Escaping the Delta (20 page)

Even if he was not its originator, Johnson was the first guitarist to make the boogie shuffle a standard accompaniment pattern and use it for multiple songs, and he inspired other players to pick up the style. This innovation was not particularly important at the time, but when electric amplification allowed guitars to supplant pianos as the rhythmic timekeepers of blues combos, it became a basic part of the musical language and one of the building blocks of rock 'n' roll. Meanwhile, it gave Johnson's song a propulsive dance beat, and he comes off sounding considerably more relaxed than on “Kind Hearted Woman.”
The straight-ahead rhythm was in stark contrast to the idiosyncratic complexities of Arnold and the older Mississippians, and “I Believe I'll Dust My Broom” would bubble in the memories of Johnson's young peers for the next dozen years, before resurfacing on a 1949 record by Big Boy Crudup and two years later in the spectacular Elmore James version, which turned it into a blues standard.

To the early white blues fans, who valued Johnson as an idiosyncratic folk artist, the straight-ahead, modern quality of this piece was not so appealing. They preferred to think of him as a mysterious Delta roots musician, and wanted to hear him moaning deep laments and playing old-fashioned slide numbers, not kicking off boogie shuffles that sounded only one step removed from the R&B hits of Jimmy Reed and Junior Parker. Thus the irony that his two most influential records in the black blues world, “Dust My Broom” and “Sweet Home Chicago,” were both left off the 1961 album that made him a posthumous legend.

This was not just scholarly or folkie obtuseness. If one considers Johnson's records as works of art rather than historical markers, he certainly gave more interesting performances than these. “
Sweet Home Chicago
,” in particular, is about as musically ordinary as his work gets. This is not to deny its strong points: There is the relaxed way Johnson breaks off the guitar boogie for a sweet melodic turnaround at the end of each verse, laying back and giving us a chance to breathe before pumping up the energy again. More important, he is finally sounding completely at home and comfortable, and there is something infectious in the way he balances the whining moan that starts the song with the humorous, conversational tone in which he throws off lines like “I'm heavy-loaded baby, I'm booked, I gotta go!”

Still, even at the time, this song was held until Johnson's sixth release, and anyone who wonders why need only refer back to Arnold's “Old Original Kokomo Blues.” As the flip side of “Milk Cow Blues,” this record would have been familiar to many blues buyers at the time, and Arnold's frenetically inventive performance has an energy and excitement that Johnson does not even approach. Its unpredictable slide work slices and stabs around the comic arithmetic of the lyric, and Johnson's version sounds stolid and flat by comparison. However,
Johnson made one essential change that would prove decisive, transforming an entertaining, upbeat song into an anthem: Kokomo may have been a logical destination for the Indianapolis-based Scrapper Blackwell, who originated the number, but Chicago was the promised land, and would become the world famous “Home of the Blues.” Arnold's “Old Original Kokomo Blues” sold a lot more copies than Johnson's “Sweet Home Chicago,” but in the eyes of history he bet the wrong pony. Later singers would often ignore everything else about the Johnson record—even dropping the whole concept of math-oriented stanzas—but the association with Chicago would make this Johnson's most-covered song. Tommy McClennan weighed in first in 1939, followed by Walter Davis in 1941, and so on up through the chart-making 1959 hit by Junior Parker and beyond.
⁶

Johnson continued the traveling theme on his next number, “
Rambling on My Mind
,” but this song would be remembered less for its lyric than for the slide triplets that Elmore James adopted for his hit version of “Dust My Broom.” “Rambling on My Mind” was the first slide piece Johnson recorded, and there is clearly something about the technique that inspired him not only as a player but as a vocalist. For the first time in this session, he gets a touch of the Delta tear, the Son House rawness into his voice, sounding more passionate than on the three previous songs.

In terms of structure, “Rambling” provides some interesting insight into how Johnson thought about his compositions, because its two takes are so different. He seems to have defined this song by its first verse, “I got ramblin', I got ramblin' on my mind/Hate to leave my baby but you treats me so unkind,” and its central bridge verse. As with “Kind Hearted Woman,” this bridge is carefully worked out, framing a programmatic train imitation played on the bass strings, which Johnson introduces by saying, “I hear her coming now….” This sort of announced musical mimicry was common on the nineteenth-century stage, in both classical and minstrel performance, and continued to be featured by medicine-show players and vaudeville entertainers, but it was rare in blues.
⁷
It is a self-conscious display of instrumental technique, the sort of thing that intellectual purists—whether in classical, blues, or jazz—tend to dismiss as cheap theatrics rather than serious
music, though for blues fans of the period a greater drawback would have been that such interludes break up the dance rhythms. In Johnson's work, these programmatic breaks show the extent to which he saw his records as arranged performances, rather than simply assemblages of blues verses. Clearly, he was already thinking of himself as a featured entertainer, able to hold an attentive audience, and not just as a juke-joint dance musician.

Surprisingly, considering the care that went into the bridge verse, Johnson seems to have considered the rest of “Rambling on My Mind” to be little more than filler. Though from the record company's point of view his two takes of the song were essentially identical—they turn up interchangeably on the released 78s—Johnson's lyric changes completely from one to the next. The first take is lyrically repetitive, with three verses that are differentiated by only a couple of words, and a fourth that continues to use the same tag line. By contrast, take two has no repeated verses, and its lyrical variety is reinforced by a more upbeat tempo. This should make it by far the more interesting performance, but that is not quite how things turn out. There is a seductive nastiness in the way Johnson stresses the phrase “mean things all on my mind” on take one that makes it stick in my mind in a way that nothing from the second take quite matches, and the slower tempo also allows him to get more out of the programmatic train imitation. Altogether, if one ignores the lyrics, this take is more musically varied, while the second feels less thought-through and more passionate.

Johnson had tuned his guitar into an “open E” tuning for “Rambling on My Mind,” but this seems to have been a relatively rare key for him, so he immediately tuned back to standard for the next song.
⁸
As a result, he starts “
When You Got a Good Friend
” with the same riff he had already used to open “Kind Hearted Woman,” “I Believe I'll Dust My Broom,” and “Sweet Home Chicago,” and which he would go on using on other tunes, moving his hand position up and down the guitar neck to fit whatever key he happened to be in. When one hears several of these songs in a row, this can seem repetitive, but it may have been a quite intentional professional choice. I am aware of no other guitarist who did anything like this, but Peetie Wheatstraw had a similar mannerism, beginning song after song with the same brief pi
ano riff. As a result, fans could instantly recognize his records, and this would have had obvious advantages when it came to selling new material.

“When You Got a Good Friend” was Johnson's most personal and distinctive lyric so far, but if he took pride in this fact it can only have led to disappointment, since it was also one of the three songs from this session that the record company chose not to release. This may have been due to the very things that attract many present-day listeners: The understated sensitivity of the song, while appealing to those who consider Johnson a blues poet, was not likely to produce any quick sales on the 1930s commercial market.

It is equally possible that the record was held back because of Johnson's performance, which is relatively lackluster and marked by the same conservatism that affected “Kind Hearted Woman.” On this sort of song, Johnson was one of the most carefully calculated singers in blues, and the two takes show him singing the first three verses virtually identically, complete with the same “mmmm” replacing the lyric in the same spot. Then he seems to have become distracted, forgot the fourth verse, covered his confusion with an impromptu “mmmm,” and picked up with verse five, but having lost the impact of its striking opening line: “It's your opinion, friend-girl, I may be right or wrong.” On the second take, he partially cleared this up, but still failed to remember the fourth verse properly, and ended up repeating three variations on the same line—something he never did anywhere else, and which it seems fair to assume was a mistake.

These errors may have doomed the song, and it cannot have been helped by its relatively pedestrian musical arrangement: The guitar part is just “Sweet Home Chicago” over again, and the lyric lacks that song's verse-chorus pattern and the catchy geographical hook. It is a pity that Johnson did not work it up more thoroughly, because the lyric is beautiful. It is also one of the rare blues lyrics that follows the African tradition of expressing social admonishments rather than romance, something that still surprises Europeans and Americans when they see translations of African pop hits. There is a flavor of secular preaching, of the singer providing social guidance, which this song captures perfectly both in its title verse—“When you got a good friend
that will stay right by your side/Give her all of your spare time, try to love and treat her right”—and in the churchy maxim, “Watch your close friend, then your enemies can't do you no harm.”
⁹
There is also an unusual care and delicacy in the choice, for example, to sing “spare time” rather than just “time” in that first verse, or “girlfriend” rather than just “girl” in “She's a brownskin woman, just as sweet as a girlfriend can be.”

The failure to release “When You Got a Good Friend” may have been disappointing, but it is nothing compared to the choice the record producers made on Johnson's next selection. From the point of view of modern-day fans, the original take of “
Come On in My Kitchen
” is his first unquestionable masterpiece, a hypnotic lament that makes it easy to believe Johnny Shines's recollection that this song reduced an audience to tears. The beginning is unique: three voice-like notes of high, vibrating slide guitar that resolve into a bell-like chord; the same passage played in descending notes; a momentary pause for a bass figure; then the same line repeated, this time with Johnson moaning in unison; then another line of this lonesome, wordless duet; and finally the invitation, sounding like a plea: “You better come on in my kitchen, babe, it's going to be raining outdoors.” Then—as if more were needed—a tumbling bass progression that, just when it seems finished, resolves in a startling, shimmering high note.

There is only one other player in early blues who recorded anything this moodily soulful, the sort of music that sounds as if the singer is somewhere off alone, absorbing all the world's sorrows and transforming them into a perfectly formed, deeply personal gem of poetic wisdom. That was Skip James, and it is no surprise that the first full verse Johnson sings is taken from James's masterpiece, “Devil Got My Woman”: “The woman I love, stole her from my best friend/But he got lucky, stole her back again.” The two songs have nothing else in common, as far as words and melody go, but that one couplet alerts us to a kinship that gave Johnson the most moving, spiritual—I want to say unearthly, except that it is also desperately human—strain in his music.

This is the sort of performance that makes me want to drop all of my normal views about blues as essentially popular music, intended
primarily as entertainment, and rave along with the most extreme fanatics. Except that it is in no way typical of blues. James was a unique and unappreciated though transcendent artist, and Johnson's choice to emulate him is a rare departure from his general trajectory toward the hit sounds of Carr and Arnold. For a moment he defies genre and fashion, and the result is timeless, universal music that can stand alongside Miles Davis's
Kind of Blue
or Pablo Casals's 1930s recording of the Bach cello suites.

Oddly, the lyric Johnson sings is not particularly distinctive. It is a collection of unrelated stanzas of varying quality, though all share a sense of loss. What makes them great is what he achieves with them. On the first two verses, his voice is rather heavy and consistent, but it is shadowed by feathery slide notes that give the performance a ghostly quality. On the third verse, this quality comes to the fore as he stops singing entirely, and instead whispers, so quietly that you would have to be right next to him to catch the words: “Oh, can't you hear that wind howl?” The guitar whines like a mournful wind, not so much howling as moaning.

There is nothing else quite like this in recorded blues, nor in most cases could there have been. Johnson had the good luck to have ended up with one of the few record companies that bothered to record blues artists with high enough fidelity to capture anything this subtle. If Charley Patton or Lemon Jefferson had tried it while recording for Paramount, it would have just sounded like an indistinct rumble. Likewise, it is not something Johnson could have done in live performance, except when playing in a very quiet room for a small, completely attentive audience—by no means a normal situation for a blues musician, or indeed for anyone outside the classical field.