Escaping the Delta (22 page)

Johnny Shines once said that he was surprised by how powerful Johnson sounded on record, because he had never thought of him as having such a full, strong voice.
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Shines, like Charley Patton, Son House, or Howlin' Wolf, had a huge voice, and he took pride in the fact that he could be heard over all the crowd noise in the joints, just as the Kansas City “blues shouters” would take pride in their ability to sing over a full band of horn players. Johnson sounded strained and a bit thin when he tried for that kind of volume, but the demands of recording were utterly different. Here, there was no need for a voice that was louder than a guitar—in fact, that would only create problems in the balance. What was needed was a voice that matched the instrument, and on “Cross Road” the match is just about perfect.

Johnson was singing hard, and one can hear him pushing, but that just makes him sound more impassioned. Meanwhile, the slide acts as an equal partner rather than an accompaniment, answering back with
the same sort of strained intensity. Both reinforce the gritty imagery of the song lyric, conveying the desperate loneliness that is the flip side of a traveler's freedom: It is nightfall, and Johnson is stuck out at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, with no one to help him, and nowhere to go in any case—the cars are passing him by, and he has no sweet woman waiting “to love and feel [his] care.” He falls on his knees and prays to the Lord above, but there is no reason to hope that his prayers will be answered, and he ends the song as lost as he began it: “I'm standing at the crossroad, babe, and I believe I'm sinking down.”

This is both a deeply personal testament and theater of the highest order, and it is odd to note that the perfect ending was accidental. Johnson had planned to sing at least one more verse, presumably the same one with which he finished take one, and he can be heard preparing to go into it before the engineer must have signaled that he was out of time. Poetically, it was a fortunate accident.

“Cross Road Blues” was an ideal choice to take the mood back to the Delta, and that is where Johnson remained for the four songs that would complete his first recording trip. The fact that these songs were tacked on at the end shows that they were not the ones on which he had pinned his hopes for commercial success. Their style was already considered old-fashioned, and no one could have imagined how fresh and exciting this approach would sound to urban audiences when Muddy Waters revived it a dozen years later, souped up with a blast of electric power.

In large part due to the influence of Waters and his generation of Chicago-based Mississippi expatriates, this is the sound most people mean today when they say “Delta blues,” but there is nothing to suggest that more than a good-sized handful of the region's musicians ever played it. Indeed, many writers have traced the whole style back to one large farm, Dockery's, and to one man, Charley Patton. Of course, the story is more complex than that. Patton's influence was important, but to treat him as the sole root of the hard Delta sound ignores the contributions of other musicians, and especially of Son House, who was mentor to both Waters and Johnson.

Trying to pinpoint the source of the Delta sound is a supremely iffy
business, but a few generalizations seem safe. The earlier black rural guitarists, whose work would be reshaped by the first blues players, appear to have played in more or less the same style throughout the South, and regional differences actually became more rather than less marked in the early decades of the twentieth century. The older style, which is echoed in the work of Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Elizabeth Cotten, and white players like Sam McGee, was based in part on banjo styles, blended with the basic guitar techniques taught in early instruction manuals. Such manuals usually started the beginner off with a simple “open tuning” piece, “Spanish Fandango,” then went on to show how one could pick the melody of a popular song—“The Blue Bells of Scotland” was typical—on the treble strings, while keeping a simple one-two accompaniment pattern in the bass. In the eastern states, this evolved into the complex ragtime styles of Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell, and the Reverend Gary Davis. In other areas, it never reached those heights, but still remained a basic underpinning of rural playing techniques.

Sometime in the early twentieth century, a group of Delta guitarists took a dramatic turn toward a tougher-sounding, more rhythm-oriented approach. I do not want to join the legions of writers who have gone out on shaky limbs in search of the roots of the Delta style (the metaphor is consciously tortured), but by the early days of recording there were players in the region whose command of complex polyrhythms was unique for rural musicians—or indeed for any American musicians outside New Orleans. The proximity to New Orleans, and hence to the Caribbean, was likely a contributing factor. The fact that the area had a substantial black majority was certainly another. The fact that the Delta was largely settled only around the turn of the twentieth century, and was thus full of energetic young “pioneers,” made it fertile soil for music that might have been considered barbaric in older, more established communities. There is also the “fife and drum” music of the east Mississippi hill country, which takes its name and basic instruments from military bands, but sounds as purely African as anything in the United States. While this music is quite different from anything we call Delta blues, a lot of the Delta pioneers came out of these hills, so it is certainly relevant.

One way or another, the Delta produced the most rhythmically expert musicians in the blues genre, and Charley Patton was the defining master of this strain. Unfortunately, the brilliance and variety of his recordings has led some historians to list artists like Tommy Johnson and Son House as pure Patton disciples, as if that explained all that was great in their music. In House's case, this is demonstrably ridiculous. He certainly admired Patton, and played some Patton pieces, but the slide style for which he is most famous, and which was what both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters were most struck by in his playing, bears virtually no stamp of Patton's influence. When this slide work was combined with Patton's rhythmic innovations, then matched with the amazing depth and power of House's voice, the result was awe-inspiring. And that is just to judge from a handful of miserably worn 78s, a rather low-key recording for the Library of Congress, and some records and films made after House's “rediscovery” in the 1960s. Muddy Waters would call him “the best we had,” and testified that “to my ideas he never did sound so good on record as he did when you heard him.”
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Johnson had idolized House in his youth, and House's bottleneck technique was almost certainly the first virtuoso guitar style he mastered. He had this sound in his bones, and played it with the ease and assurance of many years' practice—and yet, he must have been conscious that it had brought House no fortune or fame outside the small area around Robinsonville. House had recorded only once, and though four records were released, they had no success whatsoever. (Today, they are so rare that only one copy of “Preachin' the Blues” is known to exist, and one of the other records has never been found.) In the commercial music market of 1936, this was archaic, countrified material, and from a professional point of view, it is a bit surprising that Johnson recorded any of it. This was the end of the session, though, and since he clearly enjoyed this sort of music, the producers may have figured that such songs were good enough for B-sides, and that they might even sell a few extra records to some old folks.

Johnson had proved his debt to House in the slide work of “Cross Road Blues,” and for his next selection he chose a song he had learned directly from his mentor, “
Walkin' Blues
.” House had recorded a
song with this title six years earlier—though it was not released until the 1980s—and another of his records, “My Black Mama,” featured the guitar arrangement and one of the verses Johnson used. While it is commonly said that Johnson's record combines these two earlier songs, there is no reason to think that he had heard House's records, and House sang these lyrics over different arrangements on different days, mixing and matching according to his mood and memory.
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At juke-joint gigs, a song might last for fifteen or twenty minutes, and which of House's grab bag of verses happened to be captured on a three-minute record was largely a matter of chance. The record titles simply reflect which verses House sang first on each occasion.

Johnson's “Walkin' Blues” is likewise made up of unconnected, floating verses, and is probably a similarly happenstance occurrence—if he had done a second take, there is no reason to think he would have sung more than a couple of the same verses. Some of his lyrics were learned from House, but others may well have been his own creations or assembled from other sources. The last verse, for example, had been recorded eight years earlier by Lemon Jefferson, and its reference to “Elgin movements”—from ads for the Elgin watch company—had been common among black entertainers for at least a quarter century.
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Johnson's debt to House is clear in his vocal approach, which is rougher and stronger than on his more commercial sides. Nonetheless, his record's strengths are quite different, and it would be wrong to class it as simply an expert imitation. When he copied the inflections of urban stars, Johnson sometimes sounds forced or derivative, but he had been playing House's music for years and it fits him like well-worn work clothes. He did not have House's awesome power as a singer, and had he been limited by Paramount's low-fi recording techniques, as House was, his record might come off a rather pale second. Given the advantage of good fidelity, his guitar sounds fuller and warmer than House's, and his vocals show more dynamic variation. He mixes a conversational flavor with the Delta growl, and adds some well-placed falsetto. All in all, it is an excellent tribute by a student who had learned his lessons well, then applied some personal touches to make the song his own.

Johnson would reach back still further for his next number: “
Last Fair Deal Gone Down
” is an anomaly in his repertoire, by far the most “country” piece he recorded. Its basic form, a first line repeated three times followed by a final rhyming line, predated the standard blues pattern and, though it likely originated with black players, by the early days of rural recording it was already more common with white than black musicians, except in gospel songs. (Though this may just reflect the fact that it was considered a hillbilly rather than a blues style, and thus tended to be recorded by artists stereotyped in that category.) Johnson's variant is related to the hillbilly song popularized by Fiddlin' John Carson as “Don't Let Your Deal Go Down,” and also to a work song recorded in Mississippi's Parchman prison farm, and titled “It Makes a Long Time Man Feel Bad.” Whether it started out as a dance tune or a work song is impossible to say, and the distinction is probably meaningless: Songs constantly moved back and forth, sung along with a fiddle breakdown at a country dance, then more slowly and in a different rhythm to match the pace of the next morning's plowing or chopping.

As if to emphasize this overlap and interchange, and the way it affected virtually all rural music, Johnson's guitar part on “Last Fair Deal” is very similar to the one Charley Patton had played on “You Gonna Need Somebody When You Die,” a gospel preaching record he made back in 1929. This was one of Patton's less imaginative arrangements, and may just represent the standard way of playing this sort of tune among older Delta musicians, but both have a similarly solid bass, broken by the same repetitive high slide notes, though Patton's playing on the whole is more melodic.

It is a little hard to see what Johnson is after here. Is the fast pace of his arrangement inspired by fiddle hoedowns, or by the chugging engines of the Gulf and Island Railroad? Is he consciously trying to find new things to do with an old tune, or is this a stock arrangement that medicine-show guitarists were performing before he was born? In any case, he is obviously having fun. There is none of the tortured passion he brought to other slide tunes, but instead a set of showy inflections, both in his singing and—toward the end of the song—on guitar.
If I wanted to indulge in pure speculation, I would guess that he sang this on the streets to amuse white listeners, providing them with an upbeat exaggeration of the levee work songs. He sings lines like “My captain's so mean on me” with a good deal more humor than anger, and though the verses look pained on paper, the whole effect is broadly theatrical rather than deep or personal.

In the hands of a less able performer, it would also be pretty dull. This sort of song was usually played in the light country-dance style of Mississippi John Hurt or Frank Stokes. By contrast, Johnson's arrangement is a steady, damped bass chug, punctuated by a repetitive slide on the two top strings, which he breaks only halfway through the song, abandoning the slide for some punchily plucked riffs and then using harmonics to imitate the sound of a bell. It is the sort of arrangement that makes his imitators tend to sound flat and monotonous, a skeleton of instrumental work that only comes alive because it supports the muscle and sinew of his voice.

Johnson finished these first sessions with two of his wildest and most exciting performances. The first, “
Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)
,” was another Son House piece, and in its original form had been House's farewell to an earlier career as a Baptist minister. Judging by the fervor of his blues performances, House must have been a fiery and compelling preacher, but one day he heard a bottleneck guitarist on the street and could not resist the temptation to make that sound for himself. On his record “Preaching the Blues,” he described the result: “Up in my room, I bowed down to pray/Say, the blues come along and it blowed my praying away.” The change of lifestyle brought dire consequences: Within two years of becoming a musician, House had shot and killed a man and was in Parchman penitentiary. He was released a year later, just in time to make the recording trip with Patton and Willie Brown, and he turned his story into a passionate, seriocomic masterpiece, mixing gospel imagery with bitter satire, and ending with a blasphemous invitation: “I'm going to preach these blues, and choose my seat, and sit down./When the spirit comes, sisters, I want you to jump straight up and down.”