“The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie”

The studio building was a reddish structure, described by everyone who saw it as “like a barn.” There are no photographs of the studio interior, but Van der Tuuk, in “Paramount’s Rise and Fall,” skillfully layers the memories of musicians who remembered it. The space is divided into two rooms, the control room and the performance space. There’s a wall between them with a door and window in it and a red light that comes on when the artists are recording. There’s an upright baby grand piano. The room is cold and damp. The windows were “draped with burlap and blankets” to reduce the reverberation. Thick carpets on the floors. A dark, furred box. A horrible place to record.

They would have been offered illegal liquor, but not too much, just enough to limber them up.

The recording equipment itself, as reconstituted by Van der Tuuk, was a strange liminal beast that probably should have never lived. It was electrical, but it looked acoustical. You sat and sang into a giant wooden horn that was two feet wide at the mouth and eight feet long. The horn was meant to focus and direct the sound toward an electrical microphone. At the beginning of the ’30s, the engineers were having a hard time working the turntable on which the original wax masters were created; there were electrical problems. So they went back to a weight-and-pulley system, from the old days, to turn the plate. After every song, the engineers would have to jump up and raise the weights again. We may be able to hear the eccentricities of the weights and pulleys in the way the speed seems to change slightly about two-thirds of the way through “Motherless Child Blues.”

The great John Jeremiah Sullivan tracked down the story — or, at least, as much of the story as we’ve ever known — of the female blues musicians L.V. (“Elvie”) Thomas and Geeshie Wiley for the New York Times Magazine this past weekend, and you’ll want to read it and listen to the accompanying music. It’s just about already stamped with “SCREENPLAY.” Above, the duo’s recording of “Motherless Child Blues,” which Sullivan and his researcher Caitlin Rose Love discover was recorded at the Wisconsin Chair Company headquarters in Grafton, Wisc., in 1930. [NYT Magazine]