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On 23 December 1938 New York’s Carnegie Hall, at that time mostly used for classical concerts, hosted a revolutionary event. Titled From Spirituals to Swing, its aim was to showcase (as its name suggests) the history of black music in America, and to present it as something worth serious listening. It had been organised by the jazz impresario John Hammond.
Hammond, who over a career in the music business spanning almost five decades kick-started the careers of many famous artists, from Billie Holiday and Count Basie to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, was born into wealth and privilege, but early in life conceived an abiding passion for black music. He wanted someone to represent guitar blues at his concert, and he knew exactly who. He wanted a musician from Mississippi who was unknown to white audiences and not much better known to black ones, but whom he was convinced was ‘the greatest Negro blues singer who has cropped up in recent years.’ He wanted Robert Johnson.
Hammond had heard the two or three records by Johnson that had been released, and they’d made a strong impression on him. He tried to find Johnson to invite him to play at the concert, only to learn that he was dead, apparently murdered. Hammond booked Big Bill Broonzy instead, though he did play two of Johnson’s records at the concert.
For the next two decades that was about it. Robert Johnson’s name had been brought before the tiny coterie of white blues enthusiasts that existed then, but there were no reissues or compilation albums in the forties and fifties, and the only people who had direct access to his music were the even smaller number of collectors who scoured the country in search of the original 78 rpm records. There weren’t very many of them to be found. Although he had recorded twenty-nine songs at two sessions in 1936 and 1937, only a handful had been issued, and of those only one, Terraplane Blues, a saucy double-entendre that uses a car as a sexual metaphor (‘I’m gonna heist your hood, mama, I’m bound to check your oil.’) was anything like a hit even by the standards of the ‘Race’ market of the time.
This didn’t stop his reputation growing among the cognoscenti, but as far as wider audiences were concerned he might as well have never existed. The first step towards a change in that situation came in 1959, when the blues historian Sam Charters included one track by him in the compilation album The Country Blues, issued to accompany his ground-breaking book of the same name. Then in 1961 John Hammond, who by then was a producer at Columbia Records (or CBS as they were known in Britain) persuaded them to issue an entire album of Johnson’s music, fourteen tracks of it. Its title confidently asserted that Robert Johnson was King of the Delta Blues Singers.
By then the folk revival was hitting its peak of popularity in the USA, ‘Folk’ or ‘country’ blues (both terms are over-simplifications) was included in the canon, and word began to spread. The most famous alumnus of that movement, Bob Dylan, was sufficiently impressed to include King of the Delta Blues Singers in the artfully arranged jumble of album sleeves next to him on the cover photo of his seminal album Bringing It All Back Home.
But the real impetus for the spread of interest in Johnson’s music came from across the Atlantic in Britain, where at the beginning of the sixties a movement was bubbling under that would soon explode into the R’n’B and blues boom and, spearheaded by the Rolling Stones, wake up American audiences to a hitherto neglected part of their own musical heritage. King of the Delta Blues Singers found another ready audience in these early British blues fans, among them two young guitarists called Keith Richards and Eric Clapton. Clapton’s devotion was particularly intense, and he was the pioneer in recording Johnson’s songs in a white rock context.
The first recording, in March 1966, was by an ad hoc band (the word ‘supergroup’ had yet to be coined) called Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse, formed to contribute a few tracks to Elektra Records’ first British release, the sampler album What’s Shakin’. It included Steve Winwood on vocals, Paul Jones on harmonica, and Jack Bruce on bass, and if the originally intended drummer, Ginger Baker, had participated it would have been the first time the three future members of Cream had all played together. Among the three Powerhouse tracks on the album was Johnson’s Crossroads Blues, its title shortened to Crossroads. At the time Clapton was a member of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and when they went into the studio in May 1966 to record what would become known as ‘the Beano album’ the song he chose to make his debut as a lead singer was another Johnson song, Ramblin’ on My Mind.
Although that Bluesbreakers album reached the top ten of the British album chart, blues was still a bit of a niche market, but it was not long before Robert Johnson’s songs were introduced to a wider public. On Cream’s first album, issued at the of 1966, Eric Clapton sang another Johnson song, Four Until Late. And he hadn’t finished with Crossroads (it is still in his repertoire): Cream’s 1968 album Wheels of Fire included a storming live version of it, which Rolling Stone magazine has ranked at number three in its list of ‘Greatest Guitar songs of All Time,’ and which is widely considered to have been the watershed recording that brought Johnson’s music to the attention of rock audiences. The following year the Rolling Stones, at that time one of the most popular rock acts in the world, included Love in Vain on their album Let It Bleed.
Johnson’s reputation was on the rise, but how far it had spread didn’t become clear until 1990, with the release of the box set The Complete Recordings – containing all twenty-nine songs plus alternate takes to a total of forty-one tracks – which astonished Columbia, who had been reluctant to give the project the green light, by becoming a best seller. Robert Johnson had arrived in the mainstream consciousness.
At least, his music had. But for years the man who’d made that music remained an enigma. ‘Robert Johnson is little, very little more than a name on ageing index cards and a few dusty master records in the files of a phonograph company that no longer exists,’ began the sleeve notes to that 1961 album. Largely derived from the reminiscences of Don Law, the (white) man who produced Johnson’s recording sessions, topped up by speculation extrapolated from Johnson’s lyrics, they went on to paint a picture of a shy, naïve and impressionable youth (Law reckoned he was only seventeen or eighteen when he first recorded) who had never before left the Mississippi plantation where he had grown up, was an easy mark for ‘predatory women,’ and had been ‘poisoned by a jealous girlfriend.’ Just about all of this turned out to be wrong.
Those notes were influenced by, and fed into, the preconceptions held by the small white audience for the blues at that time. Devotees of what is now usually called roots music, in its various manifestations, have always tended to be of a liberal, left-leaning persuasion – Hammond himself was a civil rights activist. The early blues enthusiasts liked to romanticise the blues as the heart-cry of an oppressed people, the more rough-hewn, the more ‘authentic,’ the better.
The blues musicians themselves had no such concerns. Authenticity was a meaningless word to them. They weren’t interested in preserving traditions or what middle-class white folks thought of their music. They were interested in making money. On street corners, or in the rough-and-tumble bars known as barrelhouses (because the bar was often a plank across two barrels) or jukes (word of unknown, possibly African origin, but hence ‘juke-box’), they played whatever their audiences wanted to hear, which wasn’t necessarily blues. In the studio, they played what the record companies thought would sell, and in the period between the two world wars that that did mean blues. It was, in effect, black America’s pop music.
The dichotomy is neatly illustrated by the way John Hammond described Big Bill Broonzy, his substitute for Robert Johnson at that 1938 concert. He wrote that Broonzy was ‘a primitive blues singer’ who ‘was prevailed upon to leave his Arkansas farm and mule and make his very first trek to the big city.’ He must have known that Broonzy was in truth a prosperous, polished professional musician who had been living in Chicago since the early twenties, liked to wear sharp suits, and had released over two hundred records (Key to the Highway has become an enduring blues standard), not to mention his session work on hundreds more. I can only presume that Hammond was telling his readership and audience what he thought they wanted to hear.
(Broonzy himself was canny enough to be well aware of this. After World War II, when his brand of Chicago blues began losing out to the louder, grittier music made by the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, he took note of how much money Leadbelly and Josh White were making by playing folksy music to white audiences and assumed almost precisely the persona Hammond had invented, ditching his city suits and embarking on a lucrative new career as Big Bill the down-home folk-blues singer.)
To these blues romantics Robert Johnson was a gift. Like some wild animal caught in a car’s headlights, he had appeared out of nowhere, recorded those twenty-nine songs, and vanished again, to meet a violent and mysterious fate at a tragically young age. No photograph was known to exist. His life was a blank slate upon which legends could be written – like the one that, regrettably, seems to be the first thing that comes to many people’s minds when Johnson’s name is mentioned: that he went to a crossroads at midnight and sold his soul in exchange for his musical prowess.
And the driven intensity of much of his music (the critic Charles Shaar Murray once wrote that ‘going to a Robert Johnson record for relaxation is like drinking six double espressos just before midnight and expecting a good night’s sleep.’), was potent fuel for legends. Johnson’s often dark lyrics, his high, keening singing, and the innovative brilliance of his guitar work (Keith Richards asked, ‘Who’s the other guy playing with him?’ on first hearing him) fostered the compelling image of a tormented, doomed genius, the Keats or Shelley of the blues.
(It so happened that the first Robert Johnson record I ever heard was the most intense of them all, and it gave me an electric jolt. I had never before heard such raw emotion in any music: ‘I got to keep movin’, I got to keep movin’ / Blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail… And the days keeps on worryin’ me / There’s a hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail…)
Not everyone was content with legends, however romantic, and from the early sixties onwards a handful of blues historians dedicated themselves to discovering the reality behind them. They searched in archives. They tracked down people who knew Johnson rather better than Don Law. They spoke to other blues musicians, notably Johnny Shines, who travelled and played with Johnson, and Robert Junior Lockwood (so called not because of his connection with Johnson, but because his father was also called Robert), whose mother was in an on-off relationship with him and to whom he gave guitar lessons. They found old people in Mississippi who’d known him, including his half-sister, Carrie Harris – who possessed a photograph of him.
It took decades, but slowly a real person emerged from the shadows. A very different person from the one depicted in those sleeve notes, a worldly itinerant musician who’d play anywhere he could make money and was constantly, restlessly on the move, on one occasion getting as far as the Canadian border. One who was very much a ladies’ man, more than willing to take advantage of the spell his music cast. The only thing predatory about his relationships with women was his habit of battening onto a woman in many of the places he stayed for any length of time to get himself free board and lodging until he felt like moving on – and Robert Lockwood’s mother, for one, was happy enough with the arrangement to become a regular port of call. Carrie’s photograph, a studio portrait, showed a confidently smiling young man posing with a guitar, dressed in a snappy pinstripe suit.
There are, however, grounds for speculation that there was indeed a tormented soul behind that smile, for Johnson had a fractured childhood and his early adult life was blighted by tragedy. His mother, Julia, had been married for nearly twenty years to Charles Dodds, a relatively prosperous furniture maker, in Hazlehurst, Mississippi when a dispute with some local white landowners forced him to leave town to escape a lynch mob, leaving Julia and their ten children behind. Evicted from her home, she took up with Noah Johnson, a farm labourer, and Robert Leroy Johnson was born to them in May 1911, probably on the eighth – and was therefore twenty-five, not seventeen or eighteen, when he first recorded.
Meanwhile Charles Dodds had settled in Memphis, re-married and changed his name to Spencer. Some of the older children had already joined him there when Julia Dodds’ relationship with Noah Johnson ended and, struggling to survive as a black single mother in the most virulently racist area in the USA, she sought refuge with him. Although he took her in, it must have been an awkward situation with an ex-wife and her child by a different father under the same roof, and before long Julia moved on – leaving the two-year-old Robert behind with a step-father and mother who were strangers to him.
But Robert had his step-brothers and sisters with him, some of whom had stayed with their mother until she’d come to Memphis. Especially, there was Carrie, who would continue to look out for him – when she had the chance – for the rest of his life, and he settled into his new home, for ever after considering the Spencers to be his real family. Then, in 1919, he was uprooted again. His mother had married a sharecropper, Will ‘Dusty’ Willis, and they’d settled on a plantation across the Mississippi River in Arkansas. Now this woman whom he can have barely remembered reappeared, to take him with her to help on the farm. Young Robert was forced to exchange school and a lively city for the monotony of endless cotton fields and the primitive, back-breaking life of a sharecropper, and to live once again with strangers.
(Sharecropping is a farming system, at that time widespread in the American South, in which the landowner provides the farmer with a plot of land and the necessities of life on credit in exchange for a share of the crop. The system has benefits for both parties – a poor man can become a farmer without any outlay, and the landowner gets his fields worked without hiring labour and paying wages – but it is open to abuse by the landowner, who can fix the prices of the food and other commodities he supplies to the farmer, and the value he sets on the crop, to maximise his profits and to ensure that the farmer is bound to him by perpetual debt. Although nominally free men, most sharecroppers in the Deep South were little better than slaves and lived in grinding poverty.)
After a couple of years the Willis family moved back across the river, to a plantation near the town of Robinsonville, Mississippi, and Robert was once again able to go to school. But he hated farming, and as soon as he was old enough he took to periodically running away back to the Spencers in Memphis, where his older step-brother Charles taught him the rudiments of guitar and piano and Carrie helped him to buy his first guitar.
For young Robert had a passion for music. He would have heard plenty of it in Memphis, for the Spencer home was not far from Beale Street, the rumbustious centre of Memphis night-life that holds a similar place in blues mythology to that held by New Orleans’ Storyville in the legends of jazz. Now, in Robinsonville, he was exposed to the music that would set the course for his future, the raw, edgy style later christened (by white blues enthusiasts) the Delta blues. By his late teens Robert was already in demand to play at local knees-ups. His dedication to music did nothing to improve his relationship with his stepfather Willis, who would much rather Robert spent his time helping him in the fields and was prone to enforce his views with violence.
Some time in this period his mother told him about his biological father. We can only speculate on how traumatic this may have been for the teenage boy; but we do know that he is listed on school records and the 1920 census as Robert Spencer, while on the 1929 certificate of his marriage to Virginia Travis his name is given, and signed, as Robert Johnson. He was eighteen and she was even younger.
Later that year the young bride became pregnant, and early the next year she went to stay with her grandmother to have the baby with her family about her to support her. Unfortunately that didn’t help the outcome: on 10 April 1930 Virginia Johnson, still a teenager, died in childbirth. And Robert was not there.
Though he seems to have been truly in love with Virginia, for her sake putting aside his musical ambitions and his dislike of farming and trying to settle down as a sharecropper, in her absence he succumbed to temptation and went off in search of in search of jukes and parties where he could play and make money. When he eventually turned up at the grandmother’s house with his guitar, the family had no sympathy to give the young man who’d been wandering around playing the blues while his wife and child died. They were deeply religious people, and religious black folk regarded the blues and the lifestyle of those who played it with horror. It was, they believed, the Devil’s music. Descendants interviewed years later still stuck to their conviction that the deaths of Virginia and the baby were divine retribution for Robert’s sinful ways. They didn’t need any tall tales about midnight pacts with big black men at the crossroads to believe that Robert Johnson had surrendered his soul to the Devil.
In the bitterness of his bereavement Johnson seems to have taken this to heart. People who knew him have said that sometimes when he was drunk he would rail against God and religion, uttering such blasphemies that his listeners would leave the room for fear of becoming collateral damage in the resultant outbreak of divine wrath. And as if to live up to the accusations levelled at him by his wife’s family, from then on he gave himself up full-time to the life of a rambling blues musician, never staying in one place for long and devoting himself to wine, women and song. Though in his case that meant Bourbon whiskey – and, by all accounts, plenty of it.
He was no more restrained in his appetite for women. As his one-time travelling companion Johnny Shines put it, ‘Sometimes he was too forward, Even men’s wives were fair game to him.’ In the world in which Johnson moved that was often not a wise move. The patrons of the juke joints and other places where bluesmen plied their trade were, shall we say, not known for refinement, and violence was routine. In this milieu, setting your sights on the wrong woman was liable to land you in bad trouble. As Johnson found out, one summer Saturday night in 1938 while playing in a juke joint at a place called Three Forks just outside Greenwood, Mississippi.
Even for him, he was sailing particularly close to the wind that night. Since arriving in Greenwood a few weeks previously he had started an affair with a married woman, and that woman’s husband, Ralph Davis, worked weekend nights as a barman in the juke. Whether Johnson was blissfully ignorant of the fact that Davis had found out about the affair, or whether he simply didn’t care, we shall never know. What he certainly didn’t know was that Davis slipped something into his whiskey.
According to the blues singer David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, who was there, this was a home-made poison derived from mothballs, known in the rural South as passagreen. Although it could make the victim feel very ill, causing disorientation, nausea and vomiting, passagreen wasn’t usually fatal, and Davis’ intention wasn’t to kill Johnson, only to give him a scare and warn him off. But shortly before he’d come to Greenwood, Johnson’s half-sister Carrie had persuaded him to see a doctor in Memphis about abdominal pains he’d been suffering from, and the doctor had diagnosed an ulcer. The poison caused that ulcer to haemorrhage. After lingering for two days with no medical attention, in terrible pain and vomiting blood, Robert Johnson died in the early hours of the Tuesday morning, 16 August, 1938, aged twenty-seven.
There was no investigation into his death. Nobody in authority in 1930s Mississippi was about to bother with looking into the murder of an itinerant black musician.
Nowadays Robert Johnson, the obscure wandering busker and bar-room player who had just one minor hit in his lifetime, is a cultural icon. His face has appeared on a postage stamp. A President of the United States (no prizes for guessing which one) once publicly joined in with one of his songs. Many musicians have cited him as an inspiration and influence, Eric Clapton still foremost among them – in 2004 he released an entire album of Johnson’s songs. He was an early inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a formative influence on rock music.
But wait, I hear you say, how can the music made by one man with an acoustic guitar sound much like rock and roll?
There is a rhythm, such a basic building block of electric blues and rock and roll that you are bound to have heard it and probably take it for granted. It is the rhythm heard in various forms on (for example) Elmore James’ Dust My Broom, Buddy Holly’s That’ll Be the Day, Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode and almost any record you care to mention by Status Quo. It’s usually called the shuffle, or sometimes the walking bass.
That name reflects its origin in the left hand playing (that is, the bass notes) of boogie-woogie pianists. Robert Johnson was, as far as is known, the first to transcribe that rhythm to the guitar, and it appears on several of his records, such as that future blues standard Sweet Home Chicago. Though the first record to feature it was Lead Pencil Blues, recorded by Johnnie Temple two years before Johnson went into a studio, Temple readily admitted that he’d learned it from Johnson. Without Robert Johnson there would still have been rock and roll, bur it might not have sounded quite the same.
Oh, and what about That Legend, the one about the crossroads? You may have noticed that I’ve given it pretty short shrift. That’s because I consider it to be just that, a legend that has been blown up out of all proportion – there are at least three places in Mississippi that are touted to credulous tourists as The Crossroads. And also because a proper exploration of its origins in Afro-American folklore and how it became associated with Robert Johnson would probably be enough for a blog of its own, and this one is quite long enough as it is.
Johnson does seem to have had a remarkable gift for music (Johnny Shines remembered how he could hear a piece of music, without even apparently paying it much attention, and later play it note perfect), but there’s no need to assume a supernatural origin for it. And the photographs, three of them now, show that he (like Jimi Herndrix) had large hands and very long fingers. Somebody brought things nicely down to earth in the comments on a YouTube posting of one of Johnson’s records that I listened to recently, replying to yet another assertion (yawn…) that he had got to be so good by selling his soul to the Devil with just two words. ‘He practised.’
You do write these blogs so well, Richard. This one is the best written and most engrossing take on a musician that I’ve read in ages.
I have the Complete Recordings. I bought them some years back, not because of my own journeying into blues, but because somebody who did more than my superficial browsing suggested I should. All I can say is that it was one of the best investments I ever made. It’s odd. Some of the pieces slap you in the face, but some just seem to drift by, until a day or so later you find yourself singing along (mentally, I’m pleased to say) and wondering where that came from.
I do stop and wonder sometimes, just how much my reactions to musicians like Johnson have been influenced by having listened to so many “blues interpreters” first, especially white, western players. I wonder how I’d react to Robert Johnson if I hadn’t heard Rory Gallagher before him. For me, that’s an intriguing question, even if ultimately it’s a pointless question.
Cream, and Eric Clapton have featured in my musical past quite extensively; it would be daft to deny it. But I find it hard to listen to Clapton these days, which is both sad and annoying. I don’t subscribe to the school that his music is plain bad*, but he comes across as such an awful example of humanity that it taints everything for me.
*I came across this comment on Clapton a while back: “Clapton’s career was essentially built on raping Blues music; copying, watering-down, and re-packaging it for a white audience and although he cites black Blues artists as his influences, his opinions about black people were (and probably still are) very much racist.”
Thank you, Ath. Your assessment of my efforts in very pleasing. I did worry that it might be too long, but there are so many interesting facets to the subject, and I didn’t want to leave any of them out. Also, I didn’t know that there was anyone in my potential readership who actually knew and liked Johnson’s music.
I came to the blues by a very similar route, in my case via the Stones, John Mayall, Eric Clapton and Peter Green, and it took me a while to get acclimatised to the undiluted real thing. Those who accuse such people of ‘raping’ the blues overlook that it is principally because of these rapists (especially the Stones) that there is a National Museum of the Blues in St Louis, that a president of the USA hosted a celebration of the blues in the White House, and that many an ageing blues musician got a nice financial cushion for his old age. White Americans were almost wholly ignorant of the blues, and by the late sixties most black people regarded it as old-fashioned and a bit Uncle Tom. Sonny Boy Williamson may have been dismissive back in the sixties (‘These white kids want to play the blues so bad. And they do.’), but those who were still around to benefit (he wasn’t) were grateful enough.
Hmm, yes, Eric Clapton. You wrote a blog about this nice art / nasty person dilemma, did you not? For me, EC come across as quite modest and thoughtful when he’s talking about himself or music, but on just about any other subject, oh dear… But I can’t get away from the fact that his playing on that 1966 John Mayall album, as I’ve said before, still sends shivers up my spine. Sad that he hit his peak at the age of twenty-one. For me, anyway.
(Just looked him up, and discovered that, apart from his work on drug dependency, he supports Amnesty International and the Prince’s Trust. Real people can be quite complicated.)
Much of the stuff in this blog came from two books, both of which I heartily recommend to anyone who’s interested in Robert Johnson. Up Jumped the Devil, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow, is the fruit of half a century of research by both authors and is as close to a definitive biography as we’re likely to get, while Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues takes a wider perspective and is quite fascinating on the history of the blues and the gulf between the perceptions of it by white fans and by its original perpetrators and audience.
I wouldn’t want to make this an Eric Clapton debate, but it seems to me that there’s a huge divide between acknowledging an error, and expressing remorse for it. Clapton clearly sees himself as having made mistakes, especially the outburst on stage in Birmingham in 1976, but although I’ve seen numerous purported apologies from him, they all amount to explanations and excuses: it was the drugs, it was the alcohol (I’m not to blame, I’m no racist even if it looked that way). In any case, he appears to have been absorbed into the insane conspiracy world of anti-vaxxers for the last 18 months, including providing funds for several groups.
And yet, I can’t bring myself to say that his playing was anything other than astonishing, especially in the early years.
Yes, the point about how we come to the blues. That’s really what I meant when I said the question is intriguing but ultimately pointless. It was something that struck me as I listened to some of Johnson’s music. Some of it could (almost) have been recorded yesterday and there are echoes everywhere from the Yardbirds, through Status Quo, all the way to Dr Feelgood – and beyond. Sometimes though, I’m floundering with sounds and musical choices that are as alien as Mongolian throat singing.
But how else could I come to the blues? If I could change my skin colour, cross the Atlantic, and travel back a hundred years would that be the right way? I can’t look at a painting by Giotto and somehow ignore the intervening seven centuries of art, or read a Sherlock Holmes story as a late-Victorian subscriber to the Strand Magazine. So, a big ‘thank you’ to all those early blues fans and interpreters.
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