Читать книгу The Secret History of Entertainment - David Hepworth, David Hepworth - Страница 18

Don Law was born in comfortable circumstances in London in 1902. He sang with the London Choral Society. Young enough to escape conscription in the First World War, he packed his bag in 1923 and emigrated to the United States where he sold etchings in New York and ranched sheep in Alabama before becoming first a bookkeeper and then a talent scout for the American Record Corporation in Dallas, Texas. In those days the northern-based companies were looking for interesting performers in the emergent blues and country fields and would set up their recording equipment in southern hotel rooms, where they would make acetates, buying all rights in exchange for a fistful of dollars.

This Englishman was in charge at a session during Thanksgiving week 1936 in the Gunther Hotel in San Antonio, Texas when one young artist came in, sat facing the corner and played his entire repertoire of blues songs. The young artist was Robert Johnson and the songs recorded that day, ‘Crossroads’, ‘Me & The Devil’, ‘Hellhound On My Trail’ and others, announced the blues equivalent of a Miles Davis or Mozart.

Law went on to have one of the most successful A&R careers in country music, working with everyone from Johnny Cash down. But neither he nor his subsequent boss at Columbia, ‘Uncle Art’ Satherley, made much distinction between blues, hillbilly and other forms of southern music.

Arthur Satherley was born in Bristol in 1889. He emigrated to America in his twenties and found work in a Wisconsin furniture factory that made cabinets for record players. Moving into the record business, which was starting to flourish in the prosperous years following the War, he graduated to spotting and recording talent such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Alberta Hunter and King Oliver before becoming hugely successful producing Bob Wills and Gene Autry. According to Donald Clarke’s book The Rise & Fall Of Popular Music, ‘Satherley loved American rural music and regarded all of it as country music, whether white or black, but according to the institutionalised racism of the era it had to be divided into “race” and “hillbilly” music.’ Both Law and Satherley were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in later years.