Escaping the Delta (18 page)

Along with all the songs learned from recordings and other players, Johnson had a rare ability to create his own material. Often, he would make up songs on the spur of the moment: “He was a great guy for plain inspiration,” Townsend says. “He'd get a feeling, and out of
nowhere he could put a song together…. I remember asking him about songs he had sung two or three nights before, and he'd tell me, well, he wouldn't, he couldn't do that one again. And I'd ask him why. He'd say, ‘Well, that was just a feeling. I was just, just…reciting from a feeling.'”
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After a while—maybe the turning point came when he began recording, or maybe it was a little earlier—he came to have a few original signature pieces. Along with the popular favorites, he would play “Sweet Home Chicago,” his adaptation of a Kokomo Arnold hit that he had renamed to fit the Delta dweller's northern Shangri-La, or “Come On in My Kitchen,” his sexy, lonesome reworking of Tampa Red's “Things 'Bout Coming My Way.”

According to Shines, Johnson's slide guitar work was particularly distinctive, and could have an almost hypnotic effect on his listeners:

By 1936, Johnson had proved his abilities among his peers, and his power over an audience, but he still had not gotten the respect and reputation that came with a recording career. With all his traveling, it seems a bit strange that he did not head for the studios in Chicago, where most of the top blues hits were being made, but maybe he was afraid he would get lost in the big-city shuffle—or maybe he had given it a try and for some reason it had not worked out. In any case, sometime that year he walked into H. C. Speir's furniture store in Jackson. Speir had expanded from selling phonographs and records to acting as a talent scout, and had been responsible for getting pretty much all the Mississippi blues singers their recording deals—the Mississippi Sheiks, Bo Carter, Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Ishmon Bracey,
Skip James, Son House, and many lesser names. By the mid-1930s, the record companies were shying away from rural artists, but Speir was impressed with Johnson and got in touch with Ernie Oertle, the Mid-South agent for the ARC company. Oertle was interested, and arranged a debut session for Johnson in November, in San Antonio, Texas.

Oertle brought Johnson to the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, where ARC was conducting its sessions, and introduced him to the producers, Art Satherley and Don Law. As was typical for field trips by the big companies, they were in San Antonio to record a range of regional and ethnic music, and that week's acts included two groups of Mexican musicians and a cowboy swing band called the Chuck Wagon Gang. Johnson was the one blues singer on the roster, and according to Law he was “suffering from a bad case of stage fright.” Law recalled that he had to turn his back on the other musicians before he could relax. “Eventually he calmed down sufficiently to play, but he never faced his audience.”
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Many modern commentators dispute Law's assessment of this situation. Some argue that Johnson was “jealous of his own abilities,” and turned away to conceal his guitar technique from the Mexicans. Others suggest that Johnson was trying to get an acoustic boost by “corner loading,” playing into the corner so that the sound would be amplified by the close walls rather than dissipating in the bigger space of the room. To me, it seems unlikely that Johnson would think he knew recording acoustics better than the ARC engineers, or that he would suspect Mexican ranchera singers of wanting to steal his licks. Law's explanation, by contrast, seems perfectly reasonable: Though confident of his prowess at a juke joint or house party, Johnson was recording for the first time, and everyone agrees that he considered this a make-or-break moment that would define his future. Even a very practiced performer can get nervous in that kind of situation, and what could be more reasonable than to try and shut out the distractions of the recording process by turning away and going into his own world?

If this first session was a somewhat nerve-wracking experience, that would help explain Law's other memories of that week: First, that
the road-savvy Johnson ran afoul of the local law and got busted on a vagrancy charge, and then that, after Law bailed him out, he called the producer again to complain that he was “lonesome.”

“Lonesome? What do you mean, you're lonesome?” Law says he responded.

“I'm lonesome and there's a lady here. She wants fifty cents and I lacks a nickel…”
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Was that really Robert Johnson, or was Law dredging up a favorite blues musician anecdote? Whatever the intervening incidents, Johnson did three sessions that week, on Monday, Thursday and Friday, November 23, 26 and 27. He recorded sixteen songs, generally doing two takes of each.

This was the depths of the Depression, and new blues artists were not selling very well unless they had the Chicago band sound behind them.
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Still, Johnson's debut produced one moderately good seller, “Terraplane Blues,” a high-powered double-entendre number about a fashionable make of car. It did not set the blues world on fire, but impressed a lot of people back home in the Delta. “We heard a couple of his pieces come out on records,” Son House remembered. “Believe the first one I heard was ‘Terraplane Blues.' Jesus, it was good. We all admired it. Said, ‘That boy is really going places.'”
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There is no dispute about how important the recordings were to Johnson himself. He proudly brought records to various far-flung family members, and Shines recalls the pleasure he took in talking about the process: “Nearly every time I came upon Robert he'd be telling me about some new recording session. He'd tell me about things I'd never seen, like ‘start lights' and ‘stop lights' used in recording. About seventy-five to a hundred dollars was all the money he ever got.”
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In those days, rural artists were rarely paid any royalties for their records. Even if they were offered the option of a royalty deal, it was a gamble that few would take when balanced against a lump sum, paid immediately in cash. Johnson probably got a few hundred dollars for his sixteen sides—a small payment considering what they would become, but a fortune for a wandering guitarist in the midst of the Depression. It was very likely the most money he had ever had at one
time, and may have paid for the slick suit he is wearing in his studio portrait. The recordings also would have increased his drawing power, and hence his earnings at juke joints and house parties.

As for ARC, the company was happy enough with Johnson's sales to invite him back for another session in June. This was by no means standard procedure in that period, and can be taken as a high compliment and demonstration of the producers' belief in his potential. Just seven months after his first sessions, he was in Dallas, in another makeshift recording studio. This time, it was the height of summer and Don Law recalled that at such sessions, “to keep the street noises out, we had to keep the windows closed, so we worked shirtless with electric fans blowing across cakes of ice.”
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Johnson recorded another thirteen songs, then hit the road again. Shines says that they met up in Texas, then worked their way to Arkansas, where Johnson split off and headed back to Mississippi. Later, they seem to have made another trip north, visiting St. Louis and going up to Illinois, where Shines reports that they got a gig in a small town simply because the locals had never seen a black man: “We stayed there a couple of nights, and the people at that time paid twenty-five cents a head to come in and see what the colored guys looked like…. [But] we didn't want to be part of a freak sideshow. The guy thought we wanted more money, but we just wanted to get the hell out of there. After all, a man have pride. And that wasn't in the South either. Well, that just shows you how unthoughtful sometimes people can be.”
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Some of that year was spent in Helena, Arkansas, where Johnson continued his on-and-off affair with Robert Lockwood's mother, and Lockwood picked up some more guitar tips from him. There are stories that he got a band together, that he was playing with a pianist and a drummer, with his name written across the front of the bass drum, evolving toward what would come to be called a “jump blues” sound.

Unfortunately, as everyone knows, there was trouble ahead. Along with the music and the drinking, Johnson had long had a reputation as a ladies' man. As Shines put it, “Women, to Robert, were like motel or hotel rooms. Even if he used them repeatedly he left them where he
found them. Heaven help him, he was not discriminating. Probably a bit like Christ, he loved them all. He preferred older women in their thirties over the younger ones, because the older ones would pay his way.”
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Some of the women, probably most of them, went along with this program. After all, they knew they were picking up a rambling musician, and few could have had any illusions about the duration of the relationship. Others, though, were less accommodating. Willie Coffee laughs as he recalls one scrape back in the Delta:

Even if the women were satisfied with the situation, the men could be another story. As Shines put it, “If women pull at a musician, naturally men's gonna be jealous of it. Because every man wants to be king…and if he's not king and somebody else seems to be on the throne, then he wants to get him down. It don't take very much to set people off when you're being worshipped by women. And so naturally we got into a hell of a lot of trouble.”
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Johnson had annoyed more than his share of husbands and boyfriends, and in the end it caught up with him. David “Honeyboy” Edwards was working around the Delta at that time, and says that he and Johnson had teamed up on a regular gig at a little country joint near Three Forks, a small cluster of houses west of Greenwood. The man who ran the club would pick them up in Greenwood, then drive them back into town after the gig, and Edwards's understanding is that
he got the idea that Johnson was running around with his wife and decided to get rid of him by giving him poisoned whiskey.

Johnson's death certificate gives us a fairly reliable date of August 16, 1938, but the rest of the story got told and retold a lot of different ways. Aleck “Sonny Boy Williamson” Miller would tell Shines that the poison drove Johnson mad, that he spent his last days crawling around on the floor and barking like a dog, before dying in Miller's arms.
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House heard that Johnson had been shot or stabbed. The official who made out the death certificate cited the plantation owner's opinion—apparently backed up by no evidence aside from the fact that Johnson was a musician—that the cause of death was syphilis.
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Willie Coffee says that the family went to Johnson's funeral, and said that he had died of pneumonia.