Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues

368 Pages·2004·0.51 MB·english

by  Elijah Wald

Escaping the Delta
Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues
Elijah Wald
Dedication
To the memory of Dave Van Ronk,
so often my mentor in both music and writing,
whose ideas formed the foundation of this work.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction

One
The World That Johnson Knew
1 What Is Blues?
2 Race Records: Blues Queens, Crooners, Street Singers, and
Hokum
3 What the Records Missed
4 Hollers, Moans, and “Deep Blues”
5 The Mississippi Delta: Life and Listening
Two
Robert Johnson
6 A Life Remembered
7 The Music
8 First Sessions, Part One: Going For Some Hits
9 First Sessions, Part Two: Reaching Back
10 Second Sessions: The Professional
11 The Legacy
Three
The Blues Roll On
12 Jump Shouters, Smooth Trios, and Down-Home Soul
13 The Blues Cult: Primitive Folk Art and the Roots of Rock
14 Farther On Up the Road: Wherefore and Whither the Blues

Afterthought: So What about the Devil?
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
“Scholars love to praise the ‘pure’ blues artists or the ones,
like Robert Johnson, who died young and represent tragedy.
It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with
tragedy.”1
—B. B. KING
“Blues is not a dream. Blues is truth.”2
—BROWNIE MCGHEE
FOR ITS FIRST FIFTY YEARS, BLUES WAS PRIMARILY BLACK POPULAR
music. Like rappers or country-and-western stars, the top blues
singers were assumed to come from poor backgrounds and to
understand the problems and aspirations of folks on the street or out
in the country, but they were also expected to be professional
entertainers with nice cars and fancy clothes, admired as symbols of
success.
In the 1960s, a world of white and international listeners
discovered blues, and for roughly the last forty years, the style has
primarily been played for a white cult audience. This audience has
generally considered blues singers to be purveyors of a wild, soulful
folk art, the antithesis of glitzy pop entertainment. Even at the
pinnacle of commercial success, an artist like B. B. King is
considered by the mass media to be a “roots” musician, described in
very different terms from either a Duke Ellington or a Van Morrison. It
is common to hail blues artists not for their technical skill or broad
musical knowledge, but rather for their “authenticity.” By this
standard an unknown genius discovered in a Louisiana or
Mississippi prison is by definition a deeper and more real bluesman
than a million-selling star in a silk suit and a Cadillac.
Such standards framed my own introduction to blues, and though
I now consider them pure romanticism, an outsider’s perception that
has virtually no bearing on the realities of the music, my tastes
remain largely unchanged. I am not a mainstream pop fan. If a
record sounds like hundreds of other records, that diminishes my
appreciation of it. I want to hear unique, personal work, and my
interest is even greater if that work provides a window into a world or
culture that is unfamiliar to me. That is part of what attracted me to
blues, and I continue to share much of the aesthetic that drives other
contemporary blues fans. We love the music as a heartfelt,
handmade alternative to the plastic products of the pop scene, and
when we listen to older records it is as natural for us to prefer
Charley Patton or Robert Johnson to the more popular urban blues
singers of their day as to prefer Lester Young to Guy Lombardo, Tom
Waits to Billy Joel, or Cesaria Evora to Christina Aguilera.
Because of this, writers like myself have tended to shy away from
the fact that blues was once popular music. Its evolution as a style,
and the career paths of most of its significant artists, were driven not
by elite, cult tastes, but by the trends of mainstream black record
buyers. Hard as it is for modern blues fans to accept, the artists we
most admire often shared the mass tastes we despise, and dreamed
not of enduring artistic reputations but of contemporary pop stardom.
Nothing we know about Robert Johnson suggests that he aspired to
be a Mozart or Keats, a tortured genius dying young but leaving a
timeless legacy. Everything suggests that he hoped to make it on the
commercial blues scene, to be the next Leroy Carr, Kokomo Arnold,
or Big Bill Broonzy. Indeed, while white fans often imagine that if he
had survived into the electric era he would have been tearing off
screaming Delta slide licks à la Elmore James, his black musical
companions are more inclined to suggest that he would have been
as slick and expert as T-Bone Walker, complete with a horn section
and a zoot suit.
Instead, he died virtually unknown in a rural backwater, without
making any appreciable dent on the blues world of his day. It was
only after blues had largely disappeared from the black charts and
had been revived as a nostalgic adjunct to the white folk and rock
scenes that he became famed as the most influential and important
bluesman of all time. On purely artistic grounds, his posthumous
acclaim may be deserved. The early Mississippi masters—Charley
Patton, Son House, Skip James, and a handful of others—are
among the greatest musicians this country has produced, and
Johnson’s work can be seen as summing up their tradition. Still, that
does not give his fans the right to rewrite history, and the historical
evidence is clear: As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert
Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened
in the decades following his death would have been affected if he
had never played a note.
So why do I still take Johnson as my central figure for a book on
blues history? There are two reasons:
The first is that he is the only prewar blues artist whose records
are still widely owned and heard today, and therefore he is the
natural starting point for modern listeners who want to delve more
deeply. Because he recorded so little, most blues fans own his
complete works, so I can assume that readers will have the basic
source material available. His unusually broad grasp of the popular
styles of his day makes these recordings a particularly good door
into the larger musical world around him, and the fact that he arrived
relatively late on the scene means that most of his roots and
influences are accessible to us.
The second is that the odd evolution of blues and its audience is
perfectly exemplified by the paradox of Johnson’s reputation: that his
music excited so little interest among the black blues fans of his
time, and yet is now widely hailed as the greatest and most
important blues ever recorded. Since all blues history was written
retrospectively, this paradox has rarely been stressed. Therefore it is
difficult for modern readers to understand quite how differently the
music was seen in the days when it was a mainstream black pop
style rather than magnificent folk art.
Due to a combination of taste and accident, Robert Johnson has
served from the beginning as a unique bridge between two very
different worlds. For his original fans, he was a bridge out of the
Delta, a young local player who had managed to assimilate all the
latest styles from the radio and the jukeboxes, and to perform them
as well as the big stars in St. Louis and Chicago. For the small group
of urban white blues fans that eventually grew into a huge audience
that remains largely urban and white, he was a bridge in the other
direction, taking us from our world into the “deep blues” of the older
Delta players. In both cases, Johnson has served as a screen on
which each group of fans projected its own dream movie of the blues
life. For his peers in Mississippi, he was a hip, smart adventurer who
had traveled to northern cities and lived high, wide and free. For a
modern audience of college students, rock musicians, and
historians, he has been the dark king of a strange and haunting
world, lost in the Mississippi mists and harried by demons—a legend
more earthy, violent, and passionate than anything in our daily lives.
Amidst all the mythologizing, it is not easy to stand back and treat
Johnson as a normal human being, a talented artist who came along
at a particular period in American music, and to try to understand his
world and his contribution rather than getting lost in the clouds of
romanticism.

I STARTED PLAYING BLUES GUITAR in my early teens, and I had been
working the folk circuit for a dozen years before I first went to
Mississippi. That was in 1991, and strangely enough I was there to
play at the dedication of Robert Johnson’s grave marker.3 Washtub
Robbie Phillips, my regular bass player, had been invited by the
organizer of the ceremony and had just won a thousand dollars on
the lottery, providing us with gas money. I had a car, and our friend
Kenny Holladay, a slide guitarist based in New Orleans, agreed to
meet us in Clarksdale. We understood that there would be some real
Mississippi bluesmen performing at the ceremony, but that maybe
we would be allowed to play a tune. As things turned out, none of the
other musicians showed up, so we were the band.
The ceremony was held at Mount Zion Missionary Baptist
Church, a small white building surrounded by fields of soybeans, on
the outskirts of Morgan City, a sleepy hamlet south of Itta Bena. To
us outsiders, the whole experience was like a journey into a different
place and time. The congregation sang the first couple of songs a
cappella, and the harmonies and rhythms were straight out of the
nineteenth century, a taste of the music Johnson himself, and
Charley Patton before him, would have heard as children. Rather
than the shouting, body-twisting power of later gospel, it moved with
the gently insistent pulse of human breath, the singers swaying from
side to side, adding harmonies and responses as the mood took
them. When the pianist joined in, they settled into a slightly more
modern rhythm, but it was still unlike anything I had heard in gospel
churches up north.
Reverend James Ratliff, Mount Zion’s pastor, delivered the
sermon. He explained that he had never heard of Johnson until a
few months earlier, but he could appreciate the miracle of a bunch of
people coming down from New York City because a famous blues
singer was buried in his cemetery, and giving him money to restore
his church. Apparently some members of the congregation had been
a bit dubious, especially after learning that Robert Johnson was
famous not only for his music but for being involved with satanic
forces, but Reverend Ratliff had sorted that out to his satisfaction:
“God works in mysterious ways,” he preached. “Legend says this
man sold his soul to the Devil. I don’t know about that. All I can say
is, when he died, the members of this church had love in their hearts
and gave him a resting place, and God wrote that down. Now, I don’t
know what Robert Johnson told the Lord. You don’t know what
Robert Johnson told the Lord. We all have come short of the glory of
God.”
After the sermon and a few words from a Greenwood city
councilor, we moved out to the churchyard, where a sheet was
pulled off the new stone. It was decorated with a quotation from the
music historian Peter Guralnick, a picture of Johnson by R. Crumb,
and a line from Johnson’s “Me and the Devil”: “You may bury my
body down by the highway side.”
Then it was our turn. Kenny had been trying to think of some
songs that would be sedate enough for the church folks, but decided
that Johnson’s biggest hit was the obvious choice, so we played
“Terraplane Blues,” a racy, double-entendre number about a popular
make of car. The lyric is pretty typical blues fare, but the audience’s
reaction was a revelation for me. While the white record executives
and reporters were nodding in appreciation at the authenticity of
Kenny’s sound, the local black congregation was treating us as
entertainment, cracking up at lines like “when I mash down on your