Escaping the Delta

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

F
OR 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 little starter, then your spark plug will give me fire.” The song had come home, back to where it was good fun rather than a historical artifact.

For me, on that first visit, this was a huge part of the Delta's appeal. Mississippi had made hardly any attempt to preserve its musical past, and where the blues had survived, it had survived naturally, kept alive by local folks who still liked to dance to the old rhythms. It had not been embalmed or placed under glass, turned into a tourist attraction like Beale Street in Memphis or the French Quarter in New Orleans. In Clarksdale, the tourist brochures made no mention of places like the Blue Diamond Lounge, where we went later that night. Even though there was a fairly popular local blues band playing, our small group included the only white faces in the room.

The Blue Diamond was apparently the main blues club in Clarksdale, a small, crowded shack down a dark street, in which a few pool players tried to line up shots without getting bumped by the dancers. The front window was boarded up, and though it had a hole cut in it for a noisy electric fan, the atmosphere was murky with cigarette smoke. Aside from the fan, the refrigerated beer and the amplified band, the Blue Diamond seemed little removed from the rural juke joints of the 1930s: small and hot, smelling of sweat and cheap alcohol, the bands playing blues, and couples rubbing against each other in drunken, snaky dances that were rawly, exuberantly sexual.

As a music reporter, I considered all of this grist for my mill, and my pleasure was only increased by the fact that the local white people I met—as well as the more “respectable” black citizens—could be relied on to give dire warnings about the dangers of clubs like the Blue Diamond, or of hanging out at the sidewalk barbecue joint where we went later that night, or of staying at the Riverside Hotel, which I made my headquarters on several later visits to the region. The Riverside was a squat, sprawling building that had previously been the “colored” hospital, and was where Bessie Smith died in 1937 after a car accident on the road from Memphis. Its proprietor, Miz Hill, recalled seeing Smith at a local theater, though she remembered the glittering gowns and feathered headdresses better than the music. In Miz Hill's
decades running the Riverside, she had been host to much of the local blues scene: John Lee Hooker and Robert Nighthawk had lived there for extended periods, and Ike Turner arrived as a teenager and rehearsed his band in the basement. Miz Hill considered herself Turner's surrogate mother, and after his Kings of Rhythm had their first hit with “Rocket 88,” she sewed the number onto ties for all his band members. By the time I got there, the Riverside's only resident musician was a young white guy who worked at a nearby record store, but the place still had plenty of local flavor. The other guests were all black Mississippians, divided pretty evenly between muscular men renting by the month and seductively dressed women renting by the hour.

I stayed for a couple of weeks, driving around the Delta to research articles on “the heartland of the blues.” In Greenville, I spent an afternoon at the Playboy Club, sitting with its owner, Booba Barnes, a raw blues singer and guitarist who had modeled himself on Howlin' Wolf. Barnes was pleasant and hospitable, but obviously had heard all my questions before. Still, he had nothing better to do that afternoon, so he sat with me at a front table for a couple of hours, eating peanuts and drinking Coca-Cola. The Playboy was bigger than the Blue Diamond, but the general idea was the same. Everything was purely functional: a dozen tables, a jury-rigged stage with a cheap drum kit, a refrigerator for beer, and a jukebox stocked with blues and rap records. On one wall, someone had drawn a Playboy bunny silhouette and lettered the club's name. Outside was another crude sign, with a square hole cut out of the middle of it to make room for a fan.