Blue Business

This week in Delta Blues, Ted Gioia again proceeds with stories instead of the initial textbook style. He starts out talking about how businesspeople were now eying the blues as a possible commercial opportunity. These people, Henry Speirs, the foremost were responsible for taking almost all of the profits from black performers' music, and paying them very little in comparison. They did, however serve an important role; they supplied people with the blues, not allowing it die, and saving a spot for it in the musical spotlight. "Speir's preeminent talent, in his own mind, was that he knew what the market wanted," (52) writes Gioia. This kept him selling a lot of recordings, mostly to black people, of black artist. He writes, "At his Jackson store, he would sell between three hundred adn six hundred records on a good saturday, and almost 80 percent were by black musicians. And the percentage of black purchasers was even higher." (52)
Speir was in charge of making his own records, and was very attentive to detail. He would supply black musicians with better instruments to make their music better, and more sellable. Gioia describes him, "He paid close attention to the instruments his musicians used for recordings, and if necessary provided them with something better." This is interesting because on the outside this appeared as altruism, but for those who knew his intentions, he was just trying increase his profits, anything but an altruistic measure for a man who was already very wealthy.