CRITICAL MASS: The real Robert Johnson

Does anyone have a clue who he might be?

 Robert Johnson photographs.
both need to carry the following credit:
(c) 1989 Delta Haze Corporation
Robert Johnson photographs. both need to carry the following credit: (c) 1989 Delta Haze Corporation

— Robert Johnson is probably the most important bluesman who ever lived. And a lot of his importance may spring from the fact that we know so little about him.

We do know he was born May 11, 1911, and so it’s appropriate that Sony Music Entertainment has re-released his complete recordings in a two-CD version called Robert Johnson: The Complete Original Masters that will probably run you less than $20 and a deluxe $349 edition. In addition to the CDs of Johnson’s music, the deluxe version includes two discs of blues rarities, replicas of his original 78 rpm singles and the 1997 documentary Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl about Johnson’s life and music.

Johnson is something of an American Rimbaud; his life has the aspect of legend. He was born illegitimately under uncertain circumstances, never knew his biological father and is said to have suffered at the hands of an abjectly cruel stepfather. Johnson changed his name at least three times, married at 17 and became a widower a year later when his young bride died in childbirth.

Then, at 19, Johnson disappeared from Robinsonville, Miss., where he had apprenticed himself to the slightly older bluesmen Son House and Willie Brown, who thought his guitar playing unsure and crude. When Johnson returned, he had undergone a transformation. No longer was he a shy, awkward neophyte whose best instrument was the harmonica, but a kind of shamanic virtuoso with an uncanny talent.

Johnson was suddenly so good that the only explanation that made sense was supernatural; they said he’d sold his soul to the devil in return for his chops. Or at least that was the marketing plan.

Lots of words are spent in service of this myth, but what ought to matter more is Johnson’s sound. On the worst night of your life, you sit in the dark with the CD player set on “repeat,” playing “Love in Vain” over and over as you sip your whiskey and it comes to you: Johnson sounds like hope dying in a shabby hotel room in a meaningless little town.

He often sounds like two guitarists playing at once, and there is something thrilling and dreadful in his tone. It is a thin and nearly nettling sound, a guitar being worked over by a gang of tiny demons, a ringing treble figure set against percussive frogmarching bass notes and the unnaturally high voice of a haint, you might imagine.

This is all bushwah, you understand, and your romantic perception of Johnson has nothing to do with the historic personage. We don’t know much about this man who would have turned 100 years old on May 8, had he not died in 1938. All we really have are the 40-odd performances he recorded in Texas hotel rooms in 1936 and 1937 and a handful of legends, some more credible than others.

He told people he was born in Mississippi. We know he spent a lot of time in Helena — that he lived there off and on with Robert Lockwood Jr.’s mother — and he probably played the Kitty Kat Club in that Arkansas town. He died Aug. 16, 1938, near Greenwood, Miss., probably as a result of being poisoned. There are three graves purported to be his. We also know he died poor, and largely uncelebrated — he had only one minor “hit,” “Terraplane Blues,” which sold about 5,000 copies during his lifetime.

Beyond that, there is myth: a fictive Johnson who participated in a Faustian bargain, who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads (or in a graveyard), who went away for six months and came back playing better than his mentors.

GONE TO ARKANSAS

In an interview included in the 1997 documentary Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl, House says Johnson was such a rough guitar player that “folks they come and say, ‘Why don’t you go out and make that boy put that thing down? He running us crazy.’ ... He run off from his mother and father, and went over in Arkansas someplace or other.”

House says Johnson was gone for six months (other sources say it was more like two years), and when he came back he had achieved mastery of his instrument. He played a lot of places — there are indications he’d made it up to St. Louis, Chicago and even Canada, he’d woodshedded with bluesman Tommy Johnson (no relation) and maybe most importantly, he’d listened to a lot of music on the radio. It may be that exposure to recorded music was the biggest influence on what he himself eventually recorded, and it may be why he seems so striking to modern ears.

A 1961 compilation of Johnson’s work announced him The King of the Delta Blues Singers. But it seems doubtful that Johnson so regarded himself when he was alive, or that he even aspired to be a blues performer.

In his 2004 book Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (Amistad, $24.95), the musician Elijah Wald built a pretty good case that Johnson was a sophisticated entertainer who was especially skilled at copying the sounds he heard on the radio. Wald suggests that the only reason we think of Johnson as a blues performer is because that part of his repertoire is what got recorded, because that’s what Brunswick Records wanted, what they thought could sell. Johnson obliged them.

And he played facing the wall, not because he was shy — as the liner notes of The King of the Delta Blues Singers

suggested — but because he was aware of the acoustic effect it created. Suspend your preconceptions when you listen to the music and the thing you notice most is its sophistication, the way Johnson slides his voice between notes and sets harmonics tingling.

He plays his triplets on guitar, and doubles them with that supple voice. Some people think the recordings were speeded up to send his voice into that eerie register. It’s more likely that Johnson simply wanted to sound that way, that he wasn’t looking to mimic the country grumble of House or other rural blues singers; he wanted to sound like the popular singer Leroy Carr or maybe Peetie Wheatstraw.

NATURAL BLUES

The truth is that people have a lot of romantic ideas about what we call “the blues” and one of the most naive of these notions is that the people who made them were gifted primitives or feral savants, or crippled and crazy men and women afflicted by demons they could only temporarily exorcise by playing the blues.

They were not “natural” folk performers in the sense that they were unschooled or unaware. They were not especially weird or wicked, and they didn’t approach their music with anything like the respect and awe their 21st-century acolytes accord it. They were entertainers, these blues people; they did show tunes and reels and trail ballads and cowboy songs — whatever people wanted to dance to.

Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter called himself a songster, but he was a savvy businessman as well, more a co-conspirator with John and Alan Lomax, the peripatetic Depression-era folklorists who made field recordings of Ledbetter and other indigenous musicians for the Library of Congress, than a victim. Sure, Leadbelly would wear the chauffeur’s cap and growl at the Bryn Mawr girls — it was all show biz, Kong onstage straining his chains.

There’s little reason to believe Johnson was any different.

There are only two known photographs of him. One, apparently taken in a photo booth, shows him with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, wearing suspenders and a work shirt. (When the U.S. Postal Service used this image as the basis for a stamp honoring Johnson a few years ago, they erased the cigarette.)

The other more interesting picture is a portrait shot in the Hooks Brothers Photography Studio in Memphis, circa 1935 (about the time Elvis Presley was busy being born).

In this photo, Johnson is dapper, he is smiling, his long fingers choke out a chord on his guitar’s neck. It’s a publicity picture, a handout suitable for autographing and framing of an ambitious young entertainer, a showman who aspires to something like stardom.

But if you want, you can see something disturbing dancing in his eyes, something like a serial killer’s glee. Knowing the story of Johnson is enough to transform the photo into a record of a doomed creature.

Knowing the story also informs how we receive that uncanny voice — and Johnson’s extraordinary guitar technique, which is evidence of an uncommon musicality. But Johnson is only special to us because he’s the bluesman we recovered — and we impose on his ghost the obligation to be our bluesman of record, even if he never thought of himself that way.

Johnson more likely thought of himself as a showman, a pleaser of crowds. He was a human jukebox, he’d play what he was paid to play. He might have understood the utility of having a bad reputation and may have been naive in some ways. But he was certainly not the spooky hoodoo figure he has been marketed as.

And yes, he sounds like a keening devil, a wad of whitehot grief, but he was cognizant of the effect he had on people. He was in control, he knew how to make that sorrowful, heart-seizing sound. It was all a part of his act.

STRUT AND FRET

You could say that without Bob Dylan there would be no Robert Johnson. And you’d be right — at least there would be no cult of Johnson, or at least not a large cult. There wouldn’t be hundreds of guitar players beseeching his ghost, evoking his needling style.

On the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t deal in hypothetical questions. Dylan did put The King of the Delta Blues Singers on his coffee table on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home, and that affectation undoubtedly did wonders for Johnson’s postlife career but Dylan didn’t go out to the graveyard at midnight, summon up Johnson’s ghost and have him record the album.

Johnson’s tracks were put out because a record company executive thought they would sell, at least a little. All Dylan (or Dylan’s art director) did was put a copy of the album in the photo. Johnson would have existed, would have made the same music, whether Dylan — or we — had noticed him or not.

Revisionism has its place; as long as those who hear the revised version are at least aware that other versions exist, we can tolerate novel ideas. Facts is facts. But facts aren’t everything, and what we know is limited by our faculties, tools and imaginations.

Johnson is as influential a musician as this country has ever produced. But he wouldn’t be influential if people hadn’t heard him, and nobody really started listening to him until about 20 years after his death.

There are probably dozens of figures like Johnson of whom we have never heard. But somehow, across an ocean of time, we became the recipients of his bottled message.

Maybe he got what he wanted. Johnson is a pop star.

(The deluxe edition of the CD set is available at thecompleterobert johnson.com .)

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com blooddirtangels.com

Style, Pages 29 on 05/17/2011

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