Escaping the Delta (24 page)

Gertrude Stein famously quoted Picasso as saying, “When you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don't have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty.” In the same way, Johnson at this point was breaking out of his old patterns, stretching himself, and had not yet found a mature style that fit him comfortably. The excitement and passion he was investing in his work are palpable, but only rarely in his second session does he play anything that feels as natural as “Preachin' Blues” or “Cross Road Blues,” which were anchored in the techniques he had learned from Son House and had been living with for years.

If “Hell Hound” was a daring stretch, Johnson was soon back on fa
miliar commercial territory. “
Little Queen of Spades
” was a feminist reworking of Peetie Wheatstraw's “King of Spades,” using the same melody and “hoo, fair brown” interjections. Where Wheatstraw had opened with “I am the king of spades, and the women takes on over me,” Johnson began “She is a little queen of spades, and the men will not let her be.” For the guitar part, he used a variation on his basic “Kind Hearted Woman” arrangement, but this time did not bother to vary it from verse to verse or add a bridge section.

Indeed, the most surprising difference between Johnson's first and second recording trips is that he was no longer striving to provide musical variety within each song. Rather than creating bridge verses and alternate accompaniments, on this session he tended just to settle on one basic pattern and leave it at that. Only two of the thirteen songs from 1937 had bridge verses, and in both cases it was because Johnson had cast them in Kokomo Arnold's “Milk Cow” pattern. By contrast, he had used bridges or verses with clearly differentiated guitar or vocal parts for roughly half the songs he recorded in 1936, and the proportion is even higher if we count only the earlier, prepared pieces and put aside the old Delta numbers with which he filled out his session time.

It is hard to see why Johnson would have abandoned his commitment to musical variation, which had set him apart from the more pedestrian composers crowding the blues field. The change brought no benefits, and pointed the way toward monotony, though Johnson almost always found other ways to keep the listener interested. It is true that basic, unvaried arrangements were the order of the day, and none of Johnson's fans or producers were likely to note the absence of four-line bridges and alternate guitar parts. The Chicago stars were out-selling anyone else in blues, and their musical arrangements could be virtually the same not only throughout a song, but throughout dozens of records. What mattered was the soul, humor, or uniqueness of the singing, or a catchy turn of phrase. As Johnson surveyed the market, he may have concluded that the more involved compositional approach he had adapted from Leroy Carr was becoming a thing of the past. He also may have been working more with other musicians—or at least hoping to—and decided that straightforward, unchanging
accompaniments would be easier to teach to unrehearsed pickup players.

Johnson certainly had his sights set on a more uptown, urban blues style. He had introduced a sweet, crooning approach on “From Four Until Late,” and his next two songs proved that, whatever else he had been doing in the last few months, he had spent some time wood-shedding with a Lonnie Johnson record. According to Johnny Shines, Lonnie was Robert's greatest hero:

He was by no means unique in this admiration. Lonnie Johnson was the first male superstar of the blues era, and among musicians he was widely considered to be the finest guitar player in blues or jazz. For a young, hip musician, he was an obvious role model, both for his success and for the breadth of his innovative virtuosity. He traded licks with Louis Armstrong, was the first major bluesman to record on electric guitar, and was still topping the R&B charts in the late 1940s. He was also the first important studio guitarist, recording as a sideman with over thirty other performers and bands.

Lonnie Johnson's fastest, most complex guitar solos would have been far beyond Robert's technical abilities, but he was a supremely tasteful player as well, and especially on his earlier records created some lovely, understated blues accompaniments. He was also an unusually versatile lyricist, writing not only double-entendre comic numbers and paeans to lost love, but songs about floods and cyclones, bedbugs and racketeers. In 1927, he had done a whole series of songs about ghosts, starting with “Lonesome Ghost Blues” and following up with “Blue Ghost Blues” and “Low Land Moan.”

Whether attracted by the title or just because that particular record happened to be handy in some home where he was staying, Robert
settled in with “Blue Ghost” and its flip side, a ballad about a shipwreck titled “Life Saver Blues.” He learned the guitar part to “Life Saver” virtually note for note, missing a couple of the faster passages but managing all the jazzy diminished chords and making a respectable attempt at Lonnie's superb vibrato, and used this arrangement for his next two songs, “
Malted Milk
” and “
Drunken Hearted Man
.”
⁹
Both spoke of the charms and dangers of alcohol—though “Malted Milk” tacked on an incongruously spooky line from “Blue Ghost”—and both were sung in a decent approximation of Lonnie's cultured pop-blues tones. Robert's voice is darker and deeper than Lonnie's, but the style suits him quite well. He sounds less affected than on “From Four Until Late,” and on the whole these performances are comfortable and fully realized, though markedly different from his other work.

That said, they are also rather unexceptional. If we knew Robert Johnson only from these cuts, we would consider him an acceptable Lonnie Johnson clone—no mean feat as far as that goes, but not worthy of any particular attention. At this point in his development, he was still broadening his reach, trying out various musical identities, and he probably could have done quite convincing imitations of Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry, or Louis Armstrong as well, had that suited the blues market.

“Malted Milk” had some novelty value, if only for its title—it clearly refers to some sort of alcoholic beverage, though none of the myriad Johnson scholars has yet identified the ingredients
¹⁰
—and this may be why it was selected for release, while the two takes of “Drunken Hearted Man” were vetoed. As with “Little Queen of Spades,” these takes were virtually identical, showing that Johnson had put some effort into preparing the song for recording, but since it was so much like “Malted Milk,” the record company can hardly be blamed for treating the two songs as a single piece and setting one aside.

Next up was “
Me and the Devil Blues
.” This was yet another piece in the Wheatstraw style, backed with a “Kind Hearted Woman” guitar part, and Johnson sounds very much at home. His vocal is beautifully modulated, starting the first and third verses in a comfortable mid-range, adding tension by straining for high notes as he begins the
second and fourth verses, and in each case dropping to a whispery bass as he delivers the final line. He had also worked out little spoken asides for the last two verses, interrupting the smooth progress of the song for a touch of conversational intimacy.

These asides are worth thinking about a little, because they fly in the face of one of the classic blues stereotypes. Older street and juke-joint players like Son House, who were used to singing twenty-minute songs, would often go into the studio and simply record a random slice of their typical performance. At his earlier session, Johnson had done the same thing at times, singing whatever verses happened to jump into his mind on a particular take, and chopping and changing his phrasing and accompaniment as inspiration hit. This sort of spontaneity has often been hailed as a hallmark of great blues; indeed, there is a degree of excitement that comes from improvisation in any music, be it flamenco, Indian
ragas
, or jazz. When we go to hear B. B. King, we expect him to do more than simply recycle the same solos he played on his old records, and are thrilled when he is still able to surprise us, after fifty years, with some unexpected twist or bend. One can argue that this spontaneity is what keeps the music fresh and alive, while classical performances—and, more recently, note-perfect recreations of Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington recordings—have become stodgy museum pieces. I myself have criticized young blues revivalists for interjecting the same “Oh Lord” or “Help me now” at the same place and in the same tone every time they play a song, arguing that the original artists made such cries on the spur of the moment, rather than carefully working them out in advance to create a pre-planned effect.

Johnson's second session, and “Me and the Devil” in particular, force one to rethink this issue. In the third verse, he quits singing to remark, “No, baby, you know you ain't doing me right,” and this makes the record feel more casual and live, as if he were sitting with us and addressing us directly. To hear him make exactly the same remark in almost exactly the same way on the second take is more than a little disconcerting. Clearly, while he was quite capable of performing in the loose, spontaneous country style, he put no particular value on improvisation, and if he thought about it at all, he seems to have viewed
it as rather unprofessional, at least on recordings. His models were some of the most careful and prepared artists in the field, and no blues singers have ever polished their work more thoroughly than he did “Me and the Devil.” Virtually every musical phrase, every falsetto “ooo,” every offhand comment has been planned in advance.

This is not meant as a criticism. I am a great fan of Leroy Carr and Lonnie Johnson, and am writing this book in large part because I feel that their more polished, professional approach has been disrespected by generations of blues writers in search of wild Delta primitivism. I only want to stress the degree to which, to the best of his abilities, Johnson was attempting to place himself on the Carr side of this aesthetic divide. Far from being the spontaneous heart-cry of a demon-driven folk artist, “Me and the Devil” is a superbly constructed piece of pop music in the style of the best urban studio performers of the time. It has the easy intimacy of the studio, rather than the loud attack of the streets and jukes, and its effect is carefully calculated.

The lyric, as well, has more than a touch of hip humor and sophistication. This is an aspect of Johnson's work, and of blues in general, that has far too often been overlooked or undervalued. White writers, performers, and audiences, living in a world where blackness is routinely equated with toughness, violence, primitivism, and innate rather than conscious artistry, have a tendency to interpret songs rather differently than the black songwriters, musicians, and audiences that supported blues as a modern, relevant pop style. Dave Van Ronk, one of the pioneer white revivalists, told me of a performance he once gave at a blues festival in New England: He arrived late, and did not know who else was on the bill, but gave his usual show, ending with a shouting steamroller version of “Hoochie Coochie Man,” full of aggressive macho bluster. Exiting to wild applause, he found to his embarrassment that Muddy Waters, the song's originator, had been sitting in the wings watching him. Waters, always the gentleman, hastened to put him at ease. “That was very good, son,” he said, putting his hand on Dave's shoulder. Then he added, “But you know, that's supposed to be a
funny
song.”

The idea that violence, mayhem, death, and misery are fertile soil for humor is common among poor people throughout the world, and
frequently inexplicable to those who are cushioned from the harsher and earthier aspects of life by money and formal education. Thus, as I have previously noted, it is common for white scholars to remark on the dark passions and superstitious terrors expressed in lines that in a juke joint would have produced laughter.
¹¹
In the case of “Me and the Devil,” Johnson was working within a well-established tradition of blues Devil songs. Just three months earlier, the Chicago-based slide guitar wizard Casey Bill Weldon had recorded a remake of Clara Smith's 1924 hit, “Done Sold My Soul to the Devil,” a display of the same sort of tongue-in-cheek braggadocio Waters used in “Hoochie Coochie Man” or Peetie Wheatstraw was employing when he called himself “The Devil's Son-in-Law”: “I'm stubborn and I'm hateful, I'd die before I'd run,” Weldon sang. “I drink carbolic acid, I totes a gatlin gun/I done sold my soul, sold it to the Devil, and he won't let me alone.”
¹²
Lonnie Johnson had been a master of this kind of macho-satanic joking, singing, “The undertaker's been here and gone, I give him your height and size/You'll be making whoopee with the Devil in Hell tomorrow night” and “I told you next time you go out, please carry your black dress along/'Cause a coffin will be your present and Hell will be your home.”

Johnson's song is full of this spirit, starting with the friendly way he greets his visitor, “Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go,” and ending with the clever, Wheatstraw-inspired, “You may bury my body down by the highway side/So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.”
¹³
The Greyhound bus was still a new arrival in the 1930s, and beyond the means of most black Delta dwellers. It conveyed an idea of fast, modern transportation, and would have seemed a particularly comical conveyance for an evil ghost. As for the line in which Johnson says, “I'm going to beat my woman until I get satisfied,” it is ugly, but no one familiar with rap will be surprised if I suggest that it evoked more guffaws than horror from its intended audience.