27: Robert Johnson (2 page)

Prior to the American Civil war, from 1861 to 1865, it was one of the richest cotton-growing areas in the United States, the cotton plantations dependent on the labour of black slaves. The area is still predominantly black. Following the abolition of slavery, cotton remained the principal crop; freed slaves were frequently allocated a small share (the origin of the ‘forty acres and a mule' stereotype) of their former plantation and they would farm that section, very much dependent on, and vulnerable to, the largesse of the former plantation owner.

The homes of these former slaves were often places of abject poverty, exacerbated by a lack of sanitation and essential hygiene, with frequently no latrines. Moreover, the grim spectre of lynching loomed forever over the black population, especially males, a permanent threat to any ‘nigger' getting above his station. Ill-educated and outnumbered, the local poor white community felt themselves under economic threat – local blacks could be employed for even less than themselves – and their resentment would sometimes find an outlet in membership of the Ku Klux Klan.

*

The facts about Robert Leroy Johnson are much clearer than the myth.

He was born on 8 May 1911 in Hazlehurst, Mississippi.

His mother was Julia Ann Major Dodds. In 1889, when she was fifteen, she had married Charles Dodds, who had been born in February 1865. Both of their parents had been born into slavery.

In 1900 the federal census listed this married couple's children as twelve-year-old Louise, nine-year-old Harriet, eight-year-old Bessie, five-year-old Willie, four-year-old Lula and one-year-old Melvin Leroy. Two children had died of illness – not uncommon in those days – and two more children were born subsequently.

But Robert Johnson was not a consequence of Julia Dodds's marriage; Charles Dodds was not the father.

Charles Dodds was relatively affluent and successful. He was a manufacturer of wicker furniture and also owned farming land outside Hazlehurst, Mississippi, which was south of the state capital of Jackson, outside the Delta. Yet his position hardly saved him from conflict with local whites. Specifically, in 1909 Charles Dodds fell foul of John and Joseph Marchetti, a pair of Italian businessmen who had settled in Hazlehurst. This strife was occasioned almost entirely by Charles and Joseph both enjoying the charms of the same local woman, Serena, a mistress with whom Charles had two boys. Fleeing a white lynch mob, Charles Dodds disguised himself as a woman and managed to make it to Memphis, Tennessee, 240 miles distant. There, still feeling unsafe, he changed his name to Charles Spencer. Soon Serena and her boys joined him in Memphis, followed shortly afterwards by most of the children that Charles ‘Spencer' had had with Julia Dodds.

It would have been a very different life to the one they had experienced in the Delta; the world's largest cotton and hardwood lumber market, Memphis was a rich boom town, on one hand sophisticated, on the other wild and often very dangerous. In 1921 Memphis was the murder capital of the United States, its homicide rate seven times that of the country's average; guns and knives were pulled with abandon, and poison – that staple weapon in slave rebellions against white overseers – was a regular method of dispatching rivals.

Unhappy about the living arrangements of her husband, Julia Dodds remained in Hazlehurst with two of their daughters. Yet the Marchettis soon kicked them out of their home and land.

This was clearly a bad time for Julia Dodds, only compounded by the divorce that she and her husband underwent the next year, in 1910.

Julia, who was by now thirty-eight years old, then had a brief relationship with Noah Johnson, a local plantation worker who was ten years younger than her. Out of this relationship was born Robert Leroy Johnson.

The boy was born into a life of struggle. His father was no longer around, and Julia needed to make money simply to survive. Working as an itinerant cotton-picker, for more than two years Julia moved from camp to camp in the Mississippi Delta region, around Tunica and Robinsonville, with her youngest daughters, Bessie and Carrie, who cared for their half-brother, the baby Robert.

Showing compassion for their plight and their poor living conditions, Charles Dodds Spencer decided around 1914 that he would bring Robert up along with his other children, all of whom were by now in Memphis, where they were joined eventually by Julia. Yet because of the birth of Robert, Charles Dodds Spencer refused to resume his relationship with her; Julia lived in the same household with her former husband and Serena, his mistress having now usurped her position in the family. However, there was apparently no tension because of this. In Memphis Robert's elder half-brother, Charles Leroy, owned a guitar, and from time to time Robert would play on it. Having started out life as Robert Johnson, the boy now found himself named Robert Spencer, bringing further confusion to an already confused life.

Memphis may have been somewhat wild, but it was also a progressive city; a powerful and vocal local movement urged the education of young black children. Robert Johnson attended elementary school there, most likely St Peter's, from 1916 to 1920.

Around 1920, however, Robert went back to live with his mother, who had returned south and settled in the town of Robinsonville, Mississippi, thirty or so miles from Memphis. When he returned to the Delta, even though he was not yet a teenager, the contrast between the sophisticated and exciting city of Memphis and the small towns of the Delta must have struck Robert Johnson forcefully.

But the sensual urbane flavour of Memphis lingered in him, its influence part of who he was. His song ‘From Four Until Late' makes mention of the city, employing an identical melody to a tune by a Memphis musician, Johnny Dodd, whose 1920 hit was very similarly entitled ‘Four Until Late Blues'. He would return time and time again to Memphis; Robert Johnson's later dapper appearance was always far more that of a Beale Street slicker than a Saturday night fish fry plantation worker – even when that was his actual occupation.

By this time Julia, now forty-five, had remarried, in October 1916, to twenty-two-year-old Willie ‘Dusty' Willis. As a consequence Robert Johnson now became known as Little Robert Dusty, further confusing his identity.

In the early 1920s, Dusty, Julia and her son crossed the Mississippi River to the town of Commerce. The two adults were employed on the Abbay and Leatherman plantation, and a wooden shack came with their jobs. By 1924 the fourteen-year-old Robert was registered at the Indian Creek school.
[6]

On arriving at the school, he had demonstrated that he was already a very proficient musician. His contemporary, Willie Coffee, recalled that they would regularly play hooky from school, hiding under a local church. There Robert would ‘blow his harp and pick his old Jew's harp for us and sing.' When discovered by their teacher, as they inevitably were, the truant schoolboys would each receive five lashes. Although some would claim that Robert Johnson had no education whatsoever, Johnny Shines maintained he had beautiful handwriting, a product of his creative long fingers.

During this time Robert Johnson is recalled making a ‘diddley bow', a wire stretched with nails, on the side of their plantation shack that abutted onto the levee. It would be played by hitting it with a stick as a glass bottle was slid along to change notes, and Robert would be heard playing on it late into the night.
[7]
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After playing around with the Jew's harp, Robert moved on to the harmonica, playing it for the next few years until he bought an old guitar, so battered that it only had four strings – he saved up his pennies for the remaining two strings. Out on the edge of the road that ran alongside the levee holding back the waters of the Mississippi, as other kids played with marbles, he would struggle to play this instrument. One of his favourite songs, which he would strive to replicate, was ‘How Long, How Long Blues', by Leroy Carr.
[8]
Taught by Harry ‘Hard Rock' Glenn, he also learned one of his first guitar songs, ‘I'm Gonna Sit Down and Tell My Mama'.
[9]
In addition he picked up a certain ability with piano and pump organ.
[10]

By now the clearly intelligent, quietly self-assertive boy was aware of his ancestry, and of his true name, which he began to use. He would slip away at night, travelling to nearby towns like Lake Cormorant, Pritchard and Banks, playing guitar in juke joints – frequently black-owned stores that converted at night into small semi-nightclubs. He would also travel up to Memphis, to spend time with Charles Spencer and his family.
[11]

Wherever he went, however he travelled, Robert Johnson was known for somehow always looking well turned out, well pressed. As the guitarist Johnny Shines, with whom he would trek and play as a duo in the last years of his life, explained to Alan Greenberg, ‘We'd be on the road for days and days, no money and sometimes not much food, let alone a decent place to spend the night . . . And as I'd catch my breath and see myself looking like a dog, there'd be Robert, all clean as can be, looking like he's just stepping out of church.'
[12]

For his parents there were worries he might have been going off the rails. By contemporary standards his mother Julia, by then in her fifties, was considered aged – in 1920 life expectancy for non-white Americans, who were ninety per cent black, was only just over forty-five years. Yet together with her new husband Dusty Willis, Julia had endeavoured to imbue her son with solid, God-fearing values, setting him on a straight course, they hoped, for adulthood. Robert did not always get on with his step-father, however; Dusty Willis held no truck with the boy's penchant for picking at his guitar, when instead he should have been out breaking his back picking cotton in the fields.

His fastidiousness about his on-the-road appearance was not necessarily reflected in other aspects of his demeanour; fond of a drop of moonshine, Robert was known to grow amorous under the influence of alcohol. Johnny Shines later recalled their needing to hotfoot it out of towns after Robert found himself becoming over-affectionate towards another man's girlfriend or wife.
[13]
How must his parents have felt when in 1926, when he was only fifteen, Robert Johnson began a relationship with a divorced mother? The woman, Estella Coleman, was ten years older than Robert; was this perhaps a subconscious adherence to the pattern of behaviour displayed by his own younger father with his mother? And by her relationship with Dusty Willis, less than half her age? ‘Robert followed my mother home,' Estella's son said later about an affair that would continue, one way and another, for the next ten years.
[14]

Estella Coleman's son's name was Robert Lockwood, Jr. He was only four years younger than his mother's lover. When he was eight, Robert Lockwood had started to play organ in his father's church. When Robert Johnson arrived with his guitar, however, he switched to that instrument. Whenever he put down his guitar and went out, Robert Lockwood would pick it up and try to copy what he had seen him doing. On discovering this, Robert Johnson resolved to tutor the younger boy, the only person whom the usually secretive Robert is believed to have so instructed. Robert Johnson even made Robert Lockwood a guitar. ‘The first thing he taught me,' said Robert Lockwood, ‘was “Sweet Home Chicago” . . . He was like pennies from heaven for me, because he taught me how to make my living. My mother loved him and he taught me to play, so I have to say I loved him too.'
[15]
Later Robert Johnson would also teach him the rudiments of stage-craft. (The ultimate consequence of this exposure to his mother's lover was that by 1948, after many years of assiduous application to his craft, during which time he himself had already become a celebrated blues musician, Robert Lockwood had been transformed into what Robert Palmer described in his 1981 book
Deep Blues
as ‘the Delta's first modern lead guitarist'.
[16]
(As though repaying his debt of instruction from Robert Johnson, Robert Lockwood later taught guitar to the man who became B.B. King.)

Most other bluesmen worked in guitar duos, but ‘Robert came along and he was backing himself up without anybody helping him, and sounding good,' Lockwood recounted in
Deep Blues
.
[17]
Lockwood's assessment of Johnson's playing differed from the common local view, which was utterly dismissive of his skills. Pounding the floor with his feet to push along the rhythm, Robert Johnson made his guitar sound as though it was being played by two men, somehow managing to simultaneously play rhythm and lead parts. His high, keening vocals, sometimes riding up to a reedy falsetto, were far from the deep baritones employed by many bluesmen. Still in his mid-teens, Robert was in the process of developing his style and abilities to a point where he would revolutionize the form.

He was surrounded by prospective mentors. Settled in the area, for example, was local bluesman Willie Brown, from whom Robert Johnson already had endeavoured to glean as many musical insights as he could. Robert emulated Willie Brown, learning some of his tunes, notably ‘The Jinx Blues', and Willie Brown is referenced in Robert Johnson's song ‘Cross Road Blues', when Robert calls for help from his ‘friend Willie Brown'.

Willie Brown was an acquaintance of Charley Patton, born in either 1887 or 1891, one of the earliest and greatest – and best-educated – of the Delta blues artists. Already celebrated, Patton was distinguished by his gravelly, raucous voice and showmanship; he was an early exponent of that chitlin' circuit specialty of playing his guitar behind his head and between his knees. Between 1929 and 1930, Charley Patton recorded forty-three tunes, more than any other blues artist up to that point; altogether he would record over sixty songs. He wrote stories about his life and the lives of those around him, about women running off, about problems with the law, about life on plantations and work and chain gangs, and about a seemingly casual racism; his song ‘High Water Everywhere' was about how the flooding of the Mississippi in 1927 changed the geography of the entire Delta. ‘Would go to the hilly country but they got me barred', he sang of how the local police made sure only white folks made it to the high ground. (In Patton's ‘Dry Well Blues', it was the turn of drought to bring devastation.)