Escaping the Delta (43 page)

9
First Sessions, Part Two: Reaching Back

1.
It has also been suggested that Johnson may have recorded only one song on Thursday because he had been hurt in an altercation with the police, as recalled by Don Law.

2.
Wisconsin may seem like a strange location for a Mississippi musician to choose, but James was recording in Grafton, Wisconsin.

3.
Wardlow,
Chasin' That Devil Music
, p. 15.

4.
The practice of suggesting a full guitar accompaniment while in fact only beating a rhythm was employed brilliantly by Charley Patton, the most rhythmically complex artist in blues. Johnson was certainly influenced by Patton's work, though to what extent is debatable.

5.
Recalled by Paul Geremia, personal communication with the author, 2002.

6.
Oliver,
Conversation with the Blues
, p. 70.

7.
House did compose some songs with fixed lyrical structures, but “Walking Blues” and “My Black Mama” were not among them. His two versions of the former song, recorded in 1930 and 1941, share only the title verse in common.

8.
Jefferson sang this verse in “Change My Luck Blues.” The Elgin metaphor was popularized in black vaudeville by the song-and-dance man Butler “String Beans” May, who in 1910 was billing himself as “The Elgin Movements Man” (Abbott and Seroff, “‘They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me,”' p. 435), and in the 1924 pop hit “Everybody Loves My Baby.”

9.
The “heart disease” line had been used still earlier, in Le Roy “Lasses” White's 1913 sheet-music number, “Nigger Blues” (Abbot and Seroff, “‘They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me,”' p. 411).

10.
Though I hear a somewhat garbled pronunciation of “accelerate” as the word Johnson is singing, the usual transcription of this phrase is, “I can study rain” or “I been studyin' the rain,” which even its proponents describe as “phonetically correct, although meaningless” (
Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings
[New York: Sony Columbia/Legacy 64916, 1990], compact disc album notes, p. 41). Johnson's singing is not clear, and I prefer to go with what makes more sense. There is no “right” answer, and such difficulties have dogged the blues world since the 1920s. One of Charley Patton's most imitated songs was released as “Stone Pony Blues,” but Son House would explain, “That's ‘Storm Pony,' s-t-o-r-m. It's a fast-running horse, just like a storm coming, with a lot of wind to it and it's really getting going. That's the way the horse do…. If it's stone, s-t-o-n-e, like they think, a stone don't move, and you can't ride it” (House, interviewed by Fahey et al.).

10
Second Sessions: The Professional

1.
David “Honeyboy” Edwards,
The World Don't Owe Me Nothing
(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1997), pp. 99–100. In interviews, Edwards has placed his first meeting with Johnson in Jackson, in Itta Bena, and in the northern Delta. Each time, he was quite precise about the street and circumstances. I have no reason to doubt that Edwards met Johnson, but he is an old hand at jiving blues researchers. (When Lomax met him in 1941, he was claiming to be Big Joe Williams.) In his book he boasts of his abilities as a con man, and always musters a wealth of detail to support his memories, whether or not these details match from telling to telling.
Caveat lector
.

2.
The records released were, in order: “32-20 Blues” b/w “Last Fair Deal Gone
Down,” “I Believe I'll Dust My Broom” b/w “Dead Shrimp Blues,” and “Rambling On My Mind” b/w “Cross Road Blues.”

3.
Others have heard this line as “I got three legs to truck on” (or “truck home”), and I can hear the faint suggestion of a “g” that would support these interpretations, though they are logically absurd. I always heard the word as “lanes,” which makes more sense.

4.
Bruce Bastin established the term “Piedmont” to describe a distinct regional blues style, the ragtime-influenced playing common in the Carolinas and Georgia. By now, some writers use it for almost any blues style from east of Mississippi, and a few even throw geography out entirely and call John Hurt a Piedmont player. I stick with Bastin's usage.

5.
The researcher Edward Komara has suggested that Blake's “Georgia Blues” was a likely model for Johnson's song. “Four Until Late” was actually the second piece Johnson recorded in C, but the first, “They're Red Hot,” was strummed rather than picked, which gives it a very different feel.

6.
In “Police Station Blues,” the same song from which Johnson adapted a phrase for “Terraplane Blues,” Peetie Wheatstraw sang, “If tomorrow was Sunday, today was Christmas Eve…” This seems to support the contention of some blues experts that “Christmas Eve” and “Christmas Day” were black slang for Saturday and Sunday, but in the context of “Hell Hound,” Johnson sounds as if the time he is yearning for is a good deal further off than the weekend.

7.
Guralnick,
Searching for Robert Johnson
, p. 42.

8.
Welding, “Ramblin' Johnny Shines,” p. 29. Lonnie Johnson was from New Orleans, not Texas. The confusion may have arisen from his frequent sessions with Texas Alexander and Victoria Spivey.

9.
On one bass break in “Malted Milk,” Johnson throws in a lick from Scrapper Blackwell, but other than that every note he plays in these two songs is taken directly from “Life Saver.” One can pinpoint the precise record, because on the flip side, “Blue Ghost,” Lonnie Johnson sang, “My windows is rattlin', my doorknob turning round and round/These haunted house blues is killing me, I feel myself sinking down,” which Robert adapted for the last verse of “Malted Milk.”

10.
Both Adam Clayton Powell and Josh White drank cocktails of scotch in milk, and it may have been something of that sort.

11.
Blues singers also made plenty of completely straightforward jokes, sometimes in quite serious songs. Leroy Carr's “I Believe I'll Make a Change,” the ancestor of Johnson's “I Believe I'll Dust My Broom,” ends with the couplet: “I believe, I believe I'll make a change/Gonna turn off this gas stove, I'm bound for a brand new range.”

12.
I cannot establish a release date for Weldon's side, but it could have been out by the time Johnson recorded, and helped inspire his song. It is worth noting in this context that “Sold My Soul to the Devil” was backed with “I've Been Tricked,” a song about a “hoodoo woman” in which Weldon imitated Peetie Wheatstraw's “hoo-well-well” yodel. Weldon's Devil number was popular
enough to be covered that December by a white hillbilly band, Dave Edwards and The Alabama Boys.

13.
In “Six Weeks Old Blues,” Wheatstraw sang: “When I die, please bury my body low/So now, that my evil spirit, mama, now, won't hang around your door.” As with other such borrowings, this may have been unconscious on Johnson's part.

14.
Once again, I take Mann as my authority for the guitar tuning. The song structure, a twelve-bar blues consisting of two rhymed verse lines, then a chorus made up of a short phrase repeated twice and a long phrase to finish, was commonly used for funny songs in the “Tight Like That” mold, but Johnson gives it a quite different feel.

15.
One of Henry Townsend's reminiscences of Johnson shows how this phrase was used: “He wasn't like I've heard people say—he wasn't women crazy at all…. All the gals were like they were to every other musician: They were breakin' down, but it didn't seem to go to his head” (Townsend,
A Blues Life
, p. 68).

16.
The first take of “Traveling Riverside” was left off the
Complete Recordings
set, but appears on
King of the Delta Blues Singers
, Columbia/Legacy CD 65746.

17.
Other transcribers have heard this lyric as “if I be rockin' to my head.”

18.
The “lemon squeeze” was apparently a popular party game, though I have no evidence that it was played in the Delta. A contemporary article headlined “‘Lemon Squeeze' Is New Harlem House Rent Plan,” explained that “each participant pays a small sum to test his ability at guessing the number of seeds in a lemon, with the winner supposedly to collect a sizeable total. On the surface this game sounds rather familiar, but unconventional Harlem has remedied this difficulty. For in this case the lemon is usually the shortest and plumpest person at the party. He is generally gayly clad in a hideous yellow suit which is laughingly described as an imitation of a lemon. The victims in turn go and squeeze this alleged lemon, which usually calls for a good deal of hilarity” (
Chicago Defender
, July 27, 1935, sec. 1, p. 6).

19.
This sweetheart was apparently Willie Mae Powell, Honeyboy Edwards's cousin, who is interviewed in
The Search for Robert Johnson
. She recalls Johnson as “very handsome; the cutest little brown thing you ever seen in your life.”

20.
Arnold had sung the couplet “Lord if you see my milkcow, buddy, I said please drive her home/Says I ain't had no milk and butter, mama, lord, since my cow been gone.” Johnson used the first of these lines to end his bridge verse in take one, then replaced it with a reworking of the second in take two.

11
The Legacy

1.
“Sweet Home Chicago” was covered in 1939 by Tommy McClennan, as “Baby Don't You Want to Go,” and then by several other players, though it be
came a standard only after Junior Parker hit with it in 1958. “Dust My Broom” was not covered until Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup did it in 1949, and hit two years later for Elmore James, who turned it into a slide guitar workout. “Stop Breaking Down” was thoroughly rewritten by John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, whose 1945 recording became the model for later bluesmen.

2.
It would be as logical to classify these latter artists as soul rather than blues singers, but black fans tend to call their music blues. As for artists like B. B. King, Buddy Guy, or Robert Cray, not to mention the many white blues acts on the scene, the only times I have seen a significant number of black listeners in their audiences has been at free festivals that were easily accessible from black neighborhoods, in nice weather. Such listeners are not the sort of fans that buy records or tickets, though they may enjoy the music when it happens to be around.

12
Jump Shouters, Smooth Trios, and Down-Home Soul

1.
“‘B' Not ‘I' Has It Because The Latter Is Swing Not The Blues,”
Chicago Defender
, February 19, 1944, sec. 1, p. 8.

2.
Often called the “Petrillo ban,” after AF of M president James C. Petrillo, this was a strike against the record companies, demanding that some sort of royalty arrangement be worked out to provide compensation for the use of records rather than live music on radio and in places of public entertainment. It lasted two years, until the major labels agreed to pay the union a royalty, and during this time virtually no commercial recordings were made in the United States.

3.
This was a light classical piece from the sound track of a wartime film,
Dangerous Moonlight
.

4.
John Chilton,
Let the Good Times Roll: The Story of Louis Jordan and His Music
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 14. Other sources give divergent versions of Jordan's minstrel-show apprenticeship, but Chilton's seems most thorough.

5.
This tally includes “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” a calypso duet with Ella Fitzgerald.

6.
Like the R&B chart, this changed its name over the years, evolving through “Folk,” “Hillbilly,” and “Country & Western.” Jordan's two number ones were “Ration Blues,” which held the spot for three weeks, and “Is You Is or Is You Ain't (Ma' Baby),” which stayed for five.

7.
Arnold Shaw,
Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm & Blues
(New York: Macmillan, 1978), p. 70.

8.
Ibid., p. 64.

9.
Helen Oakley Dance,
Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), p. 70.

10.
In 1933, the
Chicago Defender
described Cox's show as including “25 people and a red hot band” including “little Janine Carmouche, the 11-year-old
sensation, who features classic and acrobatic dancing,” and “that well-known riot comedy team of Sweetie Walker and Leroy White” (“Ida Cox Goes Big in South,”
Chicago Defender,
April 1, 1933, sec. 1, p. 5). A year later, the paper reported that Cox was working around Tucson, Arizona, with a company that included “a chorus of 12 girls and a 12-piece band” (“Ida Cox Breaks Up Show; Visits Coast,”
Chicago Defender,
May 12, 1934, sec. 1, p. 9).

11.
Billy Vera,
The Very Best of Big Joe Turner
(Rhino Records CD 72968, 1998), compact disc album notes.

12.
It is common for blues historians to call this song a reworking of Glenn Miller's “In the Mood,” but neither the tune nor the lyric has any overlap except those three words, and even in that case Hooker's lyric is closer to another Tin Pan Alley title, the 1935 hit “I'm in the Mood for Love.”

13.
Kays Gary, “Elvis Defends Low-Down Style,”
Charlotte Observer
, June 27, 1956, in Peter Guralnick,
Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), p. 289.

14.
It is interesting to find Joe Turner on this list. No one today would class him alongside down-home bluesmen like Waters, Wolf, and Hooker, since he was thoroughly urban and grew up singing with jazz players. And yet, his style had a rootsy feel compared to the café blues sound of Charles Brown and Dinah Washington, and his lyrics were full of lines on the order of “I'm like a Mississippi bullfrog sitting on a hollow stump.”