Escaping the Delta (21 page)

This whispery, programmatic interlude seems to suggest to him that he has been singing too loudly, and his next verse has a new intimacy, phrasing with more attention to the words. In the last line, “Looking for her good friend…,” his voice drops to a murmur for the ending, “…none can be found.” There is one more verse, and then a carefully played coda brings the song to a close.

It is an amazing achievement, and there are reasons why Johnson would have believed it fit the tastes of the current blues world. James's
“Devil Got My Woman” had a structure all its own, abandoning any semblance of a standard progression for a loose, hypnotically repetitive form that puts the full burden of its magic and power on James's unique abilities as a singer. Listening to the two records back-to-back, it is clear that Johnson did not yet have anything like the kind of vocal control he would have needed to cover James's work. Instead of trying, and producing a poor substitute—as Johnnie Temple had done the previous year with “The Evil Devil Blues”—he found a brilliant solution, and one that could theoretically have produced a substantial hit.

Tampa Red was the most influential and celebrated slide player in the Race market and, along with his rollicking hokum numbers, he also recorded beautiful, slow blues that showed off his impeccable tone and voicelike phrasing. The first of these to make a major impression seems to have been “Things 'Bout Coming My Way,” a song that was probably inspired by the success of the Mississippi Sheiks' “Sitting On Top of the World.”
¹⁰
Red's song was covered by several other artists, and he went on to cut a “Things 'Bout Coming My Way No. 2,” as well as a haunting instrumental version of the tune. The melody of “Come On in My Kitchen” was based on this song, and Johnson's playing suggests a clear debt to Red's work.

This was the antithesis of the Delta slide style, which depended on a hard, slashing attack that could cut through crowd noise. Red's approach was a slide equivalent to Leroy Carr's crooning, a modernism dependent on the intimacy of the recording process and the different performance demands of urban venues. To bridge the gap between this popular style and James's obscure masterpiece was a stretch that required someone with Johnson's genius as an adapter and synthesizer.
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Since Tampa Red was a major star, and his theme had been covered just the previous year by Kokomo Arnold, Johnson could well have felt this was potential hit material—an already successful tune, augmented by an injection of eerie Jamesian soul and that theatrical touch of the howling wind.

If so, the producers did not share his view. Apparently, they could not imagine the blues audience accepting such a quiet, delicate performance, so they rejected the take and instead had Johnson do a hot, upbeat version of the song. He did his best to comply, picking up the
tempo and using some riffs he had prepared for his next number, but clearly his heart was not in it. This second “Come On in My Kitchen” is not a complete failure on its own terms, but it is relatively disorganized and has none of the magic of take one. And I do not think I am simply displaying my own prejudices when I assume the producers pushed Johnson into changing his approach. He had obviously put so much care into the original arrangement, and so much of it was lost in the retake, that he must have been under orders rather than following his own commercial instincts. Indeed, it is quite possible that the passionate energy of his delivery on take two—its main saving grace—comes from irritation at having his masterpiece dismissed so cavalierly.

Whatever the interaction in the studio, the end result was that take two was chosen for release, and take one surfaced only in 1961. Since then, it has been so generally accepted as the canonical version that when I read the discographical entry saying that it was left unissued, I at first assumed that this was a typographical error. There could be no better example of the differing aesthetics of 1930s blues producers and modern-day fans—or of the way Johnson's work highlights these differences.

There are also points of agreement, though, and Johnson's next selection would please everybody. “
Terraplane Blues
” was his one hit, albeit a modest one by the standards of 1937's busy blues market. It would be chosen as his first release, and considerably increased his prestige with Mississippi music fans.

Once again, the song is an adept combination of Delta styles and hot contemporary trends. The Delta can be heard in Johnson's intricate rhythmic juxtapositions, while the basic structure is taken from “Milk Cow Blues,” and the lyric is a typical example of the sort of songs being churned out by the Chicago hit factories. Big Bill Broonzy famously explained the formula for writing such lyrics:

What Broonzy did not mention is that, at least in the 1930s, it was extremely helpful if all the things you did with the chosen object could be understood as double-entendre descriptions of sexual acts. Such “party blues” were ubiquitous, sung by almost everyone in the field, but the most prolific master of the form was Bo Carter. Along with being a sometime member of the Mississippi Sheiks, Carter was probably the most popular Mississippian recording on his own in this decade, and his song titles are a comic catalog of phallic objects—“Banana in your Fruit Basket,” “Pin in Your Cushion,” “Ram Rod Daddy,” “Cigarette Blues,” “Please Warm My Wiener”—and other imaginative metaphors: “She's Your Cook, but She Burns My Bread Sometimes,” “Squeeze Your Orange,” and “Pussy Cat Blues.”

Johnson seems to have had relatively little interest in this sort of “naughty” comedy, but his next two songs show that he could handle the style if necessary, and the success of “Terraplane”—in which the mechanical components of an automobile substitute for various body parts—showed the wisdom of making the attempt. That said, the lyrical games can only get partial credit for the song's popularity, since they are so utterly subsumed in Johnson's performance. His singing draws on two of his favorite models, Kokomo Arnold and Peetie Wheatstraw: Arnold's falsetto “plee-ease” shows up in a couple of verses, while Wheatstraw's “ooo-well” yodel is quoted in verse two. These were famous mannerisms, and Johnson must have been aware that he was paying homage, but another borrowing may have been unconcious, and shows how deeply he had assimilated the styles of his heroes: In two verses, he sings the phrase “oo-ooh, since I've been gone” with exactly the same inflections that Wheatstraw had used to sing the same phrase in his “Police Station Blues.”

Johnson carefully varies his approach from verse to verse, adding a new phrasing pattern here, a neatly placed rhythmic break there, and using an Arnold-style bridge verse in the middle. Since there is only
one take it is impossible to say how fixed this pattern was, but all the verses fit the car theme, and the interplay between voice and guitar is so tight that he must have worked much of it out in advance. The most distinctive touch is the way he keeps his slide in reserve, employing it only for emphasis at key moments. Any other player would have played slide riffs to punctuate the verses, but instead he plays fast, high figures with his bare fingers, and it is easy to forget he even has a slide until he breaks off the rhythm and hits one vibrating, heart-stopping note—on a bass string, at that—before singing the final phrase. When he plays a quick set of slide triplets—the same passage he used throughout “Ramblin' on My Mind”—near the end of the bridge verse, it comes as a startling surprise rather than an expected affectation.

All in all, “Terraplane” was the obvious choice for a single out of that first day's recording, and it would have been a fine dramatic finish if Johnson had stopped there. Instead, he finished the session with “
Phonograph Blues
,” another double-entendre composition with lines like “We played it on the sofa, we played it 'side the wall/My needles have got rusty and it will not play at all,” balanced by a few romantically lonely phrases that would have been better suited to something like “Kind Hearted Woman.” It was well played and sung, but had nothing to set it apart from other Johnson efforts, and ARC did not bother to issue it.

Once again, though, the song is interesting for what it reveals about Johnson's compositional style. Melodically, “Phonograph” is very similar to “Terraplane,” including the central bridge verse, and he could easily have sung it over the same guitar part. Instead, he sang the first take over the accompaniment he had used for “Kind Hearted Woman,” and the second take over the accompaniment he had used for “I Believe I'll Dust My Broom.” The reason for switching arrangements in midstream seems to have been that, as with “Kind Hearted Woman,” his original take threatened to run over the three-minute limit. His solution was to recut the song with a faster arrangement that would let him get all the verses in, even though this meant sacrificing the varied melody of the bridge verse and just singing it like all the others—apparently he had not worked out an appropriate variation to fit the “Dust My Broom” arrangement.

The ease with which Johnson made this transition suggests that his accompaniments on some of the other songs may well have been less fixed than we imagine. We have only the records, and since each song was recorded with a particular arrangement it is natural for us to think of them as a unit, but Johnson obviously had some stock arrangements that he used over and over. In a similar way, Josh White had novel and interesting arrangements for most of his own songs, but when the ARC producers handed him a recent hit to cover he would just sing it over a stock twelve-bar pattern. Johnson had several of these stock patterns, and it is probable that while we think of “Rambling on My Mind” as having one accompaniment and “When You Got a Good Friend” another—to choose two songs with virtually identical vocal melodies—Johnson would have used either song's accompaniment interchangeably for the other. Or, to consider a more interesting example: When Elmore James played the “Ramblin' on My Mind” arrangement to accompany the “Dust My Broom” lyric, he may just have been imitating what he had heard Johnson do on a different day.

The one other thing worth noting about “Phonograph Blues” is that, on both takes, Johnson's vocals and guitar work sound surer than they had on “Kind Hearted Woman” or “Dust My Broom.” Finishing his first session, he had relaxed into the process. Any microphone fright was gone, and by now he could be confident that the producers were happy and that he really was going to see his name on a record label and hear his voice wailing from the jukeboxes back home.

A
FTER TWO DAYS OFF
, J
OHNSON RETURNED TO THE HOTEL ROOM
studio on Thursday, November 26, but recorded only one song. Perhaps this is because the group before him, the Chuck Wagon Gang, took up more time than expected, or because the Mexican duo that recorded right after him needed to get in and finish their recordings.
¹
In any case, he made up for it by cutting another seven songs on Friday, and these two sessions would be quite different from Monday's, or from the further recordings he made seven months later. Apparently, Monday's session had used up most of the material he had prepared for his recording debut, and he was now cast back on his more general repertoire. Thus, while on Monday he had stuck to the current commercial trends, Thursday and Friday found him playing a more varied range of material, and reaching back to the countrified styles he had heard growing up in Memphis and the Delta.

The song he recorded on Thursday, “
32-20 Blues
,” was the closest thing he had yet done to a straight cover of a previous record. While one can trace the roots of the songs he had played on Monday, he had made significant changes to all of them and they can rightly be considered original compositions. “32-20,” though, is simply a guitar version of Skip James's piano-accompanied “22-20 Blues,” and even the difference in caliber does not count as an alteration, since James actually sang “32-20” in his early verses. Just as James had revealed his debt to Roosevelt Sykes's “44 Blues” by slipping back to the .44 caliber
in his last verse, Johnson makes a similar slipup: James sang that, if his baby did not come when he sent for her, “all the doctors in Wisconsin” would not be able to help her, and though Johnson changes the doctors' location to Hot Springs, he messes up in the eighth verse and sings “Wisconsin.”
²
Obviously, he was still hearing the James version in his head and had not completely assimilated his changes to it.

Johnson's appreciation for James's work was unusual, to say the least. James was the ultimate prophet without honor in his country, a unique genius whose work bore little resemblance to that of the players around him, and whose records made few concessions to any taste but his own. His singing was the eeriest, most haunting sound in early blues, his guitar accompaniments used a rare minor-key tuning and followed few standard blues patterns, and his piano playing verged on anarchy, while brilliantly fitting whatever he chose to sing. He seems to have confined his public performances almost entirely to local joints around Bentonia, a small town just south of the Delta, and his records hardly sold at all. They are among the rarest prewar 78s, and Gayle Dean Wardlow, a Mississippian who spent years going door to door in search of such records, writes that of six he finally managed to dig up, none were found in Mississippi.
³

While Johnson played a few other pieces adapted from Mississippi artists who had made recordings, most notably Son House, in general these seem to have been songs he learned in his youth and picked up at live performances. Aside from James's work, almost all the records he emulated were by top hit makers. Because of this, I would read a good deal into his attraction to James. There are two ways to interpret this attraction, and they are by no means mutually exclusive. One is that Johnson heard a unique soulfulness, and a self-conscious artistry on James's records, and was attempting to emulate these characteristics. The other is that he heard something in them that he was already feeling and trying to attain in his own work, and gravitated to James as a soul mate. Either way, his connection to James is basic to any understanding of Johnson's deeper material, and to the way his songs still capture the imagination of later generations of listeners.

Most present-day critics, asked to name Johnson's greatest works, would put James-derived songs, “Hell Hound on My Trail” and “Come
On in My Kitchen,” near the very top of the list, in both cases because of the haunting, hypnotic character of the performances and the completeness with which Johnson has conceived them as works of art, designed to reach deep inside the listener. Though it is a stereotype of blues fandom to say that such profound artistry is typical of the genre, the number of recordings that succeed in having anything like this strong an effect is vanishingly small. Most of even the most despairing blues recordings are soulful in the way that country music is soulful—they speak to people in their own language and accent, reminding them of their troubles and assuring them that others are going through the same things. Very few have a musical depth and complexity that transcend the norms of the style, standing alone as finished artworks, the blues equivalent of Ornette Coleman's “Peace” or Picasso's
Guernica
. Frankly, as we saw with “Come On in My Kitchen,” such works were unlikely to get onto records even if the musicians took the time and effort to create them, and still less likely to sell on the commercial blues market.

“32-20 Blues” was not one of James's deepest efforts, and the original recording is most notable for its spiky, staccato piano lines, which Johnson was in no position to duplicate. He did, however, try to capture the flavor of the barrelhouse piano style, using the surprisingly effective trick of simply drumming a steady rhythm on the damped bass strings of his guitar. James got the same effect on some verses, apparently by beating his feet on the floor, but generally avoided playing an even rhythm. This shifting, jagged approach worked on piano but would have been chancy on the quieter guitar, and Johnson's solution is brilliant, allowing him the freedom to capture some of James's spare phrasing, since he is only picking on the treble strings while at the same time keeping the tempo chugging along at a brisk pace.
⁴

It is Johnson's singing, though, that makes the record. He has taken little from James here, aside from the yowled “aww” that begins his sixth verse, and which he uses for quite different effect. Instead, he produces his most imaginative vocal so far, coming up with a different way to present each verse: He sings one low, one high, and in another simply talks the words. The combination of the regular, propulsive rhythm and the conversational, humorous inflections of his delivery
have a clarity and excitement that would have been instantly appealing coming off a jukebox, and it is no surprise that the record company chose this song as his second single.

Back in the studio on Friday, Johnson started off with a performance so unlike his earlier recordings that it might almost be by a different person. Here, for once, we get a taste of his gift for picking up non-blues styles. “
They're Red Hot
” is an odd fusion: On the one hand, the song itself is the sort of upbeat, comic hokum that was about to be repopularized by the Carolina ragtime-blues guitarist Blind Boy Fuller. On the other, the first measure of Johnson's guitar introduction signals a hipper influence, the swing jive sound pioneered by the Mills Brothers and Spirits of Rhythm, which by the mid-1930s was being imitated by hundreds of groups throughout the country.

Most of these groups were never recorded, and certainly no record company was heading to Mississippi in search of a down-home Ink Spots, so it is hard to say just how much of this kind of stuff was being played on Johnson's home turf. However, the same kind of fusion suggested by “They're Red Hot” had been made in a more complete—and far more commercially successful—way just a few months before Johnson's session, by the Harlem Hamfats, the Chicago band fronted by Joe and Charlie McCoy. (This is the same Charlie McCoy who played Italian music with Johnnie Temple. The Chicago-Mississippi connection was always strong, with plenty of visiting in both directions.) The McCoys had been hotshots on the Jackson scene for years before moving north, and it is probably an accident of the recording market that Joe McCoy is the only guitarist from the area who has left evidence that he played in the style Johnson uses on this piece.

The Hamfats mixed Mississippi strings with New Orleans–style horns, and their debut recording, “Oh! Red,” was a major, widely covered hit. How much influence they had on players back in Mississippi, or what black clubgoers in Jackson were listening to in the mid-1930s, cannot be known with any certainty. Still, it seems fair to assume that local musicians were aware of radio stars like the Mills Brothers, that “Oh! Red” made a splash in the area, and that a lot of people who ten years earlier would have been playing like the Mississippi Sheiks were
now adopting jazzier rhythms. Naturally, these changes did not happen overnight—street and barroom players like Johnson were fielding requests for everything from country dance tunes to early blues favorites and pop ballads, depending on the tastes of the customers—but for some young hipsters, the intro to “They're Red Hot” would have been more exciting than any of Johnson's other guitar riffs.

The song itself is a bit more open to question. As far as I know, no jive vocal group had recorded a piece with the ragtime progression Johnson used for “They're Red Hot,” though it is a natural mix and could easily have been covered by a Hamfats-style outfit. Instead, the vast majority of songs in this pattern were recorded by eastern guitarists like Fuller, who played in an intricate fingerpicking style adapted from ragtime piano. That particular brand of virtuoso guitar work had never hit Mississippi, and the one great recording of this chord progression to come out of Johnson's area was the Mississippi Jook Band's “Hittin' the Bottle Stomp,” a romping band number played on piano, guitar, and tambourine. The Jook Band's members were based in Jackson and Hattiesburg, and they made their recording four months before Johnson's, so it is no stretch to imagine that he knew them or groups like them, and at least occasionally worked with similar instrumentation. The sort of rhythmic strumming he does here would make more sense in a band context than it does as a solo style, though for one tune it is effective enough.

Johnson sounds thoroughly comfortable with this uptown approach. His vocal demonstrates a gift for jive comedy that is hardly suggested in his other material, and the guitar intro shows that he had a good handle on the new swing style (though he adds an extra beat that would have tripped up any bandmates). Since no record company was bothering to cut this sort of music in Mississippi, it is hard to say how original his approach was, but the verses he sang are an entertaining grab bag. They mix old-time country lines, like one about a girl so tall she sleeps in the kitchen with her feet in the hall, with trendy hokum: “The monkey and the baboon playing in the grass/The monkey stuck his finger in that old—good Gulf gas!” There is also violent braggadocio—“I'm gonna upset your backbone, put your kidneys to
sleep/I'll do the breakaway on your liver and dare your heart to beat”—in the Southern tradition that runs from Mark Twain to Muddy Waters to rap.

The energy and humor of Johnson's performance, and the ease with which he twists his tongue around the quick stop-time sections, indicates that this was a regular part of his performing repertoire, and he could undoubtedly have come up with a lot more songs in this style if the producers had wanted them. While Johnny Shines has said that Johnson rarely worked with other musicians, the guitar work here is that of a band rhythm man, not a blues picker, and implies that he was somewhat rethinking his approach. Much as this may horrify the hard-core blues crowd, it is possible that if Johnson had lived long enough, he would have put together a commercial radio quartet, found a tenor guitarist to play lead, and devoted the 1940s to playing rhythm chords and singing swing jive.

Such speculations are amusing—and make as much sense as the common notion that he would have ended up an electrified Delta roots musician à la early Muddy Waters or Elmore James—but admittedly it is a bit extreme to base them on a single number, and with his next selection Johnson returned to familiar territory. All too familiar, in fact, since “
Dead Shrimp Blues
” simply recycled the guitar chart he had already used for “Kind Hearted Woman” and “Phonograph Blues.”

The most interesting thing about “Dead Shrimp” is the obscurity of its lyric. Once again, Johnson was taking a common item and weaving it into an erotic image, but it is hard to see how exactly the dead shrimps he invokes relate to the woman who has left him for another man. The one line that makes thorough Freudian sense is, “Hole where I used to fish, you got me posted out,” and that does not solve the larger problem at all. The usual blues scholar gloss is to explain that “shrimp” was slang for prostitute, but this does not in any way fit the way the word appears in Johnson's lyric. (If shrimp are prostitutes, what does he mean by telling his lost girlfriend, “You take my shrimp, baby, you know you turned me down”?) My own interpretation is that shrimp were used as bait, and symbolize what he had that his girlfriend wanted, but now she has had her fill and gone her way, so his
bait is dead. Whatever the meaning, it is not one of his greatest pieces, and the fact that it was released while several better songs remained on the shelf is pretty baffling. My best guess is that, since it was the flip side of “I Believe I'll Dust My Broom,” no one expected it to be played much anyway, but the producers hoped that its odd title might attract a few curious buyers.

Any suggestion that “Dead Shrimp” was weakened by Johnson's use of a stock arrangement is neatly countered on his next selection. The first take of “
Cross Road Blues
” also recalled a previous chart—in this case the one from “Terraplane Blues”—but the result was anything but boring. First of all, on “Cross Road” Johnson makes much greater use of the slide, and while this means that the arrangement lacks some of the tension of “Terraplane,” it is also a good deal more flashy, as well as being the first piece to showcase his command of the rootsy, Son House–derived Delta style. Secondly, the song's lyrics are of an entirely different order, subtly evocative rather than straining for cleverness. Finally, though the first take is strong, by the second he has slowed the piece down, losing most of the resemblance to “Terraplane,” and achieves something of a masterpiece—though, once again, it was the fast take that was chosen for release on 78.