Escaping the Delta (36 page)

Which is to say that when Robert Johnson became a mythic, godlike figure, it was as part of the European religion of art, not any African-American spiritual tradition. He is not famed in black folklore for selling his soul. He is famed in white folklore as an archetype of the sensitive artist cut down in his prime. White blues fans elevated him to the pantheon, and it is the pantheon of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement.

Romanticism was an important, valuable movement, like the early blues boom, with standards that are just as worthy of respect. It nurtured a salutary distrust of the mainstream and successful. It argued that a thunderstorm was more awesome than St. Paul's Cathedral, and that an obscure artist dying alone and unheard could be greater than Bach or da Vinci. Those of us who have nourished our souls on Skip James or Robert Johnson owe an infinite debt to the romantics who reissued their records and acclaimed them and their Delta peers as the ultimate expression of twentieth-century American music.

It is worth being reminded occasionally, however, that our blues world bears little resemblance to the world in which our idols lived and played. There are still some fine musicians mining the classic styles. Alvin Youngblood Hart is playing music that is deep, quirky, and ranges with apparent ease from Johnson to Jimmie Rodgers to Leadbelly to Captain Beefheart. Paul Geremia remains for me the most consistently satisfying musician and writer in the field, constantly pushing himself to absorb more from the greatest older styles and to
find new ways of adapting them to his own experience. And they are not alone. There will be plenty more good shows to be seen, and talented new players entering the field.

But it is a small field, and will never again produce a Ma Rainey, a Leroy Carr, a T-Bone Walker, a Dinah Washington, a Muddy Waters, a B. B. King. Or, needless to say, a Robert Johnson. A lot of years have passed, and our world is a different place, and that makes for different music. When a young black man with Robert Johnson's ambition comes along today, he will be rapping about today's women, cars, and drugs, not playing an acoustic guitar and singing of riders, Terraplanes, and malted milk. Not because there is anything wrong with that style, but because all it can promise its devotees is a lifetime of playing in small rooms of middle-aged white people, for embarrassingly little money.

The world changes, and music changes with it, and some things are lost and others are gained, and the past may repeat itself, but always in new ways. I obviously love blues, and if I had a time machine I would go back to Robinsonville, Mississippi, in 1930. But I do not have a time machine, and I cannot fool myself that any modern blues club will provide me with one. The current blues scene has its own charms and weaknesses, but if I want to recapture a hint of Johnson's spirit, I may do as well in the Congo or Brazil or Paris as in the Delta, and I cannot expect the music to sound like anything from the old days, or to be called blues. François Villon, the medieval French bluesman, said it best over five hundred years ago: Do not ask where the beauties of ancient times have gone, for I can only reply: “Where are last year's snows?”

Except that we are in better shape than that. We still have the records, and they sound as good as ever.

I
N
R
ICHARD
W
RIGHT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, HE TELLS OF A PERFORMANCE
that transformed his life, back when he was a small boy in Mississippi: It “made the world around me be, throb, live…reality changed, the look of things altered, and the world became peopled with magical presences.”

Then his grandmother caught him listening. “You stop that,” she cried. “I want none of that Devil stuff in my house!”

The performance in question was a prim young schoolteacher telling him the story of “Bluebeard and his Seven Wives.”
¹

It is a universal fact that the terrors of the occult are fascinating, and it is common for them to be condemned by respectable people.
So it is not surprising that white blues fans have eagerly accepted the connection of blues with mysterious, demonic forces, nor that they have found black churchgoers whose views confirm this connection. The fans ignore the fact that the church folk frequently put fiddlers and tellers of fairy tales in the same category as Robert Johnson, and that in a lot of deep Southern communities blues was no more connected with the Devil than any other dance music was. When Harry Middleton Hyatt collected stories of musicians going to the crossroads to gain supernatural skills, as part of a vast study of Southern folk beliefs in the late 1930s, he reported as many banjo players and violinists as guitarists. (Also one accordion player, and that is not to mention all the stories of people seeking mastery over cards or dice.)

Which is to say I can be as fascinated by occult musings as the next guy, but it is long past time for music journalists to get over the cliché of always linking Robert Johnson and the Devil. For at least a few years, I propose a moratorium on sentences like “Persistent themes in his blues were religious despair and pursuit by demons,” or “Johnson seemed emotionally disturbed by the image of the devil, the ‘Hellhound'…” Such sentences tell us less about the realities of Johnson's music than about the romantic leanings of his later, urban white listeners. There is no suggestion from any of his friends or acquaintances that the hellish or demon-harried aspects of his work were of particular importance to him, or that they were even noticed by the people who crowded around him on the streets of Friars Point. The songs his contemporaries have recalled as most striking or popular have never been those cited by later fans as showing his fealty to demonic forces. And this is not just because the folks back home were all good-time jukers—witness Johnny Shines's eloquent reminiscence of an audience reduced to tears by Johnson's performance of “Come On in My Kitchen.”

Nothing is more dangerous than psychologizing a pop artist by studying his themes, since these often have as much to do with contemporary fashion as they do with personal taste. It would be easy to write a thesis on Johnson's weird sexual fetish for inanimate objects—hot tamales, phonographs, fishing holes, car engines, dressers, lemons, butter churns—ignoring how common such verses were in 1930s
blues. That stuff was funny, and it sold, and that may be all there is to it. Likewise, it is worth noting that in the first song that supposedly demonstrates Johnson's satanic connections, “Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped the Devil),” Johnson makes no mention of any devil. As I mentioned in the relevant chapter, it is very likely that Johnson did not even know about the parenthetic addition—that it was simply tacked on by someone in the Okeh offices in an attempt to attract the Peetie Wheatstraw fans.
²

There is some argument as to whether Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-In-Law, the High Sheriff from Hell, was already a legendary African-American folk character before a singer named William Bunch appropriated the pseudonym, or whether Bunch's popularity was so great that his character grew into a folk hero.
³
Either way, the character was at least as exciting as the music, as witness the record and movie
Peetie Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son-In-Law
, produced by the comedian-rhymester Rudy Ray Moore in the 1970s, which contained not the slightest reference to blues singing, but instead told of a superfly ghetto character who agrees to marry the Devil's daughter. Back in the 1930s, the image helped make Bunch a star, and as Peetie Wheatstraw he became one of the prime influences on Johnson's singing and songwriting styles. Given Johnson's obvious admiration for him—and no blues fan of the time would have failed to recognize where that falsetto “
ooo-well
” came from—I have sometimes toyed with the idea that it could actually have been a savvy producer who cooked up the whole Devil theme. In my fantasy, Johnson arrives for his second recording date, ready to follow up his “Terraplane” success with more double-entendre party numbers, and the producer says, “Hey, the dirty songs are getting kind of played out, but I notice you're a big Wheatstraw fan. How about some Devil stuff? You know, something a little more unusual.” Fast worker that he is, Johnson riffles through his mental catalog of favorite songs, reworks a couple of them, and comes in the next day with “Hell Hound On My Trail” and “Me and the Devil.” Unfortunately, these songs do not sell, and are quickly forgotten even by him, but it was worth a try….

It is just a fantasy, but it makes as much sense as a lot of the other Johnson fantasies out there. Not that I am discounting the lure of the
supernatural, or the fact that the Delta was and is rife with what some call superstition and others consider a survival of ancient African religions. I am just baffled by all the writers who assert that blues singers were the famous adepts or priests of hoodoo. This has become common currency in certain circles, and the idea was reinforced by an odd book called
Bluesman
by a writer named Julio Finn. Finn is brother to the blues musician Billy Boy Arnold, and he clearly knows a lot about blues. He has also made a quite thorough survey of African religious survivals in the Caribbean and Brazil. However, the only evidence he provides to link these two fields is his personal intuition, and it does not add up. For one thing, the African-American musicians who have always been deepest into hoodoo have been not Delta blues singers, but New Orleans jazz and R&B players. The Caribbean sources of hoodoo/voodoo/vodun—African magical powers, by whatever name—were known throughout the South, and when a Mississippian imagined a quest for such things he headed “down in Louisiana to get me a mojo hand,” to quote the Muddy Waters hit. And he did not buy that mojo hand from a juke-joint guitarist.
⁴

Strange as it may seem to present-day fans, musicians were not that important. Even on their most famous stomping grounds, they were not the reason for the juke joints, nor were they the kings of the juke joints. They were the entertainment—specifically, that portion of the entertainment that has come down to us on records, unlike the bootleggers, gamblers, and prostitutes who also had their fair share of fans and legends. It would be interesting to see what would happen if, instead of going up to the oldest folks on Dockery's plantation and asking, “Who were the famous blues singers around here?” the folklorists asked, “Who were the famous people around the juke joints?” If we judge by who was immortalized in song, there are ballads of gamblers and gunfighters like Stack O'Lee and Billy the Lion, and legendary workers like John Henry and Casey Jones. Charley Patton immortalized a couple of local sheriffs, a steamboat, and a tough plantation boss. Barroom “toasts” celebrate the amatory prowess of famous pimps and whores. Who sang or recited legends of famous musicians, before the northern white kids got into the game?
⁵

The New Orleans jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton regularly boasted
that music was just a sideline for him, that he made his real money as a gambler and a pimp. It was the gamblers and pimps, the bootleggers, tough guys, and gangsters who ruled the barrooms and juke joints, often hiring and firing musicians at their whim. Especially in Louisiana and the deep South, a lot of these guys were pretty heavily into hoodoo, and it was easy for their less fortunate admirers to assume that they had signed pacts with satanic powers. That is what all those charms, the mojo hands and John the Conqueror roots, were usually about. They brought their owners inhuman control over love affairs and the rolling of dice. Sure, Robert Johnson looked solvent and sharp in that fine suit, and that was no small thing for a guitar player in the Delta, but did he ever own a second suit? Even his greatest admirers could not imagine him acting out the following scene from Morton's autobiography:

In the 1970s, Little Brother Montgomery was still recalling the figure Morton cut: “He always had a thousand-dollar bill in his pockets somewhere: and then he had diamonds on his fingers and all in his shirt and in his teeth and a .38 special in his bosom.”
⁷
There were
quite a few characters like that around, but most have been forgotten because they did not possess Morton's musical genius along with their more remunerative skills. Now, if you were sitting in a juke joint, and had to guess which person in the room had made a bargain with the dark powers, would you pick the rich gambler who won all bets and was supported by a string of women, or the guy in the back playing expert guitar?

I am not sure when people first began suggesting that blues singers were the high priests of some secret hoodoo cult, or were regarded in their communities as the anti-preachers of Southern spirituality. I suspect that this legend may have its roots in the New York of the 1930s and 1940s, when the folklorists, artists, and writers who were becoming interested in blues were also exploring the African religious societies of Haiti and Cuba. Far from the Delta, experiencing its culture only on records, they thought it logical to suggest that blues was a mainland analog to the ceremonial songs of the islands, and Robert Johnson's records fit this bill better than Leadbelly's, Josh White's, or Big Bill Broonzy's. Back in Mississippi, though, music was just one part of what made up black life and culture. As for magical beliefs, there were certainly some that could be traced back to Africa, but also many that traced to Europe and points farther east. One of the older Delta residents Alan Lomax interviewed in 1941 spoke of the “Egyptians” who used to come through with lodestones, saying that they could cure sickness, repel bullets, and lift a wagon just by passing their hands over it. Such Gypsies, real or fake, traveled the South working charms and predicting the future, and there were also plenty of “Indian” wonder-workers, of both the Native American and Asian varieties. There was a lot of belief in “ancient wisdom,” and both blacks and whites found it easy to accept the idea that the Far East, the American forests, or the African jungles were populated by mystical forces that could be harnessed by those who possessed the required knowledge.

Quite a few blues songs mention mojo, hoodoo, goofer dust, and other charms, but that was by no means unique to blues: There were ads for all these products in the pages of the
Chicago Defender
. Likewise, stories about people selling their souls to the Devil were common in South and North, and told by blacks and whites alike. As with
so much in American culture, African and European beliefs blended and overlapped. European stories of great musicians—Tartini and Paganini are famous examples—selling their souls in return for musical gifts were matched by African stories of similar gifts being given by the spirits of forests, rivers, or pathways. It is possible, as some blues scholars argue, that the old European legend of going to the crossroads to meet the Devil was overlaid with African memories of a “spirit of crossing paths” that Cuban Santeria belief calls Eleguá. The beliefs belittled as “superstition” and “folktales” frequently have roots in older, more formal religious beliefs, changed and distanced from their origins. Parables from Africa survived in the United States—albeit far more rarely than in areas of the Caribbean and South America where slave owners did not work so hard to destroy African culture—as did some African musical techniques. It is logical to assume that African religions survived to some extent in the beliefs of African Americans, especially in majority-black regions like the Delta, forming a rich mixture with Christian teachings and the commercial magic and sooth-saying of Gypsies, Arabs, and Indians. Nonetheless, such beliefs were by no means either universal or consistent, even in relatively small and isolated areas. Among black Delta dwellers, as among most people in most places, one person's Devil was another person's superstitious silliness. Some folks believed, some mocked, and many swung back and forth depending on the situation.

One man who certainly believed was Tommy Johnson's brother LeDell, who provided the story that has formed virtually the entire basis for the Mississippi blues devil legend: