RARE Bristol sessions 78 Black artist El Watson " Pot Licker Blues " Victor 1927

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103

El Watson " Pot Licker Blues / Narrow Guage Blues " Victor 20951 78 RPM 1927. Harmonica with guitar (Charles Johnson of the Johnson Brothers). Very scarce 78. I THINK he lived in Kingsport, TN at some point. Not sure. He was the only black artist at the Bristol sessions in 1927. See more info about him below. NOTE: This record could be considered blues or early Country. Elements of both. He makes the harmonica sound like a train on the move on the B side. The record is in fairly good condition overall. It still has some gloss. A few scattered scratches and scuffs/smudges. Nothing really bad. A few can be felt. It plays with some the usual "sizzling/crackling" with occasional pops/ticks. No skips or hesitations. His harmonica and the guitar come through reasonably well.The labels have light wear on the A side and a bit of wear/chipping on the B side.Some spindle tracks. Buyer pays Priority shipping to be determined by your ZIP. Or I will mail it by Media Mail if you wish. Foreign to be determined.. On some items, tracking information is REQUIRED, especially on foreign items paid for with PayPal. I reserve the right to refuse payments byPayPal to certain countries or individuals. Please email me if you have any questions about anything. Returns Accepted only for lost or seriously damaged items. EL WATSON: "By July 28, 1927, the Bristol Sessions were looking like a bit of a dud.  Ralph Peer had been recording for three days, and though he’d heard some good music—most of it from Ernest Stoneman and his friends and family in various combinations—he hadn’t heard anything that sounded like a game-changer for Peer or for the Victor Talking Machine Company. It would be another few days before the Carter Family showed up at the Taylor-Christian Hat Company building, and it would be a week before Jimmie Rodgers stepped up to Peer’s microphone.  Peer couldn’t know what would come of those late-session recordings, however, and as of July 28 things weren’t going well.  He had already struck out in recording sessions in Atlanta, Memphis and New Orleans, and Bristol was looking like more of the same. When El Watson showed up that evening it didn’t change Peer’s outlook.  Watson arrived at 5:30 p.m. and left at 6:40, having recorded two songs, “Pot Licker Blues” and “Narrow Gauge Blues,” accompanied by guitarist Charles Johnson of the Johnson Brothers. Peer liked Watson and his music, enough that the next year he paid to bring Watson to New York to record four more songs, but he wasn’t under any illusion that the next big name atop the pop charts would be a harmonica soloist … who happened to be black. Watson’s presence at Bristol, as the only African-American artist recorded in the 1927 sessions (a duo called Tarter & Gay would participate in the 1928 sessions), is both interesting and resonant.  Peer doesn’t seem to have thought there was anything remarkable about recording a black musician amid a series of white musicians (the suggestion that Watson’s after-hours recording appointment was meant to keep his participation quiet is absurd—Peer routinely worked into the evening, with the Carter Family working until 9:30 p.m. and the Tenneva Ramblers until 11 p.m.), and apparently he treated Watson with the same courtesy extended to everyone who recorded.  The session sheet identifies him as “Watson, Mr. El,” an honorific which a black man wouldn’t routinely have expected in the South in 1927. Very little is known about Watson beyond his two sessions for Peer (and another, under a different name but probably the same man, at the 1928 Columbia sessions in Johnson City).  Rudimentary details such as when and where he was born and when and where he died are unavailable.  No photograph is known to exist.  If he hadn’t been at the Bristol Sessions, hardly anyone would take notice of his existence. That would be a pity, though.  Beyond Watson’s formidable skills on the harmonica (check out “Pot Licker Blues” and “Narrow Gauge Blues“), his presence at Bristol is packed with symbolic consequence.  Country music, as it was going to emerge in the next few years as a commercial form, would be a fusion of the white tradition of the mountain ballad and the African-American tradition of the blues.  The singers who would dominate that form would be white, but they would be heavily influenced by black musicians—the most influential of them all would be Jimmie Rodgers, who had grown up steeped in the African-American music of the Mississippi Delta, often worked with black instrumentalists and was a blues singer in all but name.  That there should be a black man in the room in Bristol, playing lead and backed by a white guitarist, is altogether right and proper. Watson also serves as a proxy for the black man who really ought to have been there, but wasn’t ".