Escaping the Delta (25 page)

This is not to say that “Me and the Devil” was intended purely as an extended joke or comedy routine, but simply that there is a good deal of dark humor mixed in with the fine singing, the brilliantly understated guitar work, and all the other factors that go to make this one of Johnson's most fully conceived performances. The range of tone he
can pack into a few lines is astonishing: The final verse starts with his voice sounding tight and forced—“You may bury my body,” then a pause for the guitar, then “down by the highway side,” sounding as if he is squeezing the words out of an unwilling voice box. Then he steps aside, and remarks that he does not care where his body is buried, talking in a normal, conversational tone, completely relaxed and dispassionate. Then he is singing the opening line again, but now in a comfortable mid-range, sounding like a more muscular Leroy Carr. In the middle of the line, he places that “ooo,” which to my ear always sounds a little too careful, but finishes with a crooner's ease and a lovely slide down to a low register on the word “si-ide.” Then he hits hard on the last line, singing the word “spirit” with field-holler power—even to ending it with a slight grunt—before trailing off to a quiet low note and playing the guitar tag. None of this was accidental, or the result of a momentary burst of feeling: the description I have given applies equally well to either take.

Johnson picked up the tempo for his next tune, “
Stop Breakin' Down Blues
,” an upbeat boogie with a strong chorus line, which would later be reworked into a blues standard by John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. While the guitar part has some of the same elements as “I'm a Steady Rollin' Man,” this time Johnson is playing in open tuning, and the song is structurally unusual, set in a quite different pattern from anything else in his repertoire.
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Its selling point is the way his exuberant vocal drives home the story line, a series of verses about no-good women set off by the chorus phrase “Stop breaking down”—which means roughly “straighten up,” or “stop messing around”
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—and a final macho boast: “The stuff I got'll bust your brains out, it'll make you lose your mind.”

The two takes sound very similar, though on the second Johnson fluffs the opening verse and finishes with what sounds like an old folk couplet chosen at random. (If evidence is needed to show how little this troubled the record company, once again the two takes were released interchangeably, some 78s having one and some the other.) The one truly odd thing about the song is its final four notes, which Johnson plays with a slide. As any guitar player knows, it does not make a lot of sense to have a slide on one finger unless you are using it, since
it means that you cannot use that finger for anything else, and if you are not careful you are likely to clunk the slide against the guitar neck. In his “Terraplane” arrangement, Johnson had used the slide for only one note per verse, plus a brief, ear-catching introduction—an unusual choice but very effective. To use the slide only for a final, four-note coda was something else. It sounds good, certainly, but few people were likely to notice, and none to care very much. It is like a little inside joke, something Johnson tosses in for his own amusement or as a wink to some friend or fan—maybe someone who had suggested he play this song as a slide number. In any case, it is not accidental, since he plays the quirky slide fillip to end both takes.

If Johnson had known that his recordings would eventually be released in a long-playing format, grouped in chronological order, the slide coda would have made more sense. In a session that had assiduously followed the current national trends, it set the stage for a proper slide workout and a return to his Delta roots. “
Traveling Riverside Blues
” revived the “Rollin' and Tumblin'” arrangement he had used for “If I Had Possession over Judgment Day,” with a new lyric that name-checked three Mississippi riverbank hot spots—Friars Point, Vicksburg, and Rosedale—and was one of his most thoroughly satisfying performances.

Once again, the song had been carefully rehearsed. The two takes are structurally identical up to the last verse, where on take two Johnson underlines the salacious line, “You can squeeze my lemon till the juice run down my leg,” by repeating it in his speaking voice and prompting, “You know what I'm talkin' 'bout…” Despite lines about “barrelhousing” all night long, he has slowed and calmed down the arrangement. There is little of the wildness of “If I Had Possession,” which had been played in the old country style and ignored the concept of counting regular measures. The riffs are the same, but now he is playing a consistent twelve bars per verse, except when he consciously chooses to insert a brief solo.

It is particularly fascinating to compare the two takes of this song, because they highlight Johnson's awareness of and attention to the subtleties that separate a good performance from a great one.
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If one heard them several days apart, it would be easy to mistake one for the
other until that spoken section in the last verse, but heard back-to-back they are utterly different. The first take is well sung and well played, a perfectly respectable performance that is easily the equal of “Stop Breakin' Down,” and better than quite a few other Johnson recordings. But consider his differing approaches to the song's first line: On take one, Johnson just sings it straight. “If your man gets personal, want y' to have your fun.” The guitar keeps a regular railroad rhythm, only briefly doubling up for a little jump between the two phrases, then he repeats the line almost exactly the same way, just adding a hint of slide at the end. On take two, Johnson is singing slightly slower and with more emotion, and the guitar swoops up to a powerful slide chord after the first phrase, holds it with a touch of tremolo under the second phrase, then slides back down into the instrumental riff. When he repeats the line, he sings “person
a-al
,” giving the note a wry twist, as if nudging the girl in the ribs. Then, on the third line, “Best come on back to Friars Point, mama, and barrelhouse all night long,” he holds “night” with a hint of invitation that flows into a long “looong” that leaves no doubt what he is thinking about.

It is Johnson's sexiest performance since “Come On in My Kitchen,” with the slide lazily echoing some vocal lines, slicing quick and delicate behind others. The lyric is sly and romantic, describing his favorite girl: “I ain't gon' state no color, but her front teeth is crowned with gold/She got a mortgage on my body, now, and a lien on my soul.” She is from Friars Point, but he will take her down to Rosedale and promises that they can still barrelhouse there, “'cause it's on the riverside.” At that time, Mississippi was still a dry state and liquor came across the river from Arkansas. In the river towns, a guy could lay up with his girl, drink and party all night long. “You can squeeze my lemon…” If you were in love with the good-looking guitar player with the long, expert fingers, it could be a tempting invitation. As for Johnson, he was ready for whatever might come: “I'm going back to Friars Point, if I be rocking to my end,” he sings, and slides up to a final, shimmering chord.
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Good as it was, “Traveling Riverside Blues” was yet another song the producers chose to veto, and would not be released until the 1960s. In this case, it is hard to imagine their rationale. If I had wanted to pick
one song from Johnson's second sessions as a likely follow-up to “Terraplane,” this would have been it. The lyric and singing style more than balanced the old-fashioned approach that may have doomed “If I Had Possession,” and the exuberant party feel was exactly what the blues market was going for. Some writers have suggested that the verse about lemon squeezing was too racy, but there were plenty of similarly racy verses that were released without any problem in this period—including Bo Carter's “Let Me Roll Your Lemon,” with its repeated tag line: “Let me squeeze and roll your lemon, babe, until your good juice come,” Tampa Red's “Juicy Lemon Blues,” Blind Boy Fuller's “Let Me Squeeze Your Lemon,” and Bumble Bee Slim's “Lemon Squeezing Blues”—so this makes little sense.
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Obviously, the producers did not automatically rule it out, because they recorded two takes and the second was sexier than the first. It may be that there was no reason at all, that the song was planned as a later release, then simply overlooked. None of Johnson's records sold particularly well, and if one or two decent songs happened to fall by the wayside that would hardly have been a major concern of anyone at ARC or Vocalion.

If a song had to be overlooked, though, Johnson's next effort would have been a more logical choice. “
Honeymoon Blues
” was set to yet another variation of the “Me and the Devil”/“Kind Hearted Woman” arrangement, and though Johnson adds a new descending passage on guitar—yet again reminiscent of a Carr piano riff—the song broke no new musical ground. Still, Johnson sings with easy assurance, and the words are pleasantly romantic, the one completely optimistic lyric he recorded. It is a relief, after all the heartache and loneliness, to hear him deliver a love song, even if his idea of the perfect woman was “a sweet little girl that will do anything that I say.” He does sing “my life seem so misery” in the third verse, but since he follows with the observation that “I guess it must be love, now, Lord, that's taking effect on me,” I take this to be the sort of sweet misery celebrated at least as far back as the Elizabethans. There were few blues celebrating marriage rather than barrelhousing or its equivalent, and it is interesting that it should have been Johnson, famed as a rambling womanizer, who chose to sing, “Someday I will return with a marriage license in
my hand.” He sounds completely sincere, and “Honeymoon Blues” deserves to be taken into account by anyone trying to understand Johnson by way of his lyrics, providing a little balance to his image as a haunted loner.

Admittedly, the celebration of matrimony was only momentary. With his next song, Johnson remained a loving romantic, but abandoned all traces of optimism. “
Love in Vain
” is one of his most beautiful and internally cohesive compositions, a sad little picture of a man bidding his loved one farewell. The images are simple and carefully observed: the suitcase he carries for her, the way he looks her in the eye as the train arrives, and finally the way the train looks as it pulls away, two lights shining at the tail of the caboose. It is only then that he shifts from storytelling to metaphor, comparing the blue light to his blues, the red to his mind. (This verse was not original, having appeared eleven years earlier in Lemon Jefferson's “Dry Southern Blues,” but it fits perfectly in Johnson's new context.) Altogether, there are just three verses, each with the mournful tag line: “All my love's in vain.” To finish off, Johnson moans a fourth verse, wordless except for the name of his sweetheart, Willie Mae, his sadness too powerful for speech.
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As usual, this song was based on a previous model, taking both its form and the distinctive wordless verse from Carr's last major hit, “When the Sun Goes Down.” Carr's song was so popular that it was covered not only by half a dozen blues artists, but also by pop groups like the Ink Spots, and in 1949 it would resurface and hit the R&B top ten—retitled “In the Evening”—in versions by both Charles Brown and Jimmy Witherspoon.

Carr's success obviously served as an inspiration to Johnson, but this should not be taken as a lack of originality. Using an existing framework for one's compositions is part of both folk and formal traditions—whether one is writing ballads, sonnets, blues, minuets or concertos—and “Love in Vain” is no less a masterpiece because Johnson shaped it to match a recent hit. For a virtually unknown Delta guitarist to aspire to the level of sophistication of Leroy Carr, a defining urban blues star and one of the music's finest and most enduring
poets, was not a sign of weakness, but a daring leap of the imagination. To succeed in producing work that can stand alongside Carr's own masterpiece was an astonishing triumph.

On at least one front, Johnson actually bested Carr: The wordless verse as he sings it is far stronger than the original, drawing on the Mississippi field-holler tradition and sounding not merely like a musical interlude—which is all Carr makes of it—but like the cry of a lonesome, breaking heart. If there were only one take of the song, one might think that this effect was spontaneous, an outpouring of emotion inspired by what is arguably Johnson's finest lyric. In fact, there are two takes, and they are so nearly identical that I can barely distinguish one from the other. The emotional power of Johnson's vocal is equally strong on both versions, driving home the point that he was a supreme professional, intensely aware of what he was doing and how to achieve his effects. Even the one tiny difference in the lyrics is revealing: On take one, he sings, “I was lonesome, I felt so lonesome,” while on take two he sings, “I felt lonesome, I was lonesome.” In both cases, he made sure to vary the phrase slightly, giving the sense that he is mulling over the emotion rather than simply repeating himself.

By now it must have been pretty late in the evening, and Johnson had completed nine songs plus alternate takes. He had time for only one more piece, and it is probably fitting that he finished with a last tribute to Kokomo Arnold. He had been mining Arnold's “Milk Cow Blues” ever since “Kind Hearted Woman,” but only now did he produce an explicit follow-up, “
Milkcow's Calf Blues
.” Though intended as a sequel, even trading off lines from Arnold's song to end the bridge verse, Johnson's piece was a more cohesive and developed composition.
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Where Arnold had used the title metaphor in only one of his six verses, picturing himself as a farmer and his straying girlfriend as a missing cow, Johnson extended it throughout the song and cast himself as the cow's hungry calf.