, with carefully controlled swells and diminuendos. Each line is punctuated by a steel guitar lick that recalls the male voices’ woo-woo-wooo in the introduction.

Blue shadows on the trail

Blue moon shining through the trees

And a plaintive wail from the distance

Comes a-driftin’ on the evenin’ breeze.

For listeners with even a slight acquaintance with dime novels, western comic books, radio serials or cowboy movies, the song readily suggests the spaces and places of the popularly constructed American West: the strummed guitar might be akin to the sound of the singer’s horse ambling across the prairie; the woo-woo-wooos are creatures calling out in the distance, perhaps whippoorwills, or (as a devotee of wagon-train westerns would suspect) unseen Indians signaling to one another as they secretly observe the singer. The far-off steel guitar suggests a creature of the night—perhaps a coyote howling eerily from atop a butte or mesa (no doubt silhouetted against a rising full moon). The combination of lyric content, vocal harmony, instrumentation and studio contrivance here sets up a virtual geography, a coherent, highly specific sense of place and space.

In part, the polished, professional, unhurried feel of Blue Shadows might derive from the support the song gets from extrinsic, nonmusical traditions: widely disseminated preexisting representations of the cowboy west in comic books, dime novels, western movies, sheet music covers, popular landscape art and so forth, as well as other, newer traditions of the sonic representation of space in radio serials and on movie soundtracks. When the producers decided to place the steel guitar off-mic, they were apparently satisfied that the record’s listeners would be cued to imagine the appropriate western image.

Compare this with Elvis Presley’s version of Mystery Train (1955), recorded at Sun Studios on the eve of the singer’s move to RCA (and consequent megastardom). The first sound heard on the recording comes from Scotty Moore’s electric guitar, a hammering-on¹ on the low strings, followed by a brisk repeating figure located around the middle register. The guitar sound is highly echoic. These ingredients, the use of reverberation (reverb), the low pitch of the guitar and the brisk shuffle feel combine to evoke something of the sound of a train in the distance, an effect much compounded when Presley starts singing, Train I ride, sixteen coaches long. Again, recording contrivance complements lyrics and musical sounds in manufacturing a sense of near and far, a sense in the listener that the musical sounds are emanating from different locations within a musical field.

And the singer here is ambiguously located. He is at one moment on the train, at another apparently watching the train leave, and yet another waiting for it to bring his baby back. While the echoic guitar maintains a constant background sense of locomotive urgency, the reverb and echo delay around the singer’s voice in concert with the moments of deliberately jerky phrasing gives rise to a sense of nervousness, of simultaneous dread and jubilation. A runaway train, perhaps. The place of the voice in the mix, reverberant, yet up front, compounds the ambiguities, setting up a simultaneous nearness and remoteness.

While it is difficult to make sense of this spatiality in the same way that one can interpret Blue Shadows, it is no less effective for that. Where Blue Shadows employs aural spatiality in a clever but nonetheless realist way to create a coherent, pictorial sense of place, Mystery Train uses its spatialities in order to evoke a sense of disordered space, of Dionysian abandon. Blue Shadows, for all its technical mastery, presents as being very much the product of a largely obsolete aesthetic regime—open-throated voices singing close harmony, the use of strict, unsyncopated tempo—whereas Presley’s Mystery Train has enjoyed a steadily growing status since the time of its recording. The track has been permanently on RCA’s catalogue since the late 1950s, and is a particular favorite among Presley fans and devotees of rock ’n’ roll music. It has lent its name to a much-reprinted critical work by Greil Marcus² as well as to Jim Jarmusch’s film.³ The particular guitar sound Scotty Moore employed on that track has been much emulated, the riff much quoted.⁴

Consider also Robert Johnson’s recording of his own composition Come on in My Kitchen (1936). The track is composed solely of Johnson’s voice and acoustic slide guitar. Johnson sings a couple of verses in his more usual singing voice, then breaks for a few bars to insert some sotto voce murmurings, matching each utterance with guitar lick of increasing subtlety.

[Guitar lick.]

Baby can’t you hear that wind howl? [spoken].

[Different slide lick, softer.]

Oh, can’t you hear that wind howl? [spoken].

[Slide lick repeated, followed by barely discernible rattling

of bottleneck on string as last note is held.]

This recording too is concerned with place and space. As in Blue Shadows and Mystery Train, the listener’s attention is directed to a real-world physical phenomenon (in this case, the howling wind) that is represented by musical means, the delicately picked slide guitar. Yet the landscape spatiality is overridden here by a more arresting sense of a different place: the actual physical space occupied by the singer and his guitar at the moment of the recording. Although we do not have any strong pictorial reference to aid us in visually imagining this space, the close miking of the voice and guitar, the singer’s deliberate use of barely audible utterances and extremely delicate guitar figures, plus the inclusion on the recording of other intimate, nonmusical sounds (such as the accidental rattle of the slide against the strings of the guitar)—all serve to create sense of moment, and create a sense in the listener of proximity to the singer. The listener is afforded a kind of aural glimpse, a private sonic close-up of the singer in action.⁵ When the singer invites us to hear the wind howl he is working near the limits of what was possible in recorded dynamics at the time, drawing his listeners in, inviting them to pay even closer, more concentrated attention to the music.

In visual terms, listening to Blue Shadows might be likened to the experience of looking at a large, romantically rendered work of landscape art, while Presley’s Mystery Train might be imagined more as an expressionist or cubist painting, in which the viewer might encounter the real in an exhilaratingly re-formed, nonrealist configuration. Listening to the Johnson song then would be like being inside an installation. In their different ways these recordings each use sonic means to contrive a sense of space and place, and in each case this spatiality is critical to the recordings’ musical effects. It is with these and other kinds of sonically created spatiality that this book is concerned.

My original intention was to answer what seemed to be a simple enough question, or series of questions concerning the use of the echo and reverb production effects that so typified many classic rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly recordings—from the reverberant voice effects used by Elvis Presley and others, to the echo and reverb effects used most notably on electric guitars, but also found applied to saxophones, drums, harmonicas and other instruments. I was particularly interested in the big echo sound of much early rockabilly music of the mid-1950s and guitar instrumental music from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The questions basically were, In what ways do these echo and reverb effects accomplish their task? Whence did they come? Why should they be present at all?

The questions partly arose from personal experience as both a dedicated listener to live and recorded music and as a semiprofessional electric guitarist. Experience in the latter role had taught me that the merest touch of echo and reverb could greatly alter the emotive impact of sounds produced, and the affective change often seemed to be out of all proportion to the purely sonic changes wrought by the effect. By flicking the switch on a tape echo unit, suddenly low notes played on my guitar took on a menacing presence, or a slow, lazy shimmer. The high notes became more piercing, and previously indifferent riffs and figures (sometimes) took on a rich, haunting fullness. Why should this be so?

Although there now exists a quite considerable body of scholarly, semi-scholarly and mass-market literature dealing with rock ’n’ roll music in musicological, social, historical and/or anecdotal terms, there have been few serious attempts specifically to address the question of why one of the primary characteristics of the music, the use of echo and reverb, should be present at all. Similarly, the last ten or twenty years has seen the growth of a culture of fetishization of classic production sounds among many musicians, which has seen the reissue of a number of 1950s- and ’60s-styled amplifiers, guitars and ancillary devices, including echo and reverb units. When I started out playing guitar in the early 1970s, what knowledge there was circulating about the Sun Sound, and the Chess Sound was anecdotal and fragmentary, and snippets of information about guitar sounds used by players like Scotty Moore, Les Paul, Muddy Waters or Dick Dale were rare. Nowadays magazines such as Guitar Player provide a great deal of information about how particular sounds were achieved, what devices were used and so on. Similarly, worldwide networks of keen amateurs exist, whose members communicate via websites and e-mail, or meet at workshops conducted at blues and roots music festivals. The coming on line of digital signal processing technologies such as the Quadreverb, Lexicon, and computer packages such as ProTools have made available to both institutional and home-based producers a great range of effects. At the lower end, a wide range of relatively cheap black boxes and foot pedal effects units that offer a range of echo and reverb effects are available to musicians. Reverb and echo effects are ubiquitous in contemporary popular music making. All this notwithstanding, questions of how these sonic variables might bring about an affective outcome in listeners have gone largely unasked.

Returning then to the backstory to this current project, the echo and reverb effects I was hearing on classic rock ’n’ roll recordings sometimes seemed to suggest (to me) something to do with the supernatural; in combination with certain lyric styles, instrument mixes, certain pitches and tempos, the echo was in some way suggestive of hoodoo powers and magical forces. (Indeed, one of the most common adjectives encountered in writings about echoic guitar and vocal music is haunting.) But at other times reverberant and/or echoic sonics suggested desolate, wide-open landscapes, depopulated but for a single wayfarer (later notable examples being Ry Cooder’s slide guitar pieces for the soundtrack to Paris, Texas (directed by Wim Wenders, 1984) and Ennio Morricone’s western soundtracks), or deserted streets late at night. Sometimes dark, subterranean spaces were evoked; at other times this listener was put in mind of grand mountains and canyons. Then again, the echo effect on the surf guitar music of Dick Dale or the Atlantics readily suggested tiny figures on Malibu surfboards dwarfed by murderously large waves. Or echoic electric steel guitar in some hapa haole Hawaiian music conjured up a notion of waves lapping lazily on palm-fringed beaches, of dreamy, sensual tropical evenings. But then the echo and reverb-laden voice and electric guitars on, say, Gene Vincent’s Be Bop a Lula (1956) suggested to me the ambience of a Saturday night scout hall rock ’n’ roll dance. And so on. Echoicity was highly evocative, but there was no one-to-one relationship between the effect and what was signified by its deployment.

Echo and reverberation made it seem as though the music was coming from a somewhere—from inside an enclosed architectural or natural space or out of a specific geographic location—and this somewhere was often semiotically highly volatile. On reflection it became clear that with the addition of echo and reverb, place and space had become part of the larger musical equation, a new component in the musical totality. To understand how and why echo and reverb did something to the music then, it would be necessary to investigate these sonically represented spaces.

The spaces ranged from the decidedly concrete to the mythic and/or purely imaginary. Furthermore, some of these sonic spatialities were pictorial, somehow referring me back to my own learned preconceptions of, say, the American West or the beach at Waikiki (neither of which I have actually visited). At other times this musico-sonic spatiality was less explicitly pictorial, even tending toward the hallucinatory, in some way evoking in me a sense of strangeness or disquiet. Yet another type of less pictorial spatiality was to be found, in say, the music of Bo Diddley, Little Walter, or early Elvis Presley recordings, in which everything seems to be vibrating, echoing, reverberating in an out of control, manic, atomic kinesis, suggesting movement in space but without any special reference to specific real-world spaces or places.

These preliminary musings were made in relation to recorded rock ’n’ roll, rockabilly and electric blues music that had an unmistakably echoic character, in which a producer had apparently deliberately added synthetic echo, either by manipulating magnetic tape record and playback heads to achieve a slapback effect⁶ or simply through placing a second microphone in a reverberant space—most commonly the studio toilet. But virtual spatiality was not merely a product of the deliberate, sometimes heavy-handed use of studio effects. Clearly the actual acoustic regime of the studio itself (not just the studio bathroom) was crucial; so too were the specific deployments of the recording apparatus and the placements of voices and instruments within that space. Also to be factored in were the many acoustic adjustments and accommodations, both small and large, made by performers to their instruments, to each other, to the studio space and to the recording apparatus.

To be considered as well were the complex sets of interpersonal accommodations—especially important in the southern U.S. studios where most often white producers recorded itinerant or déclassé African American artists or poor whites. Indeed, these interpersonal considerations are arguably crucial to any recording studio, anywhere; typically the performers, isolated in the spotlight, are watched, monitored and directed by unseen engineers and producers. In such situations potentials simultaneously exist for everything from the crassest form of bullying and intimidation to the most intimate creative synergies.

Thus I concluded that the spatialities set up by the use of echo and reverb as musical effects cannot at any certain point be separated from larger issues of production and production values; these in turn involve matters of proxemics and interpersonal relations, which in turn involve powerful social forces from beyond the studio—in particular, tensions around class, racial and sexual politics.

It became clear that to understand the workings of the echo and reverb effects used in 1950s rock ’n’ roll it would be necessary to go beyond a synchronic musico-semiotic analysis of the recordings themselves and to locate the recordings in relation to earlier intersecting and overlapping traditions of musical performance and recording in which spatiality was key. Accordingly, certain emblematic recordings will be discussed, going back to recordings of hillbilly music of the early electronic period of sound recording (that is, roughly post-1925), southern country blues recordings of the 1930s, big band, western swing, hapa haole Hawaiian guitar music of the 1940s, postwar country music, singing cowboy music and (some) early electric southern blues, as well a series of influential and commercially successful highly spatialized pop, country, blues and novelty recordings produced in postwar Hollywood.

It will be argued that in pre–magnetic tape popular music recording, especially southern U.S. blues and country recording, questions of place and space (at both the personal and collective levels), were crucial, and that many of what are now widely regarded as the most idiosyncratic and valuable roots music recordings (such as Robert Johnson’s Come on in My Kitchen) derive much of their affective power from spatial tensions, traces of which, I shall argue, are detectable in the recordings themselves. A number of key artists knowingly made use of spatio-acoustic conditions in order to present uniquely their own sense of self. The social, the personal, the geographic, the demographic, the physico-spatial conditions of their lives (and of life in general) were rendered into aesthetic effects.

This particular translating of the lived into the musical recording, while not exclusive to them, was a defining feature of much southern country blues and hillbilly recording, and this tradition of the highly individual, very personal sense of self-in-place was readily available, geographically and culturally for adoption by the very artists and some of the producers who created rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues music in the 1950s. The echoic voice, the echoic electric guitar, harp or tenor sax, were new enactments of prior traditions of self-representation.

In making sense of 1950s echoic recording, it will also be necessary to go outside the strict domain of music recording to examine other related sound production and recording practices, including deployments of echoicity and reverb in Hollywood movie sound. Not surprisingly, some of the most telling uses of the devices are to be found in Hollywood westerns, crime, and horror films of the 1940s. By the late 1940s performers as unalike as pop singer Vaughn Monroe and blues singer John Lee Hooker were using echo and reverb, albeit in different ways, to signify uncanny presences. Presumably audiences readily understood what was intended by the effect. It is difficult to account for this relatively sudden appearance without reference to the prior semiotic listener training groundwork done by Hollywood movies, in which these same acoustic effects are explicitly linked to stories of terror and the supernatural, and moments of mystical transformations. Accordingly chapter 4 deals with some key, nonmusical cinematic uses of echo and reverb effects.

I shall then go on to argue that by the late 1940s and early 1950s, a repertoire of spatial sonic production practices, musical and nonmusical, had become available, and in theory these were easily reproducible for anyone with basic magnetic tape recording equipment. Through the late 1940s a subset of spatialized popular songs began to appear that relied on reverb effects (in league with lyrics and musical effects) to set up pictorial spaces. These earlier overt uses of spatial production devices were in the main realist and singular in their reference. The sonic 3-D of Foy Willing’s Blue Shadows on the Trail, for instance, seeks to replicate the acoustic conditions of a western landscape at sundown; the ghostly voices on Vaughn Monroe’s Riders in the Sky (1949) or the sirenlike calling of the off-mic steel guitars in pop Hawaiian music, while flirting with the supernatural, nonetheless sought to trigger in the listener mental images of coherent, imaginable physical spaces. In the hands of the artists and producers at Sun, Chess and elsewhere, these same devices were put to uses that saw an explosion of contradictory, realist and nonrealist signification.

It will be further argued that these spatial production characteristics were much more than an interesting gimmick; they both paralleled and to some extent enacted the global breakout of rock ’n’ roll music. These spatialities, as much as any intramusical features (such as twelve-bar structure, backbeat drumming), served to typify and sometimes even define music as rock ’n’ roll.

As well as investigating the supply side of the equation, we shall also be obliged to look at listening practices in relation to recorded and live music, and give some consideration to the various spaces and spatialities in which music is consumed and used. Many of the foregoing remarks and indicated complications might equally be applied to this consumption side of the music contract: for instance, we should consider some of the many different architectural spaces and acoustic regimes in which music is listened to as well as changes over time in playback apparati. It will be necessary to consider the interpersonal complexities operating at the sites of production and the interpersonal configurations among music listeners, both actual (if temporary) communities of listeners in the one architectural space and notional communities of geographically disparate listeners. With regards to solitary listeners, some consideration must be given to different modes of listening, differing degrees of distractedness and focus with which listeners address recorded music.

In other words, recorded music will need to be considered in both its most collective and most individual consumption modes. This work asserts that it was in recorded southern blues, rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and country music of the late 1940s and early 1950s (located as these were outside but still close to the mainstream of the American popular music industry) that many of the ground rules of rock music production and consumption were laid down, and that the fabricated virtual spaces that typified so many of these recordings provided an imagined shared space, occupied by both listeners and performers. In this space, listeners could choose to engage and interact with the music in a most intense, solitary way or in ways that were wholly collective and community-forming.

The following chapters are arranged according to a rough chronology. Chapter 2 examines ancient and medieval acoustic histories and mythologies, tracing them through to the nineteenth-century beginnings of sound recording and the establishment of a popular music recording industry. Chapters 3 to 7 trace the subsequent emergence of spatial music and sound recording practices up to the early 1950s, while the remaining chapters examine in more detail how the makers of early rock ’n’ roll recombined these practices and effects. Before proceeding with that story, however, I shall survey here some of the broader critical, scholarly and theoretical territories into which this study wanders. Readers who proceed directly to chapter 2 may feel a need to refer back to this section, at least for an explication of the Deleuze/Guattarian terms territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, which are used throughout this book. Unlovely though these neologisms may be, they reference a set of ideas that provide a practical analytical tool, yet remain sufficiently open-ended to allow for and suggest freer, more imaginative speculations.

Literature

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, writings about popular music—reviews of performances and recordings, biographies, star profiles, histories, music trade news, fan literature, and, since the late 1960s, high-flown think pieces—have been a steadily increasing presence in popular and specialty presses. Within the academy, studies of popular music have emerged (generally as a minority practice) within such diverse disciplines as sociology, literary studies, psychology, ethnography, anthropology, cultural history, architecture, physics, engineering, geography, archeology, leisure studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, diaspora studies and musicology. In these fields, with the exception of the last, the primary focus is not on the musical object itself—its internal structures and relationships, the various aspects of its sonic constitution, its connections with its own outside—but rather with the social, cultural and physical contexts in which music resides. Sociologists studying popular music, for example, may use popular music to exemplify social and cultural formations, or may examine social formations arising around certain music practices, or may be mainly concerned with furthering discussion of competing analytical models and theories. Although the extent to which they attend to the specifics of the music in question varies, their primary concern will by definition generally remain extramusical. The discipline of musicology, on the other hand, has been frequently criticized for its resolutely intratextual focus, and for its general indifference to broader cultural contexts.⁷

Theodore Adorno’s work on Tin Pan Alley popular music of the 1920s linked certain intratextual characteristics—particularly lyrics and textural qualities—to politics in the larger social world. Adorno damningly locates the music industry and its products within a larger mass culture operation serving to manipulate, infantilize and silence subjects, and generally deaden political will. Although subsequent writers have generally not fallen in step with Adorno’s wholly pessimistic view of popular music,⁸ his broad approach of seeking and seeing both the text within the culture, and the culture within the specificities of the text has informed various (minority) strands of popular music studies since, exemplified in the work of writers as diverse as Alan Lomax (1968), Phillip Tagg (1979, 1982), Richard Middleton (1990), Theo Van Leeuwen (1991), Susan McClary (1991), Robert Walser (1993), Paul Theberge (1997), Steve Waksman (1999), David Brackett (2000), Susan Fast (2001) and others.

Susan McClary and Robert Walser⁹ have outlined some of the problems specific to writing pop musicology. They refer to rock criticism’s and academic writing’s tendency to vague pretentiousness and chronic failure to address what is really at stake in the tunes. The alternatives in writing about music are either to write impressionistically (and thereby fail to address the details) or to address the details in technical terms (and risk mystifying readers). In addition, there are severe problems specific to pop musicology. Pop musicologists need to dispense with established musicology’s notions of the inherent, self-evident greatness of certain musical texts and the discipline’s indifference to the social grounding of those texts (they are transcendent; ergo, their social grounding is largely irrelevant). Yet in looking beyond purely formal intramusical considerations, a huge range of multidisciplinary approaches are suddenly called for:

One of the extraordinary ironies of contemporary musicology is that the intellectual apparatus required of those studying ‘serious’ music … is practically nonexistent … while that required of those studying popular music—where reception, social context, and political struggle are regularly regarded as central issues—is vast.¹⁰

Moreover, musicology’s eschewing of purely affective responses to music as being somehow childish or naïve has left modern popular music analysts with a difficult task:

to try to make the case that a particular configuration sounds mournful (something that may be obvious to virtually all listeners …) is to have to invent a philosophical argument for meaning in music and try to reconstruct forgotten codes out of centuries of music. At first glance, for instance much of Philip Tagg’s work appears bogged down in what seem to be irrelevant issues (why semiotics?) and irrelevant repertoires (what has a Bach passion got to do with ABBA’s Fernando?). If Tagg were in a context in which semiotics existed as a matter of course, he could simply refer. But unfortunately most of his steps are absolutely necessary—he has to rebuild the whole of Western musical semiotics before he can unpack the theme from Kojak.¹¹

In contrast to his earlier broad endorsement, Walser (1993) takes issue with Tagg’s work in his Running with the Devil for too often ignoring or marginalizing both the political economy of popular music and its actual operations in social contestation. The scientific rigor and objectivity for which Tagg strives, argues Walser, manifest in his elaborate taxonomies and extensive acronymic abstractions, has produced often excessively complex, cumbersome and even artificial analyses. The steps Tagg takes to so carefully guarantee accurate delineation of meaning ultimately serve to inhibit the attribution of the social meanings he is seeking. There are no people in Tagg’s analytical world, where musicians and fans are reduced to Emitters and Receivers, thereby reinforcing the flawed model of art as a conduit for delivering meaning, rather than as a social field for constructing, negotiating and contesting it.¹²

Walser’s remark that you have the problem of connecting art and society only if you accept the assumptions that separate them,¹³ does much to point the way to a meaningful, yet accessible, socially grounded musicology. Popular music recordings are objects of material culture, and reflect (albeit in complex and not necessarily obvious ways) aspects of the cultural conditions obtaining at the places of their production and reception. These objects in turn participate in the processes by which subjectivity is constructed; they determine, in their own ways, the cultural fields from which they spring. The repeated, more than slightly anxious quest for ironclad, positivist legitimacy perhaps serves, albeit unwittingly, to revive the discredited and simplistic assumption that the art object is hermetically separate from the social. On the other hand, legitimacy anxiety might also stem from residual reservations concerning the validity of the popular music artifact itself, as though there was a need to justify (again and again) its study, in answer to antique prejudices concerning high and low art, and in particular to dispute or compensate for the perceived triviality of the pop artifact.

In reviewing methodologies of pop musicology, David Brackett (2000) alerts us to the pitfalls of studies that assume the stability of musical codes and the material immanence of the pop music text. The recourse to ‘immanence,’ he writes, relegates the discussion of a musical text to an ahistorical, noncultural vacuum, a vacuum without perceiving subjects. If we accept that musical meaning is conveyed through a code that is sent by a somebody, then we must assume a receiving or consuming somebody as well, and thus we need to consider parallel codes relating to listener competency.¹⁴ Codes are no more static, argues Brackett, than are the types of competence that listening subjects may bring to bear on them; furthermore, the way in which we ‘decode’ a piece may change our sense of the piece we are hearing, necessitating an infinite series of new perspectives in the act of listening (13).

Degrees and types of competence may indeed vary greatly between listeners, and even for a single listener. We may listen to a recording one day, and, for no special reason, experience a near magical awareness of the sounds and musical relations, intuit the inner codes as they are being simultaneously acknowledged and refigured, feel the three dimensionality of the recording as though we and the music are copresent in a single, fluidly gridded zone. The same recording heard the next day might offer no more than background static. And these huge variations in the nature of the encounter, to this listener at least, do not seem to depend on the quality of the playback device or on the acoustics of the playback space: pieces of recorded music heard accidentally on a store radio, or on a pub jukebox, or on a lo-fi car stereo may produce surprisingly intense listening experiences, while more deliberate, purposeful listenings may leave us strangely unmoved. Or may not, according to the complex and mysterious workings of various sets of personal and collective, internal and external, affective and physico-acoustic variables.

The issue of competence raises questions as to the stability and readability of the musical object, especially in relation to the more connotative layers of meaning. If we identify connotations, especially of the more ephemeral kind, how can we be sure that they are indeed present in the text and working on listeners? The present work assumes that there may well be a great number of possible listening positions and competency profiles for any popular music recording. Indeed, the three-minute pop recording, designed to sell itself in a single hearing, easily repeated on the home player, jukebox, dance hall or disco turntable, allows for particularly easy access; nearly anyone can become an expert, of sorts, on a particular recording, and on entire genres and styles. One important assumption I make is that, while it may not be universal, high-competency listening is sufficiently ubiquitous to underwrite, in principle, the idea of a semiotic reading of the pop recording. A common feature of many of the recordings surveyed here is that they were made by musicians and technicians who, as their biographers note, were themselves obsessively close, knowledgeable listeners to the recorded popular music, both of their time and earlier. Furthermore, many of the hillbilly, Hawaiian, jazz, country blues and early rock ’n’ roll records talked about here inspired widespread do it yourself copycat practices among their audiences, practices that involved extremely close (yet frequently amateur, musically unlettered) engagements with the recorded artifact, and these engagements occurred both at the individual level and within larger listening formations.

For other listeners—or for high-competency listeners during their more distracted moments—the engagements may occur at more unconscious levels. Listeners may have very strong feelings for a certain recording, for example, but may have only the vaguest awareness of its sonic specificities, its textures, structures, its location within a generic history, and so forth. Furthermore, many of the spatial effects traced in the pages that follow, effects that notionally locate the musical objects and listeners, frequently do so covertly. Effects that might have aroused conscious notice and comment when they first appeared (and many did) might go quite unremarked later, but this is not to say that those effects do not continue to work on listeners, regardless of whether or not individual listeners closely interrogate their precise responses to the music. An example: a number of pop western recordings of the 1940s and 1950s, as already noted, used reverberant guitar or vocal sounds to sonically represent western landscapes (a relatively simple denotative device borrowed in part from radio dramas, and movie soundtracks) and on occasions to further represent numinous moments experienced within the western landscape (well exemplified in Vaughn Monroe’s hit record of Riders in the Sky). Yet Ry Cooder’s version of the slide guitar piece Dark Was the Night on the soundtrack to Paris, Texas, elaborately treated with echo and reverb, and appearing more than thirty years after these more commonplace uses of echo and reverb, is not infrequently described by listeners in adjectival terms (mysterious, atmospheric, haunting). In other words, a spatiomusical effect more or less unproblemmatically present in pop music in the 1940s and 1950s as denotation, resurfaces to later audiences, less consciously aware of its semiotic history, as connotation. This work is thus much concerned with the semiotic history of such spatializing effects, and the contexts in which they first appeared, as well as their later appropriations.

Certain of the thornier methodological problems attending cultural interpretations of music—such as what different musical scales and intervals, harmonic relationships, timbral characteristics and combinations might mean—will thus be less at issue here. In the first instance, paramusical acoustic spatial indicators like echo and reverberation might be seen, according to the schema derived by C. S. Peirce, as indexical signs: indices of the physical conditions that produce them, like footprints in snow, or smoke from a fire. The reading of such effects, even when they are used fictitiously, as in pop western recordings, requires some minimal interpretation, but not generally of a contentious kind. Reverberation and echo simply are sonic attributes of physical space. When discussing the nature of the space(s) inferred by the use of echo and reverb on recordings, however, especially when lyrics do not cue us to imagine specific space(s), we move further into the area of connotation; in teasing these meanings out, we run the risk of interpreting idiosyncratically, of overinterpreting, or of misreading. In regards to this study, the risks of over- or wrongly interpreting becomes greater the further we move along the time line: generally speaking, the earlier we are in the history of sound recording, the more denotative the uses of spatial effects tend to be, making the task of interpretation relatively more straightforward. By the late 1940s, however, a much wider range of possible meanings was available to record makers and listeners, and many of these are at odds with others (such as the use of reverb or echo to locate a voice at a marked physical distance from the imagined center stage and also to suggest the inner voice or conscience of the singer).

The safeguards against obsessive and overheated interpretations include, along with the usual highly modalized language of scholarly caution (suggests, might be seen as, could be, implies), the accreting of multiple examples in which domains of broadly