The story of Robert Johnson is usually presented as a Faustian bargain, but it is really a tale of possession. Johnson was the product of an affair his mother, Julia Dodds, had with a plantation worker. Johnson had unusually long fingers and a bad left eye (that has been attributed to a cataract), and by the time he had recorded his
canon, he had earned the right to sing and play the blues.
His youth was spent moving between homes in Memphis and Robinsonville, Mississippi, 30 miles south of Memphis, where he lived with his mother and her second husband on a plantation. There he was known for his interest in guitar and his reluctance to work the fields.
It was in the aftermath of his wife’s and child’s deaths—Johnson was approximately 19 at the time—that his musical education is believed to have begun in earnest. In 1930 the ferocious blues singer Son House had moved to Robinsonville to begin a fruitful musical partnership with the guitar ace Willie Brown, and Johnson became a regular presence at their performances, although the two elder bluesmen perceived him as a nuisance. House’s recollection of Johnson—as told to folklorist Julius Lester in 1965—was of a “little boy” who would commandeer either his or Brown’s guitar during their breaks and irritate the audience with his marginal skills. Perhaps Johnson sensed, too, that he was not ready for the stage, because around this time he moved back to the Hazlehurst area, his birthplace, where he began an apprenticeship with a blues guitarist named Ike Zimmerman (the spelling of his name is disputed) which would transform Johnson into the virtuoso he is known as today.
That Robert Johnson is remembered as a guitarist who could play almost any song after hearing it just once on the radio; a singer whose repertoire, like those of most itinerant bluesmen, included numbers made famous by Bing Crosby, Irish standards, and even polkas, in addition to his own songs; a performer whose travels took him as far north as New York City and even Canada in search of an audience; and an artist who could move an audience to tears and then disappear into the crowd as if he had never played at all.
Clearly, Johnson was a man of some ambition, and in November of 1936 he traveled to San Antonio, Texas, for the first of two recording sessions for the American Record Corporation. Once in the makeshift studio, he played facing a corner, with his back to the technicians and other musicians who had come to record, a move that has been variously interpreted as shyness, an attempt to prevent other guitarists from seeing his unusual playing style, or a street-savvy technique for getting the most sound out of his acoustic guitar. Whatever the
case, Johnson recorded approximately 16 songs over three days, most of them in two or three takes. One of those tunes, “Terraplane Blues,” a double-entendre-laden number, was issued as a 78-r.p.m. single on the Vocalion label and became a modest regional hit, selling approximately 5,000 copies. As a result, Johnson was invited back to Texas, this time, in June 1937, to Dallas, where he recorded another 13 tracks, but no more hits.
A little more than a year later, Johnson would be dead—and probably destined for obscurity had his music not already gotten the attention of a record producer who would exert a huge impact on popular music in the 20th century. By the time John H. Hammond Jr. came across Johnson’s records, he had persuaded Benny Goodman to integrate his band, discovered a young Billie Holiday in Harlem, and recorded Count Basie, but he was just getting started. As a talent scout for Columbia Records in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, Hammond would discover Aretha Franklin and sign Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan to the label.
Hammond’s role in Johnson’s legacy is pivotal. He first championed Johnson in print in 1937 when, writing under a pseudonym for the left-wing publication
New Masses, he asserted that “Johnson makes Leadbelly look like an accomplished poseur.” Then, in 1938, Hammond sought to feature Johnson in a concert he was producing at Carnegie Hall that December called “From Spirituals to Swing.” He sent an emissary into the South to track down Johnson and bring him back to New York. But as the day of the show approached, Hammond learned that Johnson was dead—possibly murdered. On the night of the concert,
Big Bill Broonzy took Johnson’s place, but Hammond memorialized the late Delta artist by playing two recordings of his songs for the Carnegie Hall audience.
More than 20 years later, Hammond would expose Johnson’s music to a whole new generation of listeners. Columbia now controlled Johnson’s recordings, and in 1961, Hammond oversaw the release of
King of the Delta Blues Singers, the first album-length collection of Johnson’s music, which helped spark a blues revival in America. According to the album’s producer, Frank Driggs, it sold approximately 10,000 copies upon its initial release—impressive for an obscure, dead, vernacular performer.
“The Music Almost Repelled Me”
Not long before the album became available to the public, Hammond had given a young Bob Dylan an early acetate copy of the LP. Near the end of his 2004
memoir,
Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan recounts the rather intense effect
King of the Delta Blues Singers had on him. If he hadn’t heard the album at such an early, formative stage in his career, Dylan writes, “there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn’t have felt free or upraised enough to write.”
King of the Delta Blues Singers had an arguably larger impact across the Atlantic in Britain, where a new generation of rock ’n’ rollers were learning their chops and finding their influences. One of them was a shy, alienated teenager named Eric Clapton, who was given the Johnson album by one of his early bandmates. “At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense and this man made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play,” Clapton writes in his recently published
memoir,
Clapton: The Autobiography.
The chance of this music’s having such an immediate and visceral effect on an aspiring rock star today is, frankly, pretty slim. To ears accustomed to modern, computer-generated effects that can make almost anyone sound like a guitar god or a vocal powerhouse, Johnson’s music can sound thin and primitive at first spin, even though it’s remarkably complex and polished for its time.
As Clapton explains in his autobiography, Johnson employed a fingerpicking style that had him “simultaneously playing a disjointed bass line on the low strings, rhythm on the middle strings, and lead on the treble strings while singing at the same time.” Occasionally, Johnson worked in some bottle-slide playing, too, which involves placing a small glass bottle or sleeve over the left pinkie, then sliding it up and down the guitar’s neck to create the pitch-bending wail that is a signature of the blues. Even accomplished guitarists can have a hard time re-creating Johnson’s sound, let alone mastering it. Says Dave Rubin, an author for the music publisher Hal Leonard Corporation who led the team of musicians who transcribed Johnson’s songs for the guitar instructional
Robert Johnson: The New Transcriptions, “When you get to ‘Crossroads’ and ‘Preachin’ Blues’—oh my God, forget it. It sounds like three guys playing.”
Johnson’s guitar chops were just one part of the equation, however. For a blues singer, he was more of a crooner than a croaker, and his voice sometimes had a quaver that could sound haunted or seductive. There was also an urgency to Johnson’s singing that made him sound “like he’s about five minutes away from the
electric chair,” Driggs says. Lyrics such as “She got a mortgage on my body now, a lien on my soul,” from “Traveling Riverside Blues,” could also have a devastating poetic economy. In
Chronicles, Dylan recounts writing Johnson’s words down on scraps of paper to examine their structure and finding “big-ass truths wrapped in the hard shell of nonsensical abstraction—themes that flew through the air with the greatest of ease.” (Dylan could have been talking about himself.) He doesn’t put much stock in criticism that is often leveled at the blues artist: that Johnson’s work is derivative. In
Chronicles, Dylan plays
King of the Delta Blues Singers for his friend
Dave Van Ronk, the respected folksinger known as the Mayor of MacDougal Street, but Van Ronk mostly hears a musician mimicking his predecessors. “He didn’t think Johnson was very original. I knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite. I thought Johnson was as original as could be, didn’t think him or his songs could be compared to anything.”
What Dylan understands about Johnson is that, while his influences are easily divined, in all but a few cases, every guitar lick, vocal technique, or lyrical flourish that he borrows or steals he makes his own. For example, Rubin explains, while Johnnie Temple’s “Lead Pencil Blues” was the first recorded example of the “cut boogie pattern”—the chugging, trainlike guitar line that’s a staple of basic rock ’n’ roll—it’s Johnson’s harder, more propulsive version, found, for example, on “Sweet Home Chicago,” that other guitarists began to adopt, from Elmore James to
Chuck Berry and beyond.
“To me, he was the synthesis of his generation,” says blues guitarist and singer-songwriter John P. Hammond, whose father was the
John Hammond who signed Dylan and oversaw the release of
King of the Delta Blues Singers. Hammond
fils discovered Robert Johnson independently of his father, in the late 1950s, when he heard one of the bluesman’s songs on a Folkways album compilation. “He was my inspiration to want to play,” Hammond says of Johnson. Hammond joined a number of artists in the 60s who were influenced by Johnson, covering his music on their albums or in their concerts, or both. The Rolling Stones reworked Johnson’s “Love in Vain” for their now classic 1969 album
Let It Bleed (although they credited the writer as “Woody Payne,” presumably to avoid copyright problems), and that same year Led Zeppelin’s second album included “The Lemon Song,” a track that owed much to Howlin’ Wolf but also took part of its lyrics—“You can squeeze my lemon ’til the juice run down my leg”—from Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues.”
And then there was Clapton. Initially taken aback by the intensity of Johnson’s work, he writes in his autobiography that, after letting the record get under his skin, “I realized that, on some level, I had found the master, and that following this man’s example would be my life’s work.” In 1966, with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, he recorded Johnson’s “Ramblin’ on My Mind,” and then, in 1968, with the band Cream, he worked up an electrified and modified take on Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” called “Crossroads” that became one of his signature hits. But only after recording his 2004 homage to the blues musician,
Me and Mr. Johnson, and filming a companion DVD,
Sessions for Robert J, was Clapton left with the sense that “my debt to Robert was paid.”
....... great thread! This is also the foundation for my favorite genre of music.... Jazz!!
