H.C. Speir and the Delta Blues Canon

Henry Columbus Speir was born in Mississippi in eighteen ninety-five. He ran a furniture store and phonograph shop at two twenty-five North Farish Street in Jackson, and he had an ear.

When the northern record labels wanted to find talent in the South in the nineteen twenties and thirties, they could not simply drive the Delta looking for musicians. They needed someone who knew the territory. Speir became that person. Musicians who wanted to record came to his shop, and he auditioned them. He made test recordings on the equipment he used to demonstrate to customers. He sent the recordings to representatives at Paramount, Victor, Columbia, OKeh, and Vocalion. If a label approved, Speir would arrange sessions, sometimes accompanying artists to recording locations in New Orleans, Birmingham, or the Midwest.

Through Speir's shop passed Charley Patton, the foundational voice of the Delta blues. Skip James, whose high lonesome falsetto would influence decades of musicians. Tommy Johnson. The Mississippi Sheiks. Robert Johnson's recordings, the sessions in San Antonio and Dallas in nineteen thirty-six and nineteen thirty-seven that produced the twenty-nine songs the world calls his entire catalog, came about partly through a recommendation from Speir.

He was not a musician. He was a furniture salesman with commercial instincts and a genuine passion for the music he heard. He received flat fees from the labels for his scouting work. He received no royalties from the recordings he helped produce. Blues researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow, who tracked down Speir and interviewed him late in his life, called him the godfather of Delta Blues.

Speir died in Jackson in nineteen seventy-two. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in two thousand five. The music he helped document is inescapable.