Escaping the Delta (23 page)

Johnson was clearly struck by this song, but he did not share
House's church background, so he completely refocused the lyrical theme. Indeed, it is surprising that he bothered to retain the title, since the only mention he makes of preaching is an encouraging aside to his guitar: “Yes! Preach 'em
now
.” He opens with House's powerful image of the blues coming to him, “walking like a man,” and asking for his hand, but instead of becoming the music's preacher, he becomes its victim: In his lyrics, the blues tears him up inside, and is compared to a shaking chill, heart disease, and a slow death from consumption (tuberculosis). These comparisons were not original—the shaking chill verse was one of House's standbys, and the one comparing blues to heart disease and consumption was from Clara Smith's 1924 hit, “The Blues Ain't Nothin' Else But!”
⁹
—but those who seek references to Johnson's own life in his songs can read the whole story of his wife's death in childbirth and his subsequent lonely rambles in the lines “The blues felled mama's child, tore me all upside down/Travel on, poor Bob, just can't turn you 'round.”

The problem with this interpretation, good as it looks on paper, is that Johnson does not seem particularly caught up in the trials he describes. Where House's song sounded like a tormented personal testament, Johnson's sounds like an enthusiastic display of guitar technique. His singing is fine, but the main thing I hear in it is excitement at the pace he is keeping, and his enthusiasm is more than justified. There is a smooth ease to his playing that recalls not the hard, Delta approach he had adapted from House, but the lilting feel of “Come On in My Kitchen”—only this time jacked up to lightning speed. There have been few guitarists who could play this fast without sacrificing tone, but every note rings clear and gleams like mercury. Then, just as we are getting carried along by the sheer pace of it all, he brings us up short, as he did in “Terraplane,” going to the bass strings and a halting counter-rhythm that makes us stumble and pause, setting up the last line of each verse.

Given the pace and energy of this performance, and the obvious enjoyment Johnson takes in it, the lyric of suffering and disease undergoes a complete metamorphosis. Here he is not going for the anguished passion of “Cross Road.” Instead of being beset by the blues,
when he sings that it is “an aching old heart disease” he sounds as if he is exulting in its power. The listeners may be trapped, but he is in control, and his dialogue is not with demons but with the sparkling guitar riffs: The slide flies up to a new, higher lick, and he smiles: “Do it now.” The old lick comes back, slick as grease. “You gon' do it?” Sure it will. “Tell me all about it.”

Johnson may have been a moody loner, but he loved to travel, and he fills this performance with the exhilaration of a fast car on a new-paved road, or the wind whipping over the roof of a highballing freight train. “I'm acceleratin', oh, oh, drive, oh, oh, drive my blues—I can 'celerate an' I'm gon' drive my blues away.” And then he breaks the rhythm one more time and ends on a humorous downbeat: “Going to the 'stillery, stay out there all day.”
¹⁰

There is one last minor but intriguing mystery about this song: the parenthetic second title. Since the lyrics do not mention the Devil at any point, what does “Up Jumped the Devil” have to do with it? Was it Johnson or the record company who tacked this on? If it was Johnson, it may be that he was coming up with his own name for the Son House tune, that when asked what the song was called, he automatically said “Preachin' Blues,” then realized that he might as well change it and added something like “…or, I don't know…‘Up Jumped the Devil.'” Whoever chose it, the title was far from original. “Up Jumped the Devil” was the name of a popular fiddle tune, and also of a jazz number that had been recorded by a couple of white New Orleans bands in the 1920s. “Preachin' Blues” remained on the shelf for three years, being issued only in 1939 as Johnson's final, posthumous 78 release (on the flip side of “Love in Vain”), and it may be that the producers were trying to piggyback on the popularity of a hot jazz record, or just to spice up an overly churchy song title.

If the religious implications troubled them, they would have had similar problems with Johnson's final selection—and indeed, “
If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day
” remained unreleased until 1961. More likely, though, it was the song's old-fashioned style rather than its lyric that kept it off the 78 market. Another upbeat, driving performance, it was Johnson's version of an older tune that had been
recorded in 1929 by a medicine-show entertainer named Hambone Willie Newbern as “Roll and Tumble Blues.” Johnson had apparently heard Newbern's record, since his guitar work is based closely on Newbern's and there is a high proportion of overlapping lyrics. On both counts, though, Johnson has improved on the original. Newbern was an old-time entertainer who specialized in comic ragtime numbers, and “Roll and Tumble” was his one foray into this sort of deeper, wilder playing. Johnson takes Newbern's basic arrangement, repeats it virtually note for note, then begins to go to work on it. This was clearly the style in which he felt most at home, and as on “Preachin' Blues,” he plays with dazzling precision and control, adding little pauses, rhythmic subtleties, and slide riffs that Newbern could not have negotiated.

The opening verse is one of Johnson's most memorable lyrics. Son House, in “Preachin' the Blues,” had sung “I wish I had me a heaven of my own/Then I'd give all my women a long, long happy home.” It was a sexy verse, the fallen preacher imagining a paradise in which he was surrounded by loving girlfriends and able to take care of all of them. Johnson took this fantasy and turned it on its head: A woman might get into heaven if she did him right, but if she did him wrong he could send her elsewhere without recourse to appeal. “If I had possession over judgment day/The little woman I'm loving wouldn't have no right to pray.”

It is a fearsome verse, but also a pretty funny one, and I imagine the hometown boys would have laughed and repeated the threat to their drinking partners. As he keeps singing, though, piling up verse after verse of painful breakups, Johnson drops the wry twist of that first couplet and begins to sound deadly serious. He loses the angry bravado as well, becoming lonely, upset, and by the end, painfully vulnerable: “Run here, baby, sit down on my knee/I want to tell you all about the way they treated me.” Or maybe I should say attractively vulnerable: Johnson was reputedly in the habit of seeking out older women who would treat him right and take good care of him, and few songs could be more perfectly shaped to achieve this aim. He is angry, hurt, abandoned and mistreated by the bad women; he folds his arms and walks off, murmuring that their day will come, and comforts him
self with his powerful, virtuosic guitar riffs, then ends with that final, childlike appeal. Meanwhile, the men are still laughing, shouting, “Baby, watch out or it's Judgment Day tonight!” Everybody can take the song as they please, and Johnson will get his drinks bought, some money in his pocket, and a warm bed for the night.

J
OHNSON'S FIRST RECORD
, “T
ERRAPLANE
B
LUES” BACKED WITH
“Kind Hearted Woman Blues,” was released early in March of 1937 and quickly turned up on some Mississippi jukeboxes. Honeyboy Edwards recalls seeing Johnson playing on the street in Greenwood just as the record was hitting:

ARC was clearly pleased with the sales, since they released two more records in April and another in May, then brought Johnson back to Texas for a second round of recordings in June.
²
His session on Saturday, June 19, was sandwiched between two by western swing bands, and he cut only three numbers, but on Sunday he was the last artist of the day, and he recorded ten songs.

This time, he was fully prepared. Where the first sessions had found him speeding up and rearranging songs because they were too long to fit on a 78, this time his pieces were perfectly timed for recording, and the alternate takes were virtually identical. The songs were all carefully composed, and he had at least as many as were needed, so this time he recorded no old Delta favorites or songs compiled on the spot out of other people's verses. It has sometimes been said that Johnson carried a little notebook with him and wrote lyrics in it, though other people recalled him as virtually illiterate. If he did not write down his songs, he had an extraordinary facility for making up and remembering cohesive compositions. In any case, in the seven months since his studio debut, he had devoted a lot of attention to composing, and had also become a noticeably more polished and professional recording artist.

Judging by his new lyrics, he had also become a good deal more somber and introspective. The second sessions included very little upbeat material, no “Sweet Home Chicago” and certainly nothing like “They're Red Hot.” There were some seductive invitations, and some songs patterned on current hit formulas, but he often followed the model of “Cross Road Blues,” limning the dark wanderings of a traveler in an unfriendly world.

Looked at one way, “
Stones in My Passway
” was a schizophrenic attempt to follow this path and at the same time make “Terraplane II, the Wreck.” Johnson revisits the guitar arrangement of his hit, but this time instead of taking off on an auto-erotic romp, he finds stones blocking his path, enemies who have betrayed him, and a general misery that subsumes even his few pleasures: “I have a bird to whistle and I have a bird to sing/I got a woman that I'm lovin', boy, but she don't mean a thing.”

There are at least two ways to hear this song. If one listens to it with “Terraplane” echoing in one's ears, it can seem less than satisfactory. The propulsive rhythm, with the bass-string slide breaking it up for final phrases, has us zooming off down the highway, while Johnson is singing, “I got stones in my passway and my road seems dark as night.” The combination makes no sense, and it is tempting to assume that he simply needed another “Terraplane,” and grabbed a handy lyric
that should have been used elsewhere. By the bridge verse, where he is once again recycling Arnold's falsetto “plee-ease,” the imitation has gone too far, and it becomes ridiculous when he finishes off with a verse that simply repeats a pair of “Terraplane” phrases—“please don't block the road” rhyming with “I'm booked and I've got to go.”

Looked at another way, Johnson has taken what at his first session was a comic double-entendre number and turned it into something subtler and more complex. The bass slide provides a stinging pause for lines that drive each verse home with raw directness. “I have pains in my heart”—the slide hits like a stroke—“they have taken my appetite.” He is singing better than ever, and has also developed as a writer. There is a cohesiveness to his better lyrics, apparent since “Kind Hearted Woman,” and in songs like “Stones in My Passway” there is also what later writers have celebrated as a self-conscious artistry, a style that has provoked comparisons to European poets rather than blues singers. Such comparisons are meant to elevate his stature in the literary world, but it should be emphasized that even his finest passages have their analogues in the work of his peers. While the rich language of the Bible permeated African-American culture, and it should be no surprise that the great blues writers occasionally sound like cousins of the Elizabethans, it is equally important to see blues as a poetic form with its own strengths. It is also vital to remember that, although a blues lyric on paper may look like formal poetry, the comparison is not necessarily a compliment. This was a performed art, for a largely illiterate audience, and the words on paper could be completely transformed by a twist of the singer's delivery in ways that no reader would expect.

Johnson's uniqueness has been stressed so often that it is fascinating to see how thoroughly his work fits into the patterns of his contemporaries. There were no classicists laying down formal strictures for blues lyric forms, as there were for the Elizabethan sonneteers, but a good ear and a sense of oratorical tradition can create patterns almost as fixed as those of the academy. For example, it is educational to see how formally Johnson adapted Arnold's bridge verse from “Milk Cow Blues”: Arnold played two such bridges in the song, both four-line stanzas in which the first couplet was a three-or four-part list and
the second resolved the idea while employing his trademark falsetto leaps:

In “Terraplane,” Johnson fit his car metaphor neatly into this framework:

For “Stones in My Passway,” Johnson employed the pattern yet again, though this time he replaced the list of physical items with a list of events encapsulating the history of a relationship gone sour, followed by a plea that it get back on track:

Whether in sonnets or blues patterns, the best writers harness predetermined forms to serve their meaning rather than finding such rules constricting, and in this case the bridge verse functions as a bridge between misery and hope. The song's first three verses, with their loneliness and frustration, have set the mood, but now Johnson recalls that at one time he had a good relationship, and reaches out for a lifeline—if his girlfriend will just take him in again, everything could be all right. He shakes off his despondency, and the final verse fits the
quicker pace of the guitar. He is on the road again, and hope springs eternal: “I got three lanes to truck on, boys, please don't block my road!”
³

There is still something schizophrenic about the performance, but in this interpretation that is part of its brilliance. “Stones in My Passway” perfectly evokes the paradoxes of a rambling life. There are the moments of utter despair and loneliness, but they are balanced by the thrill of freedom and movement. Listening again to the opening verses, I am struck by the beauty of Johnson's singing, a sureness and ease that suggests that he is reflecting on his trials but confident that he can get beyond them. I am reminded of a quotation I once read from Bob Dylan, in which he argued that the difference between the old blues singers and the young interpreters of the 1960s was that the young performers sang as if they were trying to get into the blues, while the older artists had been singing to get out of them.

Johnson's next piece was an altogether slighter effort. “
I'm a Steady Rollin' Man
” is in a mainstream Peetie Wheatstraw style, complete with the falsetto “ooh well” and a guitar part that nicely captures elements of the piano-guitar duet sound. The lyric is a bit out of character, painting Johnson as a steady, hard worker whose baby keeps rambling off with “cream puffs” and “monkey men.” It is well put together, each verse flowing logically into the next, and Johnson sings with a nice, relaxed swing, but it does not have anything like the power of his more personal work.

Still, “Steady Rollin' Man” shows that Johnson was developing his musicianship—though not necessarily in ways that would please his later fans. More and more, he was shaking off the complex polyrhythms of the Delta and replacing them with styles that might be more harmonically advanced, but had less quirky rhythmic interplay. “Steady Rollin' Man” was in the key of A-natural, like “Kind Hearted Woman,” and though on the whole it was a far less interesting arrangement, he had added a new walking bass figure, and his playing was sounding closer to that of the East Coast and Piedmont pickers.
⁴

Johnson's next selection was even more firmly in the Eastern camp. “
From Four Until Late
” was fingerpicked in a basic C position, the favored style of ragtimey guitarists like Blind Blake, and indicated his
growing interest in smoother playing techniques.
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His singing was in the same line, a mellow croon much lighter than any of his earlier vocals. Blind Blake has sometimes been criticized as a relatively weak singer who compensated for this deficiency with spectacular guitar work, but he had a pleasant, relaxed delivery on mid-tempo blues songs that Johnson seems to be emulating. This vocal style came naturally to Blake, but for Johnson it was something of an affectation and occasionally sounds forced and fake. On the whole, though, his performance shows surprising warmth. His voice sounds prettier than ever before, and while that may turn off the deep Delta fans, his delivery is nicely suited to the urbane and rather formal lyrics, with their sly punning and flowery phrases like “When I leave this town I'm gon' bid you fair farewell.”

With that, Johnson had finished for the day, but he was back the following afternoon, and opened with one of his most celebrated performances. Whatever its strengths, nothing in “From Four Until Late” hinted at the tortured poetry Johnson would unleash in “
Hell Hound on My Trail
”—though the two songs would be paired as the session's first release. As if to counter the idea that he was smoothing out his delivery, Johnson made a complete about-face into his darkest, most anguished performance on record. Once again, he was inspired by Skip James's “Devil Got My Woman,” but the effect was quite different from the sweetly aching, meditative feel of “Come On in My Kitchen.” Johnson followed James's minor-keyed, almost modal arrangement, and strained to approximate his eerie and idiosyncratic singing style, while reshaping the lyric into a saga of haunted flight. It is his poetic masterpiece, a nightmare of hellhounds and magic powders, illuminated by lightning bolts of sharp, natural imagery: “I've got to keep moving, blues falling down like hail,” “I can tell the wind is rising, the leaves trembling on the tree.” Placed alongside the memories of his friends and traveling partners, it seems painfully autobiographical. He may end two verses with the thought that all he needs is his sweet woman, his little sweet rider to keep him company, but the delivery gives no sense that he could find peace so easily. It is the cry of an ancient mariner, cursed by his fates and doomed to range eternally through the world without hope of port or savior.

The strain in Johnson's voice adds to the song's power. He has patterned his arrangement on James's guitar part, but tunes his guitar a full tone higher, despite the fact that he was normally a lower singer than James. The result is a profoundly unnatural vocal, as removed from Johnson's normal voice as the smooth inflections of “Four Until Late.” It sounds painfully tight and forced, with no warmth and only the briefest hint of relaxation in the spoken aside that follows the vain wish, “if today was Christmas Eve and tomorrow was Christmas Day”
⁶
: “Oh wouldn't we have a time, baby?” Johnson murmurs, sounding like his old self, but he soon is straining again, giving the lie to this momentary optimism.

It is a great performance, but there is also something disturbing about it, beyond the anguish of the lyric and the power of the delivery. There is so much effort being expended that it takes on a contrived and theatrical quality. Effective as it may be, it is less human and genuine than “Come On in My Kitchen,” where Johnson spoke to us directly rather than assuming such a deliberately tortured persona. In his extended essay on Johnson's life and work, Peter Guralnick writes that at the second sessions Johnson produced “his most inspired and his most derivative recordings.”
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To me, “Hell Hound on My Trail” shows both sides of this equation. It is a gripping snapshot of a great artist at a moment when he was extending his already formidable powers, commanding new tools, sharpening his gaze, moving beyond the familiar influences of his youth. Such moments are striking, fascinating, dramatic, but they are also incomplete.