Lil' Son Jackson, Volume 1, 1948-1950: Rockin' and Rollin'; Volume 2, 1950-1952: Restless Blues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jackson, Volume 1, 1948-1950: and Rollin'; Volume 2, 1950-1952: Restless Blues. Document DOCD 5680-5681 (2006) Rags, Breakdowns, Stomps and Blues: Vintage Mandolin Music 1927-1946. Document DOCD 32-20-3 (2007). Mighty Day: 25 Gospel Greats. Document DOCD 32-20-11 (2006). Paul Oliver, compiler. Broadcasting the Blues: Black in the Segregation Era. Document DOCD 32-20-10 (2006). Document Records nearly became a casualty when its bank, the Halifax Bank of Scotland, suffered widely fluctuating share-prices throughout 2008; eventually the bank was taken over by Lloyds TSB. That Document plans to issue its sixteenth 32-20 series CD as Bankers Blues shows how deeply its finances were affected. On its website (www.document-records.com), Document also recently announced that it acquired an R-Quest CD duplication system, and that it is using white/silver CD-Rs. Furthermore, it acknowledges that its production runs for the last 6 years have used both manufactured CDs and CD-Rs. This explains the variances in pressing quality that I have reported in the last few reviews. Melvin Lil' Son Jackson (1916-1976) lived in Dallas, TX and earned his living as an auto mechanic. He learned how to play guitar from his father, and in his spare time he played blues and gospel. Around 1948 he made a demo recording--accounts differ as to whether it was a vanity recording for his own amusement, or if it was an audition disc for a record label--on which basis he was contacted by Bill Quinn of Gold Star in Houston. His 1948-1949 releases on Gold Star were successful enough to enable a fulltime musical career. Later he recorded for the Imperial label from 1950 through 1955. A 1956 car accident while returning from a performance in Oklahoma led him to return to auto mechanics. In 1960, author Paul Oliver, his wife Valerie, and Chris Strachwitz located him. Strachwitz recorded what was to become the Arhoolie album Jackson (F1004, 1962), and Oliver taped an interview from which excerpts were used in the book Conversation with the (Cassell, 1965; reprinted by Cambridge University Press, 1997) and in the audio companions (Conversation with the Blues, LP, Decca LK-4664, 1965; CD supplement to the Cambridge University Press book reprint, 1997). The two Document volumes collect Jackson's recordings through 1952. All of the 1948-1949 sessions for Gold Star were solo performances, singing and accompanying himself on the guitar. Like Lightnin' Hopkins, Jackson's musical tastes were formed by the mid-1930s recordings of pianist Leroy Carr and the prevailing east Texas acoustic guitar styles. His guitar technique included a respectable stock of treble licks, and a thumbed common-time bass-string pulse imitative of Carr's style. He also had a modal style of singing, for which his guitar accompaniment was well suited. The melody he is now known for is Rock Mama, which Jackson recorded as Milford Blues for Gold Star (and licensed to Modern Records for release on Modern 840), and later as Rockin' and and Rockin' and Rollin' no. 2 for Imperial. These records predate the more famous renditions by Muddy Waters (All Night Long, Chess 1509, 1951, and Rock Me, Chess 1652, 1956) and B.B. King (Rock Baby, Kent 393, 1961-1962). Jackson's versions are worth acquiring because of his modal, seemingly linear approach to the song. His 1951-1952 sessions for Imperial with a studio band come off less well than those by himself. The reason for this is that Jackson and the band musicians seem incompatible to each other's ways of performing, although the released recordings show that they tried various ways to match. The band, with its beats provided by a bass-and-drums rhythm section, is too heavy and too regular for Jackson's style, and Jackson for his part has the melody as his performing unit, not the 4-beats-per-measure units that the band needs to stay together. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".