'well, that was actually more in the ragtime idiom'

A point worth making amid the blues discussions by Messrs Fisher and Reynolds; there's surely no music more utterly dominated by its recording technology than 1920s blues. Listening to Robert Johnson you have, rather than the expected in yr face earthiness and presence, layers upon layers of fizz, crackle, hiss, white noise, as if its been remixed by Basic Channel rather than recorded in a room in some mythologised deep south. In this sense in the scene in Ghost World where, horrified by the cock-rock of Blueshammer, Seymour strains irritadedly to hear his ageing hero play proper blues over the noise of a crowded bar shows him missing the point- it sounds like that in the first place.