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Roberta Flack - Angelitos Negros

That link between writing music and the physical outcome of it is one of the problems I have with the modern blues musician. They make records. They are not recorded. It's not their fault, you understand, we live in a time where music as product is inescapable, so everyone channels their art into this product even if they don't mean to. Their art is made with format in mind. Therefore the modern version of the blues, the type you find under the Blues & Jazz section in HMV, is the performer communicating their version of the blues to other people from original idea through to CD in jewel case. They are artists. My over simplistic view of the blues is that it has a purpose, and that purpose is to sing away your troubles or sooth them somehow. That's where the roots of the music lie. In theory, if you do a perfect job you won't be playing the blues anymore, as you'll have cheered your ass up. When you're on a 10 album contract you're probably less likely to work towards that goal, if you know what I mean.

Now, I know, a real or natural recording is impossible. I'm not naïve enough to think that the early race recordings I'm talking about were made in wonderful, uncorrupted surroundings and that their strength is in their purity, or some such nonsense. Like the late blues scholar, guitar legend and fat drunken antagonist John Fahey pointed out in his thesis on the aforementioned Charley Patton, any recorded environment is unnatural, even that of the folklorist who went from town to town making natural field recordings of black musicians.

But the early, late 1920s/early 1930s, race records are the closest we can come to natural, to hearing someone articulate their feelings in a piece of music conceived with no mind to commerce, even if the act of recording that music is commercial to the core. Don't underestimate how powerful that is.


Roberta Flack - Angelitos Negros
  • Released in: 1969
  • Genre: Jazz, Funk / Soul
  • Vocals by: Roberta Flack

"Roberta Flack performs in the areas of jazz, soul, and folk, and began her professional career recording for Atlantic Records without much success, until one of her earliest recordings which won the 1974 Grammy for Record of the Year."

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