Escaping the Delta (2 page)

Barnes was a small, wiry man, with a pointed beard and bulging eyes that made him look fearsomely Mephistophelean on his album covers. In person, he was polite and soft-spoken, and the people who dropped in during the course of the afternoon treated him as a respected businessman, showing a mild but obvious deference. The neighborhood kids addressed him as sir, and he brusquely sent them on errands to buy Cokes and cigarettes.

Barnes was probably the hottest Delta act on the touring circuit at that moment, traveling to Chicago, New York, and Europe, and he was clearly proud of the fact. At one point a young man came in and had
a whispered conversation with him, and when he had gone Barnes told me, “He wants to play with my band. He plays bass. He's good, too, but I'm gonna keep the boy I got. A few years back, that guy didn't want nothin' to do with me. He put himself above me. He was playing that disco and stuff, but I stuck with what I know, and now I ain't making nothin' but money.”

As we sat there, chatting and sipping our Cokes, a man walked past the door, and Barnes jumped up and ran after him, yelling, “Get your goddamn ass inside here!” He returned alone, shaking his head, and explained, “Yeah, that guy drink in here for nothing and then when he's got some money he go drink somewhere else.” The next time the guy went by, Barnes ran out and yelled after him again, then reached inside the back band of his pants and pulled out a pistol, held it up to his cheek, and sighted along it, shouting, “You give me my damn money!” He was laughing, and the customers were laughing, so I laughed along with them, guessing that this was a show put on for my benefit. Still, the gun was real.

From the Playboy, I headed across town to visit Eugene Powell. Then eighty-three years old, Powell was the only prewar blues recording artist who still made his home in Mississippi. He was sitting on his front porch with a lady friend, and invited me to join them. With little prompting, he began talking about the old days when he used to perform with the Mississippi Sheiks, the state's most popular band. After a while, we got out our guitars, and I played backup as he ran through what I gathered had become his standard set, a mix of blues, pop and country hits. The blues were mostly standards like Little Brother Montgomery's “Vicksburg Blues,” Roosevelt Sykes's “44 Blues,” and Tommy Johnson's “Big Road Blues,” which he introduced as his own compositions, meaning that he had rearranged them and added some new verses.

When the mosquitoes started biting, we moved inside. Powell's front room was both bedroom and parlor, with a big double bed and several chairs. The walls were decorated with framed photographs of his children and of “old friends that's dead.” In the center of one wall was a hand-tinted portrait of Martin Luther King, with a yellow plastic flower attached to the frame. On the wall facing the bed was a large
clock, a present from his daughter in Chicago. Its second hand carried a butterfly, revolving through a field of artificial flowers, and its case was surmounted by a golden bust of a unicorn.

I had brought a cassette that included Powell's 1936 recording of “Street Walkin'” (made under the pseudonym Sonny Boy Nelson), along with other Mississippi songs of the period, and he asked me to put it on and leave it playing. He talked through all the guitar-and-vocal selections, including his own, but stopped to listen to the Sheiks playing their biggest hit, “Sitting On Top of the World.” When it was over, he laughed and said, “Now, anybody don't like that don't like ham and cheese.”

After a while, Powell got off the subject of music and started talking about ghosts, or “haints.” He said he had never seen any himself, but he had friends who had, and he knew a house where, if I could stay in it all night, the owner would pay me ten thousand dollars. Taking my cue, I asked him about the stories of bluesmen using supernatural powers to improve their playing. “Oh, yeah,” he said, smiling. “They say if you put some rattlesnake rattles in your guitar, that'll make it sound better. I tried it, but I never did hear no difference. Then somebody told my mama that if I did that, when the rattles go melt away to dust I was gonna go blind, so she said to get those things out of there.

“They say, ‘Take some graveyard dirt, you'll be a great guitar player.' Hacksaw Harney told me to try that, he said that's why he play so good. He took me along with him to get some, but I got about halfway there, and I said no. He said, ‘You got to do that if you want to be a better player.' I said I guessed I was good enough.”

Powell chuckled, and changed the subject, telling me about the busloads of Japanese people who come to see him every summer. I would have liked to hear more musical legends, but did not feel like pressing him.

Frankly, to a northern blues fan, the Delta still had plenty of ghosts. Every town name reminded me of an old song, and it was an almost mystical experience just to drive through the monotonous infinity of flat fields stretching out to the horizon. That first visit, the annual rains had come stronger than usual, and the whole Delta was flooded,
recalling the days before the levees were built. Lone houses stood on stilts, surrounded by sunken cars and telephone poles pushing up like reeds in a haunted lake.

I visited the Delta several times in the next two years, choosing different seasons, when the land was dry and the cotton buds shone purple, or the white bolls hung waiting to be harvested. It was a deeply moving experience to drive through those expanses of empty fields, hearing the lonesome blues whining through my tinny car speakers. A piece I wrote at that time reflects the way it captured my imagination:

I still believe some of that, but after spending more time in the Delta I began to wonder about my early reactions. Six years after that first visit, I was standing with Big Jack Johnson outside a grocery store that doubled as a juke joint in the tiny hamlet of Bobo, near Tutwiler. There was almost nothing there, just the store, a few small houses, and the big mansion of the plantation owner. It was the Delta I was used to, the grimly picturesque cradle of the raw blues, but that was not how Johnson saw it. As he looked around, he described the thriving town that Bobo had been in the 1960s. There had been houses all around, a school, a hospital, and crowds of people ready to party on Saturday night. The abandoned desolation I found so striking and romantic was astonishingly recent. Far from being the roots of the blues, it bore little relation to what had been there even thirty years earlier, much less to the thriving Delta communities of the prewar years, before the combination of new farm technologies and opportunities up North prompted a mass migration of black Mississippians to St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit.

I got to thinking about how little my response to the region and its music matched that of the Delta artists I admired, and how much my own aesthetic differed from that of the average blues fan or musician of the 1930s. There was an obviousness to these meditations: I was born into a situation so different that it would be bizarre if I did not react differently to this world. But the more I thought about it, the more I found myself extrapolating to the broader blues field as I knew it, and being struck by the fact that virtually all the historical, musicological, or even impressionistic writing on blues has been done by people from backgrounds much more like mine than like those of the blues artists themselves. As a result, there is a tendency for even the most scholarly and well-researched pieces to be permeated with a romanticism that obscures at least as much as it illuminates.

In many cases, this has only become more true with the passage of time. The earliest books on the blues appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s, barely twenty years after Robert Johnson made his recordings. Those early writers met many of the old musicians, drank with them, and wandered streets in neighborhoods that had hardly changed since the music's golden age. They could turn on their radios and hear Elmore James, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed or Lightnin' Hopkins being played on black pop stations alongside Sam Cooke, James Brown, and the Drifters. The continuum of blues was inescapable, since it was still part of the African-American popular music mainstream. Lonnie Johnson, one of the biggest stars of the 1920s, had survived to cut “Tomorrow Night,” a Nat “King” Cole–flavored R&B ballad. Big Joe Turner, a boogie-woogie shouter and disciple of Bessie Smith, had jump-started the rock revolution with “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” New versions of songs like “See See Rider” and “Stagolee” were number-one hits. By the mid-1960s, one could go to a coffeehouse in Boston, New York, or Washington and see Mississippi John Hurt or Skip James.

The early writers were thus dealing not only with records but with people, and the degree to which they could impose their personal reactions on what they were hearing was more limited. They had a different background and perspective than the writers of my own generation, who came to the music after the folk-blues revival had ar
rived along with the Rolling Stones, Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton, and Canned Heat, and record stores had a blues section filled with reissue albums like the 1961 Columbia LP that presented Robert Johnson to the world and crowned him in its title,
King of the Delta Blues Singers
.

To us later fans, Johnson was a kind of god, and few of us questioned that title's legitimacy. His stature increased still further as his songs were covered and reworked by blues and rock players, and then with the astonishing sales of the two-CD set of his complete recordings in the 1990s. Today, he is regularly cited as the definitive figure in early blues, a musical giant whose influence was analogous to Louis Armstrong's or Charlie Parker's in jazz, to Jimmie Rodgers's or Hank Williams's in country music, to Ray Charles's, Bob Dylan's, Aretha Franklin's, or Jimi Hendrix's.

Many people will consider it shocking, or even blasphemous, to suggest that Johnson was nothing of the kind, that as far as blues history goes he was essentially a nonentity. Nonetheless, if by “blues” one means the black popular music that flourished from the jazz era to the dawn of soul and disco, that is about right. While all the other artists listed above were massively popular within their worlds, affecting admirers and detractors alike and redefining the terms of their genres, Johnson was unknown to the vast majority of the blues audience and ignored by all but a handful of his musical peers until the “blues revival” hit in the 1960s.

I am struck by how much the general perception of Johnson's place in blues history has changed since the first extended piece was written about him in 1959, as part of Samuel Charters's groundbreaking volume
The Country Blues
. Charters began as follows:

Charters had far more limited resources than we have today, in terms of biographical details and listenable copies of period recordings, but he touched on the central paradox of Robert Johnson's reputation, and by extension on the disjuncture between the black and the white blues audiences.

During that first trip to Mississippi, I was startled by the extent to which the blues history I had learned was out of step with what I was hearing from local black people. The white sponsors of the Johnson memorial kept repeating that Robert Johnson remains an enduring legend in the Delta, but after hearing Pastor Ratliff's sermon I had some doubts. I took to asking every black Mississippian I met—young or old, educated or illiterate, blues fan or not—whether they had heard of him. I could not come up with a single person who was familiar with Johnson's name, except a couple who had read about the memorial ceremony in the local papers and some blues musicians who had been introduced to his work by white enthusiasts. And it was not just Johnson. In my admittedly limited sample, Charley Patton's name rang almost equally few bells. Even Miz Hill at the Riverside Hotel, despite being in her eighties and considering herself a sort of den mother to the Mississippi blues world, when asked about local stars of the acoustic era, remembered only the Mississippi Sheiks. Her list of the popular artists of her youth more or less echoed the era's sales figures, whether in Clarksdale, Chicago, or Houston: Bessie Smith, Lonnie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Victoria Spivey.

Now, it is no criticism of an artist to say that he is without honor in his own country. The fact that Robert Johnson made little impact on the blues scene of his time, and that the vast majority of his direct musical heirs have been white players born long after his death, does not diminish the greatness of his art. Indeed, for most of his admirers, the exact opposite is true: The mystery and obscurity of his legend have only increased the fascination of his work.

Still, it seems fair to ask as we look at the picture of the handsome, smiling man in the natty suit that graces the cover of Johnson's
Complete Recordings
: Does the mystery and obscurity have anything to do with Robert Johnson as he lived and played? When he dreamed, did he see himself as the dark prince of the Delta, or did he imagine him
self driving a Cadillac past the Empire State Building to his headlining gig at the Savoy Ballroom? Is it maybe time—at least for a moment—to cast aside the fascination with noble primitivism, and remember that the blues scene of his day was part of a popular music world that also included Fats Waller, Gene Autry and Bing Crosby? What would a century of blues look like if, for a moment, we tried to put aside the filter of rock 'n' roll and our own modern tastes?