Googlin' the Blues

I'm working on a blues archive, a collection of 1/4" analog tapes recorded in the 1950s, 60s and 70s at various clubs (Gerde's Folk City, Sugar Hill, the Ash Grove), in a few professional studios, in people's living rooms. Most of the tapes have minimal labeling, which means I have to figure out the tape format: is it 1/2-track stereo, 1/2-track mono, full-track mono, some other configuration? Is it running at 15 ips (inches-per-second), 7 1/2 ips, 3 3/4 ips, oh please not 1 7/8ths ips? Is it heads out or tails out? Some random combination of all of the above? (It happens!) Then there's the musical content, the juicy stuff. When I don't know the song titles, I google lyrics. Which means, today, my search history looks like this:

he moans when i'm sleeping, wakes me 2am

i've got a man down by the sea

awful morning blues

hard time in monkey town

church on sunday and cabaret on monday

dreaming of you, that's all i do

don't you rock me daddy-o

there's many a girl can go about

which way does the red river run

by 4 o'clock in the morning you know it's a lonesome town

don't play police when you knock on my door

Have fun analyzing that, Google!

Jessica Thompson