Don’t Stay Up Too Late.

57. Blind Willie Johnson, “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground”
(Willie Johnson)
Columbia 14303D, 1927 · mp3
I haven’t been able to track down where precisely the great roots and blues guitarist Ry Cooder called this “the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music,” but the quote has been repeated often enough to take on the form of received wisdom about the song. It’s among the relatively few records that have been sent into space by NASA, apparently in the belief that it says something worth knowing about the human race. There are no words; there is barely a melody, simply humming and moaning over spare, bottlenecked chords on a slide guitar, but if you have any feeling for the blues, any understanding of pain and death and grief and fear and longing, this record is mother and father, sister and brother, solace and an ever-fresh wound. Excuse me for a moment.

Willie Johnson was born in east Texas, and was blinded as a child, possibly as a result of parental abuse. He considered himself a preacher more than a musician, although the two were intertwined in his life, and he recorded only spiritual, or gospel, music over the course of a three-year recording career. Some of the century’s best-loved black gospel songs have an origin in his recordings, including “John The Revelator,” “In My Time Of Dying,” and “Let Your Light Shine On Me.” His style of singing and playing was, however, unmistakably the blues. The divide between gospel and the blues was not yet entrenched, particularly in rural Texas; it would be nearly a decade later that Mississippi boy Robert Johnson made the association between the blues and the devil permanent.

58. Paul Robeson, “Deep River”
(Traditional)
Victor 20793A, 1927 · mp3
I can’t think of a sound on earth more moving than what used to be called Negro spirituals. (To distinguish them from what, precisely? Are there any other kinds of spirituals?) Probably the finest performer of spirituals, as well as the most famous concert bass of the twentieth century, and one of the greatest black Americans who ever lived, Paul Robeson had a voice in which the grace, the dignity, and the patience of a long-suffering, deeply religious people sounded like thunder over a brooding sea. (The fact that this dignified, patient, deeply religious people was a myth that whites in power found it convenient to perpetuate doesn’t alter what his voice sounded like.) An all-American football star in college, a fixture equally on Broadway and the cutting edge of theatre (he nearly sparked riots when, in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, his hand was kissed by a white woman), and later in life a political activist with Communist sympathies which resulted in his being blacklisted from public life for twenty years, Robeson is the sort of man who lived a life outside the scope of this list, which can necessarily only touch the tip of the iceberg. “Deep River,” for all intents and purposes, began its life when spiritual singer (and Dvorak inspiration) Harry T. Burleigh arranged it for solo voice a decade earlier, but Robeson’s slow, stately reading of its universal imagery — which can apply equally well to the Israelites entering Canaan in the book of Joshua, Christian entering the City Beautiful in Pilgrim’s Progress, an escaped slave making it over the Missouri, a Union soldier escaping enemy territory, or the muddy, bloody trenches of World War I — is among the most beautiful singing of the century. And for Tom Waits fans, the limitations of the recording technology adds distortions and sonic grit that pack an extra emotional punch that a pristine stereo recording can never have.

59. Ma Rainey’s Georgia Jazz Band, “Prove It On Me Blues”
(Gertrude Rainey)
Paramount 12668, 1928 · mp3
Ma Rainey was the oldest, and in many ways the rawest, of the classic female blues singers who set the standard for the form in the 1920s. Billing herself the “Mother of the Blues,” and even claiming to have coined the term herself (which is of course nonsense), she had been performing in the style in minstrel shows and vaudeville since 1902. She was an early mentor to Bessie Smith, and like Smith sang in powerfully-lunged contralto, though her voice was a coarser, blunter instrument. Her accompaniment, especially on cuts like this one, fits that coarse image: rather than the crackerjack jazz combos that backed up Smith and other high-class blues singers, a raucous minstrel band complete with banjo and jug fills in the gaps between her good-natured declamations. And the topic of the song is equally unusual; although she was married to William “Pa” Rainey (and her stage name was derived from his), she was openly bisexual, and the good-time lyrics “went out last night with a crowd of my friends/must have been women, ’cause I don’t like no men” only drove the point home. (It could even be a reference to a 1925 incident when she was arrested for hosting an all-female “indecent party.”) Bessie Smith shared her proclivites (though no one knows if the relationship between the two women was anything more), and one of the surprising things about researching 1920s blues and cabaret singers is just how many of them were bisexual or lesbian. Even some who were by all accounts happily straight used cross-dressing imagery in their act, and boasted as Rainey does here of acting like men: given the uphill battles any black woman faced in Jim Crow’s America, perhaps it took a certain kind of toughness to make it in the comprehensively rigged entertainment business.

60. Bix Beiderbecke, “In A Mist”
(Bix Beiderbecke)
Okeh 40916, 1927 · mp3
Bix Beiderbecke was a fascinating individual, a biographer’s dream who lived fast, died young, and left a good-looking corpse, the predecessor to all the tragic “too-young” icons who litter American pop-culture history, from James Dean and Jimi Hendrix to Kurt Cobain and Heath Ledger. From the opening scenes where as a boy he sits on the Mississippi docks, listening to the music drifting faintly from the riverboat pleasure-palaces (he almost certainly heard Louis Armstrong there) to the tearjerking third-act reveal that every one of the records he had sent back to his disapproving parents was stacked in a closet, unopened and unheard, it’s an unproduced biopic just waiting to happen. But it’s the music he made that’s even greater. He was indisputably the first great white jazz soloist, whose cornet playing derived from the New Orleans masters but unfolded in unpredictable, distinctly Midwestern ways. He was friends with that most Midwestern of popular composers, Hoagy Carmichael, and cut many of the definitive versions of his early work. And he had an ear for non-jazz music, as well. He wrote several piano pieces — or, more properly speaking, he had friends transcribe his piano improvisations, and published those — which showed a clear debt to Impressionists like Debussy and Ravel, filtered through the American sensibilities of the forgotten composer Eastwood Lane. “In A Mist” is the only one he recorded, however, though it deserves to be just as well known as the hot, liquid cornet playing on jazz songs that Louis Armstrong would later refuse to record, claiming that Bix had perfected them. Its advanced harmonics and tricky time-shifts sound almost like modernist composition, but its native blues chords and swinging jazz sense root it firmly within the popular music of the day. Beiderbecke would be dead within four years, destroyed by a toxic combination of bathtub gin and self-doubt, the first great martyr to jazz and probably the definitive inspiration for the generation of white jazz players that defined dance music for the next twenty years.

61. Duke Ellington & His Orchestra, “Black And Tan Fantasy”
(Edward K. Ellington/James Miley)
Okeh 8521, 1927 · mp3
Anything I could say about how Duke Ellington radically transformed the scope, possibility, and theoretics of jazz would pale to the reality. Put simply, before Ellington jazz was fundamentally a performer’s art; after Ellington, it was just as much, if not more so, a composer’s art. It was because of the ambition and rigor that Ellington brought to the form that jazz became America’s classical music; indeed, an American classical music which owed nothing to Ellington wouldn’t be much of a music. But he also transformed pop: his keen-eared approach to blending sounds and styles presaged the studio artistry of generations of producers and engineers, even to the modern electronic wizards attempting to wring new sounds out of their samplers and synthesizers. But most people at the time heard it differently: they called his music “jungle music.” To a degree this was self-conscious; his band played in nightclubs where Aaron Douglas’s angular, Afrocentric murals covered the wall, and playing up to the exoticism that most white patrons heard in jazz was just good business. “Black And Tan Fantasy” is one of the great cod-exotic compositions; although it deliberately quotes Frédéric Chopin’s “Funeral March” at the end, and uses its chords to set the scene, the tonal colors recall Middle Eastern (or what passed for Middle Eastern in 1927) harmonics, and the thumping of the drums is outrageously Hottentotish. In an era when the most lavish Orientalist fantasies in music were generally set to Viennese waltzes or at the most a Debussy-like wash of melody, “Black And Tan Fantasy” sounded raw and primitive, a musical confusion of the darker races. The solos, particularly trumpeter Bubber Miley’s (who had composed most of the song), only add to the tension, simply reiterating motifs rather than developing themes. Not that, from today’s standpoint, it sounds particularly exotic, but then we’ve had three-quarters of a century to come to terms with traditions outside the European one. (How’s that working out for us, by the way?) Ellington’s mid-to-late-20s compositions could fill half this list, but I had to leave room for others. Still . . . he’ll be back.