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Renaissance - Prologue

There is broad consensus on this, that little can be learnt about formulas after the first two decades of commercial blues recordings. So the corpus stretches basically from 1920 to 1942, with a few excursions outside whenever useful. I must indicate, however, that in the history of blues (and other) recordings, there is a three- to four-year hiatus (broadly speaking, the years 1931 to early 1934) due to the Great Depression, though production did not cease completely. One consequence of this is that it is not infrequent for a formula to be revived on record after the Depression. This would indicate that the influence of preDepression records was still active, or that the folk tradition remained alive and filled the recording gap.

On an almost regular basis, whenever a blues singer released a record with an interesting formula or turn of phrase, within months, at most a year (and we know that it was relatively easy to record just before the Depression), cover versions or partial borrowings would occur. It is difficult to be decide whether this was due to blues artists’ awareness that they could thus make their own records sell, or whether talent-scouts and record producers actually goaded them in that direction. In any case, the predominance of a few very popular artists and of their “blues hits” seems to have led to imitation across the South for commercial profit, with record labels competing for potential success.

...recordings might have arbitrarily captured only a particular version of a song and then stabilized it. From a folkloristic point of view, one might add that particular formulas were used and reused because they were aesthetically and compositionally satisfying to blues singers, but also because they captured the popular imagination and were meaningful to black people, or, more specifically, to lower-class African Americans of Southern rural extraction. One may surmise that most of these formulas originated from black folk parlance but, once they had made it onto a record, their existence was perpetuated, whether or not they actually remained in existence otherwise. In other words, they tended to acquire a life of their own. 
Source: Nobody Knows Where The Blues Come From: Lyrics And History by Robert Springer


Renaissance - Prologue
  • Recording Location: Nova Sound Studios, London, England
  • Record Label Esoteric Recordings
  • Released October 1972

"In 1972, Renaissance's then-new management disbanded the then current line-up retaining only ex-The Gentle People singer Annie Haslam and former Rupert's People keyboard player John Tout to build a new band around."

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