Escaping the Delta (16 page)
Read Escaping the Delta Online
Authors: Elijah Wald
ROBERT JOHNSON
A LIFE REMEMBERED
R
OBERT
J
OHNSON HAS BECOME THE ULTIMATE BLUES LEGEND,
and it is easy to forget that he was once just a man who sang beautifully and played expert guitar. His life and music are often encountered in a vacuum: To many modern listeners he is all of early blues, and the responsibility of standing in for an entire era of music and culture has made it very hard for him to be seen as a talented, young, ambitious man, with friends and relations, good times, bad times, and moments when he was bored and tired, or cheerful and fun to be around.
I have no intention of attempting a full biography of Robert Johnson. His legend, combined with the many blank spaces in his story, have created a mass of exaggerations, confusion, legal cases, and secretiveness that make any such attempt both frustrating and futile. Instead, I will give a rough outline of his life and personality, told as much as possible in the voices of people who actually knew him. These people have sometimes disagreed or disparaged one another's recollections, but for my purposes they are far more useful guides than any vague paper trail established by later researchers. If a date drawn from a court document is inaccurate, it is simply misleading. The memories of Johnson's contemporaries, while they may be equally inaccurate in a strictly factual sense, at least give a feel for what someone in his world thought and experienced. We cannot get inside Johnson's head, or hear his story in his own words, but by listening to
his contemporaries we can get the flavor, speech, and perceptions of people who were playing and living alongside him.
Johnson's life has been the subject of intense investigation, and sometimes intense dispute, for some sixty years. Once he became a cult idol, every Mississippi blues player of even roughly his generation was bombarded with questions about him, and some almost certainly made up stories or exaggerated their acquaintance with him in order to please their many interviewers. Meanwhile, investigators have hidden material, attacked each other's research, and squabbled over every detail, until by now there are few quotations or documents that someone will not argue are at least in part fabrications or liable to error. The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that Johnson was known by a variety of names over the years, and seems to have avoided any close friendships. If most historians now agree on a general picture of Johnson's life, that may to a great extent be simply a matter of consensus. The few supporting documents conflict with each other on many points, and in the end almost the only things we know precisely and unquestionably are what we can hear on his recordings, plus a handful of dates when he happened to intersect with the Mississippi bureaucracy. I do not emphasize this in order to increase his mysteriousness. There has been far too much emphasis on the mysteries, especially considering that, despite all the confusion, we by now know more about him than about almost any of the bigger blues stars of his day. So much research has been done that I have to assume that our overall picture is fairly accurate. Still, this picture has been pieced together from so many tattered and flimsy scraps that almost any one of them must to some extent be taken on faith, and I could preface pretty much every sentence of this chapter with “it seems” or “according to some sources.” I will try to avoid this, for the reader's convenience, but it is worth keeping in mind.
According to the researcher Mack McCormick, filtered through the writer Peter Guralnick, “Robert Johnson was born probably on May 8, 1911, the eleventh child of Julia Major Dodds, whose ten older children were all the offspring of her marriage to Charles Dodds. Robert was illegitimate, which, according to McCormick, was the cause of the name confusion and the cause of many of Johnson's later
problems.”
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(You will note Guralnick's “probably” and “according to.” I am not alone here.) Charles Dodds was a relatively prosperous landowner and furniture maker in Hazlehurst, a town south of Jackson and hence some distance outside the Delta region. Around 1909, he was forced to leave for Memphis after a dispute with some white landowners, and Robert was born of a temporary relationship between Julia and a man named Noah Johnson. Shortly after his birth, Julia had to move on as well, and she carried Robert along with her for a couple of years until he was taken in by Charles Dodds (who by now was calling himself Charles Spencer). This would have been about 1914. Dodds-Spencer had a large family, including not only Julia's children but also two from a mistress, and during his stay in this household Robert may have messed around on a guitar belonging to an older brother.
Around 1918 or 1920, Robert rejoined his mother, moving to the area around Robinsonville and Tunica in the Delta. The specific town (really more of a handful of houses out in the fields) is often given as Commerce. Julia was living with a new husband, a man named Dusty Willis, and some people remember Johnson being known as Little Robert Dusty, though records at the Indian Creek School in Tunica give his name as Robert Spencer. He attended this school for several years, and Willie Coffee, who was a few years younger but shared classes in the same one-room schoolhouse, says that among the kids he was already considered an accomplished musician:
Me and him and lots more of us boys, we played hooky and get up under the church. They had a little stand up there and we'd get up under thereâ¦and he'd blow his harp and pick his old jew's harp for us and sing under there. We'd play hooky until the teacher would find our variety, and she'd make us come in and give us five lashes.
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The first stringed instrument anyone in the Delta recalls Johnson playing was a “diddley bow,” a makeshift creation made by stretching wire between nails on the side of a house. A kid would tighten the wire by forcing a brick under the end, then play it by banging it with a stick while sliding a glass bottle along it to change notes. Israel Clark, who
knew Johnson from church and Sunday school, recalls him making a three-string version, then later buying a beat-up old guitar with only four strings and saving pennies until he had a dime and could buy two more. “[He] would noise around everybody till they run us away, and we'd go out on the levee, side of the road somewhere, and that's where we'd shoot marbles and he'd play guitar.”
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By the time he was nineteen, Johnson had married Virginia Travis, but his sixteen-year-old wife died in childbirth, something far from uncommon among poor black farm families, who had virtually no access to medical care. According to some researchers, this was a major trauma for him and set him to his life of rambling, but as far as I know this is pure speculation.
It was around this time that Johnson met the man who would be his first great musical inspiration.
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Son House had moved to Robinsonville to play in a duo with Willie Brown, whom he had met farther south on the Dockery Plantation. Both men were associates of Charley Patton, who was one of the most popular entertainers at backcountry parties around Dockery's, and in May 1930 Patton took them up to Grafton, Wisconsin, for a recording session with Paramount Records. Brown had been living in Robinsonville for four years, and shortly after the recording trip, House joined him and they formed a team that became the first-call band at local dances.
Even in the 1960s, House remained a magnificent performer, and I can only imagine how powerful he must have been in his prime. While most popular bluesmen were adept showmen, able to play a wide range of material, and noted for funny, off-color lyrics and fancy guitar tricksâPatton and Tommy Johnson played behind their heads and between their legs, threw and spun their guitars in the air, and Johnson even played with his toesâHouse played like a man possessed by a fearsome and consuming spirit. Born in 1902, he was in his sixties by the time he was captured on film, and some fans insist that his powers were much diminished, but his best performances remain the strongestâindeed perhaps the onlyâargument for the blues musician as a sort of secular voodoo master. Though in repose he is soft-spoken and rather courtly, when he begins to play he is trans
formed. His face contorts, his eyes roll back in his head, sweat pours down, his hands flail wildly at the guitar, and his voice has an awesome, earthshaking power. He seems to be in a trance, channeling energies he can barely control, and it is impossible to take your eyes off him.
House was also a big-time drinker and hell-raiserâthough in earlier years he had been a Baptist ministerâand he and Brown were Robert Johnson's early idols. In the 1960s, House would frequently tell the story for eager young blues fans:
Sometimes we'd be up there in Robinsonville, and this old man named Mr. Funk [had a place], called it Funk's Corner Store, and he would ask us to play some on a Saturday night. He had some benches out there in front for us to sit on and play. We would draw a crowd around, and he would give us a little something to do that.
So Robert, he would be standing around, and he would listen too, and he got the idea that he'd like to play. So he started from that and everywhere that he'd get to hear us playing for a Saturday night ball, he would come and be there.
So his parentsâ¦they found out that he was running 'round to them places where we'd be playing on Saturday nights, and guys would fight all the time, kill up each other, shoot each other. They'd do that regular. So they got afraid and they didn't want him to be out to those kind of places. But he got involved with it so well, and he didn't like to work anyway, because his father and mother they were farmersâ¦Robert, he'd wait till they go to sleep at night and he'd play like he going to bed, and when he'd find out they're asleep, he'd get up and crawl out the window, and he'd come on and find me and Willieâ¦
He used to play harmonica when he was 'round about fifteen, sixteen years old. He could blow harmonica pretty good. Everybody liked it. But he just got the idea that he wanted to play guitarâ¦He used to sit down between me and Willie. See, Willie was my commenter, you know, he'd second all the time, he'd never lead, I'd do the lead. And we'd be sitting about this distance apart, and [Robert] would come and sit right on the floor, with his legs up like that, between us.
So when we'd get to a rest period or something, we'd set the guitars up and go outâit would be hot in the summertime, so we'd go out and get in the cool, cool off some. While we're out, Robert, he'd get the guitar and go to bamming with it, you know? Just keeping noise, and the people didn't like that. They'd come out and they'd tell us, “Why don't you or Willie or one go in there and stop that boy? He's driving everybody nuts.”
I'd go in there and get to him, I'd say, “Robert,” I'd say, “Don't do that, you'll drive the people home.” I'd say, “You can blow the harmonica, they'd like to hear that. Get on that.” He wouldn't pay me too much attention, but he'd let the guitar alone. I'd say, “You stop that. Supposing if you'd break a string or something? This time of night, we don't know no place where we can go get a string.” I'd say, “Just leave the guitars alone.”
But quick as we're out there again, and get to laughing and talking and drinking, here we'd hear the guitar again, making all kind of tunes: “BLOO-WAH, BOOM-WAH”âa dog wouldn't want to hear it!
So we couldn't break him from it, and his father would get at him, dogged him so much that he run away. Went somewhere over in Arkansas somewhere.
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House recalled that Johnson was away for only about six months, then came back “with a guitar swinging over his shoulder.”
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According to other sources, things happened a little differently: Johnson remained in Mississippi, but south of the Delta, around Hazlehurst and Crystal Springs (Tommy Johnson's home base), and he was gone for a year or two. During this period, he married a woman named Callie Craft, and began to be a regular performer around the juke joints and lumber camps, often working with a guitarist named Ike Zinnerman. One way or another, when Johnson got back to the northern Delta, House had a surprise coming:
Me and Willie, we was playing out to a little place called Banks, Mississippi. I looked and I saw somebody squeezing in the front door, and I seed it was Robert. I said, “Bill, Bill.”
He said, “Huh.”
I said, “Look who's coming in the door, got a guitar on his back.”
He said, “Yeah, no kidding.” He said, “Oh, that's Little Robert.”
I said, “Yeah, that's him.” I said, “Don't say nothing.”
And he wiggled through the crowd, until he got over to where we was. I said, “Boy, now where you going with that thing? T'annoy somebody else to death again?”
He say, “I'll tell you what, too.” He say, “This your rest time?”
I say, “Well, we can make it our rest time. What you want to do, annoy the folks?”
He say, “No, just let meâgive me a try.”
I say, “Well, OK.” I winked at Willie. So me and Willie got up, and I gave him my seat. He set down. And that boy got started off playing. He had an extra string he'd put on, a six-string guitar made into a seven-string, he'd put it on hisself. Something I had never saw before, none of us. And when that boy started playing, and when he got through, all our mouths were standing open. All! He was gone!
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House said that Johnson stayed around for about a week. He would always explain that he tried to advise the young man about the dangers of a musician's life, the booze and wild women, but Johnson just laughed it off. As House told Lomax, “He was awful moufyâa terrible big chatterboxâproud as a peafowl.”
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It was now roughly 1931, and over the next seven years Johnson would roam far and wide, impressing everyone he met with his musical abilities. “He hung around and left, never would stay long at a timeâwas his hangout down the road in Bogalusa, Louisiana,” House said. “We'd rag around someâthe people would say we could beat him, but
we
knowed.”
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