Blues Lovers & A Century of Listening to Robert Johnson at the wrong speed.

I am really surprised this hasn’t come up before. In this revolutionary critique, it is suggested that Robert Johnson’s legacy of “interesting / bizarre / inexplicable tunings-that-no-one-could-ever-really-figure-out” makes a lot more sense when you play him at the speed he was actually record in…. 85 percent of the normal speed we are historically used to.  It would explain why he is so incredibly different from his influence Son House.  But that remains to be judged by professionals.

I am only re-reporting / aka-idiot bloggering this because I hadn’t seen a blog post that had embedded some of the old vs new.

Here is the original song “Four to Eight” “original full speed” that we have assumed was correct:

Now here is the same song at 85% speed:

What do you think? It seems obvious. This is fairly revolutionary, one may assume?