Escaping the Delta (19 page)

Frankly, no one at the time seems to have worried very much about the exact circumstances. During his research some twenty years later, Mack McCormick apparently interviewed two witnesses to Johnson's
slaying, but Guralnick quotes him only as saying, “The accounts agreed substantially as to the motive, the circumstances, and in naming the person responsible for the murder. It had been a casual killing that no one took very seriously. In their eyes Robert Johnson was a visiting guitar player who got murdered.”
⁴⁸

I
N THE END, WHAT REMAINS OF
R
OBERT
J
OHNSON IS HIS MUSIC.
Whatever may be vague in his biography, and whatever unrecorded talents may have died with him, we still have two discs' worth of songs, and they are still exciting new generations of listeners.

And yet, even that musical legacy is sometimes hard to view with any clarity. There have been thousands of pages written about Robert Johnson's records over the years, but the vast majority have simply been hyperbolic celebrations of his unique genius. I grew up on this writing, and agree with much of it, so I was unprepared for what happened when I taught my first series of classes on blues history. For the Mississippi class, I started by explaining that, though the state's artists had not been considered particularly important in the commercial blues world of their day, they were justifiably singled out by virtually all later commentators. I then played recordings of the great prewar Mississippians: Charley Patton, with his growling voice and astonishing polyrhythms. Tommy Johnson with his warmer, lighter approach and eerie falsetto. The wild bottleneck styles of Son House and Willie Newbern. Skip James, for me the most intense and transcendent singer in blues. Plus the Mississippi Sheiks, the Mississippi Jook Band, some fife-and-drum music from the hill country, Rube Lacey, Arthur Pettis, Robert Petway…

Finally, we came to Robert Johnson, the most famous Mississippian of all. My students had all heard of him, knew he was supposed
to be the pinnacle of the Delta style, but most had never actually listened to his music. Now, as he sang and played, they looked at me blankly. What was so special about this? Compared to some of the earlier players, Johnson seemed rather sedate. Why would he be hailed as a musical revolutionary, towering above his elders and contemporaries?

I did my best to come up with answers, but I was caught off guard, and over the next months this experience forced me to rethink much of what I knew—or thought I knew—about blues. My students' reaction, far from being stupid or ill-informed, was closer to the reaction of most 1930s blues fans than mine was. Even in Mississippi, Johnson's work was hardly greeted as revolutionary. His most celebrated talent, if we are to judge by the reports of his contemporaries, was his versatility, his ability to pick up new guitar parts as if by magic and to command a vast range of styles. It was incredible to them that he could play everything from Son House's raw country slide to the supple, jazzy style of Lonnie Johnson and all the latest pop and western hits. No one would have asked him to be more passionate than Son House and more soulful than Skip James. In fact, at that time there would have been hardly any listeners who were familiar with both House's and James's work, since they came from opposite ends of the Delta and their records sold poorly. It was much more impressive to be able to sound like Leroy Carr, Peetie Wheatstraw, and Kokomo Arnold, national stars familiar to every blues fan. To people in the Delta, Johnson's strength was not that he exemplified the best of the local style, but rather that he had assimilated all the hottest sounds from outside. For his young fellow musicians, he was an example of someone of their own generation who had managed to make records, and whose work pointed the way to forming versatile bands and holding their own with the pop stars up north, rather than being stuck forever playing in rundown country shacks. Meanwhile, for the broader world of blues fans, there was nothing special about one more young guy who sounded like Carr or Arnold, and the unique qualities of the Delta style had never been big selling points.

Which is to say my students were in the rare position of approaching Johnson by way of the records that preceded and surrounded him,
rather than coming to him by traveling backward from the Rolling Stones via Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters—the path taken by virtually all modern listeners. Given this, their reactions made perfect sense. Not that I believe Johnson was in any way an ordinary talent, but what makes him great is by no means as obvious and clear-cut as it has often appeared to the generations of white rock and jazz fans who have heard him in a vacuum, cut off from the larger blues world of his time.

I went back to Johnson's records with a new mission: to understand his work in its natural context. This book is, to a great extent, the result of that experience and the paths it took me down. The first step was to listen to his music, and as much as possible of the music that had surrounded him. I wanted to get a feeling for his background and the popular tastes of his day, to place his work alongside the records he and his peers were listening to, and to try to explore what he was after on his own terms.

Obviously, such an aim can never be completely achieved. I was born twenty years after Johnson's death, and I am not black, not from Mississippi, not a musical genius. I could argue that I have certain insights because I spent many years as a wandering guitarist, hitchhiking into town and looking for someplace to play and someone who would give me a bed for the night, but does that really bring me closer to him, or only give me a deceptive sense of camaraderie? I know of white Mississippians who think that they have insight into Delta blues that no northerner can share, and black college professors who have never been to Mississippi but assume they can get into Johnson's head better than any white person could. Claims of empathy are as potentially slippery and misleading as they are, perhaps, inevitable. Even for a young, brilliant black blues player from Mississippi, it would be an incredible leap of faith (or hubris) to think that one's experiences in the twenty-first century gave any clear insight into what Johnson would have experienced in 1930. Far too much water has passed under far too many bridges in the intervening years. In some ways, a young Mississippi rapper might be in a better position, at least understanding the experience of being a black, poor, forward-looking artist
trying to break into a fast-moving, high-powered national scene despite being based in a regional backwater.

In any case, I have done my best to immerse myself in what is known of Johnson's world. I have listened to thousands of recordings, concentrating (for a change) not on what I happened to enjoy but on what I know to have been popular with blues fans of his day. I have spent a fair amount of time in the Delta, and have worked and talked with blues players of Johnson's generation. And I have tried to be aware of my limitations. I did not grow up surrounded by the children's game songs of rural Mississippi or the jug-band sounds of the Memphis streets. The pop touchstones of my childhood were the Beatles and Monkees, and while thirty years of blues fandom makes it easy for me to tell Lonnie Johnson from Tampa Red, I could not even recognize a Lanny Ross or Rudy Vallee record. Robert Johnson, I assume, would have recognized both, and I have no idea how this affected his musical education or approach—especially since all that remains of his famously varied repertoire is a small pile of three-minute blues recordings, and even those few songs were chosen because they were deemed most likely to sell on the current blues market, not because they were necessarily his favorites or biggest crowd-pleasers.

There are people who will argue that, especially considering all these barriers of time and culture, it makes no sense to try to understand what Robert Johnson was attempting, that all we can do is listen to the music and react to it in the here and now. This is a valid approach, as far as it goes, and yet it also suggests a certain lack of respect for the music. No one writes about Stravinsky as if all one need do to appreciate him is to listen, without knowing anything about Western concert music. It is assumed that the more we can understand of what went into the making of
The Rite of Spring
, the more familiar we are with Beethoven and with the thrill of twentieth-century modernism, the more meaning it will have for us. Given this, I cannot help but think that when blues experts say that they prefer not to discuss Johnson's sources, or consider them irrelevant to his genius, that is often because they do not approve of his tastes—that they would be
happy to trace him to Son House, but do not like to think of him copying what they regard as dull assembly-line hits by the popular studio stars. And yet, this was precisely what made Johnson great: the ability to bridge that gap, and be both completely a product of the Delta and completely in tune with the world outside.

The more I have listened to Robert Johnson, the more I have come to admire what he accomplished. He was indeed a unique genius, and created some of the most moving and complex music of the twentieth century. Fortunately for those of us interested in understanding his work, he was also the first major blues musician whose roots and sources are almost all apparent and accessible to us. What is more, he was one of the few who made recordings of high enough technical quality that we can actually hear how he sounded up close, and the only one for whom we have so many “alternate takes,” allowing us to compare his varying approaches to a song. All of this makes his work particularly rewarding of deeper study, of listening and relistening, with his models available for comparison. That is what I have tried to do in the next three chapters. I do not claim to have made earthshaking discoveries, or to have found the ultimate answers to every question. I would hope, though, that these chapters will provide some food for thought and serve as a spur to other listeners to take the same journey and reach their own conclusions.

O
N
M
ONDAY
, N
OVEMBER
23, 1936,
WHEN
R
OBERT
J
OHNSON
entered a studio for the first time, he was an ambitious and experienced professional hoping to cut a hit record. While he was a master of several styles, and deeply steeped in the Delta juke music he had known since childhood, he was well aware of the current blues market, and naturally started with his most commercial material.

“
Kind Hearted Woman Blues
,” the first song at the first session, was Johnson's addition to a cycle of spin-offs that had followed Leroy Carr's hit “Mean Mistreater Mama.”
¹
Carr's song had originally been recorded in 1934 and spawned a series of sequels ranging from Carr's own “Mean Mistreater Mama No. 2” to covers by Tampa Red, Josh White, and Bumble Bee Slim. Slim had also recorded a follow-up called “Cruel Hearted Woman Blues,” and Johnson apparently thought it would be a good trick to write an “answer song,” defending the woman—at least up to a point. This approach, in which he both celebrated and lamented the relationship, was in perfect keeping with Carr's original, which began “You're a mean mistreating mama and you don't mean me no good/And I don't blame you, baby, I'd be the same way if I could.” Johnson's fourth verse seems modeled on one of Carr's, and the high guitar part he plays under the second verse is very similar to what Scrapper Blackwell played on the earlier record.
²

That said, Johnson's song is the most musically complex in the cycle, and immediately gives some insight into what set him apart from
the competition. First of all, it was relatively rare for rurally based singers to carefully compose a whole blues lyric. At country jukes, the dancers made so much noise that it would have been hard to make out more than a phrase here or there, and the musician's job was simply to produce a strong, steady rhythm. On street corners, passersby could hear more clearly, but only occasionally stuck around for more than a few minutes. Delta veterans like Son House or Charley Patton were quite capable of writing complete songs, but normally did not bother. At a dance they could play a single blues guitar arrangement for twenty minutes or more, singing a couple of verses, playing a solo, then singing another verse as inspiration hit. A song would thus be made up largely of “floating” verses, rhymed couplets that could be inserted more or less at random. Some of these might be original to the performer, some learned from other singers. When it came time to make a recording, the producers generally required blues singers to perform original material, but this did not necessarily mean that one needed to write a full song. Even a major star like Lemon Jefferson would often fulfill the requirement by composing one or two verses, then reach into his grab bag of floating couplets to fill the rest of the record.

By contrast, even the most mediocre of the studio regulars working out of St. Louis and Chicago tended to compose cohesive pieces around a single theme. This was a matter of necessity: They were churning out records by the dozens, often with virtually identical accompaniments, so they needed to come up with themes that would set one song apart from the next. The best lyricists would create little vignettes that flowed smoothly from verse to verse, describing a woman, a relationship, or something as vague as—to cite two of Carr's master-pieces—the feeling of loneliness at sunrise or midnight.

Johnson had studied these northern, urban styles, and his compositions are generally professional, composed works, carefully designed to fit the three-minute limit of a 78 side. “Kind Hearted Woman” does not have a perfectly cohesive lyric: One moment he is praising his kind hearted woman, the next he is complaining that she drives him to drink with her cheating ways, the next he is saying that she studies evil all the time and might as well kill him, and he ends by warning that
he will leave her because he is not satisfied. The verses show a nice turn for poetry, though, and if the theme is a bit confused, it at least stays on one subject throughout. On the whole, it is an expert but hardly earthshaking variation on Carr's pattern.

What makes “Kind Hearted Woman” unique is that, rather than just playing an accompaniment for his vocal, Johnson has worked out a full-fledged, abundantly varied musical arrangement. The guitar part for the first verse is clearly based on the sort of piano lines that Carr played—not flashy, but providing some nice, moody chords between the vocals. This was already something of a departure for a Delta player, since most rural guitarists tended to stick to approaches that derived naturally from guitar and banjo playing. (When Johnson played a Son House piece, for example, his work had no hint of piano phrasing.) The second verse uses Blackwell's high guitar riff, and Johnson changes his vocal melody to match it. Then, for the third verse, he produces a kind of musical bridge, a four-line verse that starts out like a similar verse in “Mean Mistreater Mama,” with touches from another contemporary star, Kokomo Arnold, then leaps into a startling falsetto passage.

Johnson had apparently planned to play an instrumental break after this verse, then sum up with two final verses. Unfortunately, he was still new to the recording process and had not timed the arrangement right. The three-minute mark was approaching, and he had to cut the song short before getting to the last verse. For the second take, he solved this problem by dropping the instrumental interlude and picking up the tempo, which gave him time to finish as planned.

It is interesting to compare this performance to the ones that followed. Sitting in front of a microphone for the first time, Johnson is clearly nervous, muffing some guitar licks and sounding a bit tentative at times. The carefully thought-out structure of “Kind Hearted Woman” conceals much of this nervousness, but also keeps him from relaxing. Blues artists were typically asked to have at least four original songs prepared, and Johnson was clearly starting with the most arranged and up-to-date pieces in his repertoire. This was the most varied arrangement he ever recorded, and it may be due to that as much as to nervousness that he sounds so careful, and even rather stiff
in places. This is particularly noticeable when he sings the falsetto “oooh” in the second verse: He has obviously decided exactly where and how he wants it, and places it there with an antiseptic exactitude on both takes. By the second take he is a bit more relaxed, and adds a sly twist to the word “love” in that verse's final line, but—perhaps because he has lowered his guitar half a tone—he does not have the same intensity on the falsetto lines.
³

All in all, it is an admirable recording, but there are still some bugs to be worked out, and even some of its strengths reveal more professionalism than brilliance. There is a care and solidity about the whole thing, a very conscious attempt to produce a finished product that fits the current trends. This was no mean feat, since those current trends were based on piano and guitar duets, and employed some very experienced songwriters. The song has all the hallmarks of urban, professional work, not the sort of music that would have gotten a backcountry juke joint rocking, and if Johnson's playing sometimes seems a little unsure, his voice has the strong, regular sound of the Carr school. He does not have Carr's relaxed cool, but does amazingly well for a guy getting his first chance in front of a microphone.

Though Carr was an obvious influence, Johnson's choice of material at this session shows an even more direct debt to Kokomo Arnold. James Arnold was one of the most spectacular guitarists of the blues era, a slide master who played jagged, lightning-fast passages in startling counter-rhythms to his powerful vocals. Originally from Georgia, he had spent time in upstate New York, Mississippi, and Memphis before settling in Chicago, where he made his living as a bootlegger and played guitar on the side. He became a major star in 1934, when he cut “Milk Cow Blues,” which was imitated by everyone from Memphis Minnie and Josh White to Bob Wills's Texas Playboys and eventually Elvis Presley, and recorded seventy-five more numbers in the next four years.

The four-line bridge verse in “Kind Hearted Woman” was based on a pattern Arnold had established in “Milk Cow,” and Johnson's next two songs were both pastiches of Arnold's work. This may simply have been a matter of taste, or may reflect a personal connection. While the dates are not completely clear, Arnold seems to have spent a fair
amount of time playing in Memphis and Jackson in the mid-1930s, and Johnson could well have hung around and learned songs directly from him. Though Arnold had released over twenty records by the time Johnson entered the studio, the lines Johnson used all came from his first three releases, and it may be that these songs were Arnold's own favorites, and Johnson had picked them up at live performances. (It may also be that these just happened to be the records on hand at the moment when Johnson was going through a Kokomo Arnold phase.)

One striking thing about these first Arnold adaptations is that Johnson chose not to use a bottleneck or slide. This is probably because—like most modern players—he was intimidated by the velocity and precision of Arnold's work. Johnson was a master of the more countrified Delta slide style, and arguably a more intense player than Arnold, but he never approached the frenzied speed that is still Arnold's most dazzling characteristic. There is an anarchic energy in Arnold's playing that makes it inimitable, and though “I Believe I'll Dust My Broom” and “Sweet Home Chicago” would come to be Johnson's most covered songs, neither has the wild excitement or instrumental virtuosity of the records on which they are based. Paradoxically, this probably had a lot to do with their enduring influence.

“
I Believe I'll Dust My Broom
” uses a melody that originated with Leroy Carr's “I Believe I'll Make a Change,” but had already undergone some transformations in Arnold's hands. If Johnson learned it off records, he blended two Arnold pieces: Arnold had used the title verse in his “Sagefield Woman Blues,” and two others in a novelty called “Sissy Man Blues.” (Johnson leaves out the latter song's defining verse: “I woke up this morning with my pork-grinding business in my hand,/Lord, if you can't send me a woman, please send me a sissy man.”) On the other hand, if he learned the song from Arnold directly, there is no reason to think that any merging was needed. Unlike Carr, Arnold was not a careful songwriter, and both songs were simply collections of more or less random, “floating” verses, which he undoubtedly assembled differently on different occasions, or strung together into one long song that we only hear slices of on his three-minute recordings. Johnson could easily have picked a handful of favorite
Arnold lines and strung them together to suit his own tastes, incidentally making a more cohesive lyric than either of the Arnold pieces—while not strictly linear, Johnson's song concentrates on the theme of traveling, and being away from the girl he loves. This is not to say that all of his changes were necessarily felicitous. Arnold had sung, “I'm gonna ring up China, see can I find my good gal over there/Since the good book tells me that I got a good gal in the world somewhere.” Johnson, in the most geographically flamboyant verse of his career, changed the second line to “If I can't find her on Philippine's Island, she must be in Ethiopia somewhere.” This had a topical touch, since Italy had recently invaded Ethiopia, but lacks the lonesome logic of Arnold's version. In another verse, where Arnold sang “I believe, I believe I'll go back home/I'll acknowledge to my good gal, mama, lord, I know I have done you wrong,” Johnson changed the second line to “You can mistreat me here, babe, but you can't when I get home,” which may be more interesting, but rhymes “home” with “home.”

What made “I Believe I'll Dust My Broom” exciting for Johnson's fellow musicians was not the lyric but his stripped-down, driving guitar accompaniment. Though the revolutionary nature of what he played may be lost on modern listeners, it is still easy to be caught up in the way the fast high-note triplets alternate with a pulsing boogie beat. His choice to sometimes sing over the triplets, using the bass figure as an instrumental break, and sometimes to reverse this pattern increases the tension and energy of the performance—as does the fact that he expands and contracts the time, changing chords as inspiration hits, rather than keeping a regular count of twelve bars. In 1930s Mississippi, though, what was most significant about this record was its now rather prosaic-sounding boogie bass line. Lightnin' Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, and thousands of other guitarists have made this sort of solid guitar boogie their stock in trade, but it was brand-new when Johnson did it, and must have sounded astonishingly modern and exciting.

Other guitarists, including Lemon Jefferson and the Delta legend Hacksaw Harney, had recorded boogie-woogie bass figures before this, but their versions did not have the steadily propulsive one-two beat that Johnson used.
⁴
This sort of basic shuffle had appeared on only
one previous record, cut a year and a half earlier by a Mississippi guitarist named Johnnie Temple. Temple had made his start as a musician around Jackson and Vicksburg, then moved to Chicago, where he worked as second mandolinist in a string trio led by Charlie McCoy, playing Italian favorites in restaurants patronized by Chicago's Mafiosi. Along with the Italian gigs, Temple made a series of blues records, and the first of these was “Lead Pencil Blues,” a double-entendre number about sexual impotence, which premiered the now-classic guitar shuffle pattern.

According to some blues scholars, Temple had actually learned this bass pattern from Johnson, whom he played with occasionally in Jackson and knew as “R.L.,” though others report that Temple did not remember meeting Johnson and took pride in having pioneered the style.
⁵
If primacy is important, there is at least a bit of circumstantial evidence in Temple's favor: He had been employed for a while as chauffeur to Little Brother Montgomery, one of the greatest barrelhouse pianists working the lumber camps and river towns along the lower Mississippi, and since this guitar pattern is adapted from a basic piano left-hand figure, Temple was certainly in the right place to pick it up. On the other hand, so was every other guitarist who ever hung out in a barrelhouse, Johnson included. (And it is worth underlining the fact that pianists like Montgomery were, at least in some areas of Mississippi, so much more popular than guitarists like Temple and Johnson that they could hire the latter as chauffeurs.) If Temple and Johnson did meet, it appears that they traded tunes, as Temple was an associate of the extremely obscure Skip James and probably introduced Johnson to James's work.