Johnny Cage

 

This was an interesting typo when I was using voice recognition, and is an augur of what indexing errors will do to our understanding of history. If the Mandela Effect takes hold with this glitch, Johnny Cage will be known to have been the composer of both "I Walk the Line" and "Water Walk".

Recently, I came across a question on Quora about the late country music pianist Floyd Cramer, which was spelled "Crammer". When I ran a Google search, it correctly corrected the search to "Floyd Cramer". There is no Floyd Crammer that was a country music pianist; It is an urban legend. Supposedly there was a tape by an obscure pianist that was circulating at the time and the legend is that they paid off the original inventor of the technique. My initial thought was that Cramer's lick was a variation on the "crushed" note (a blue note created by, for example, striking Eb and letting it slide to E-natural on a C chord). Cramer rather "hammered" it as guitarists do, so its influence may be from guitar techniques.

One of the biggest flaws in Google Search is that it cannot parse word order, so for people with two first names this glitch is particularly frustrating. I'm confused with the artist Barry Lee and another Lee Barry that is a DJ. Compounding the problem is incorrect metadata. (The semantic web was supposed to sort this kind of thing out). This is why we need to pull the Net back towards the bibliographic model, with machines (working with humans in the loop) to carefully examine machine-generated metadata. These humans-in-the-loop will be the new scribe/monks for the neo-medieval internet.

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PS: The "obscure" tapes are on Ebay but the last name is spelled incorrectly as "Crammer". It's even misspelled on Amazon.