History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (13 page)

It’s painful—but not as painful as the way John pulls the song to an end and freezes the music, dismissing the loose joy of what has just transpired by shifting into one more Buddy Holly number, “Mailman Bring Me No More Blues.” What he has just done is painful to him; he doesn’t want to think about what he can never have again. It’s better to pretend that liberty never existed at all, so he closes the rhythm like a lock. A dead cadence overrules anything else anyone might bring to the music. The song counts the steps down the stairs and out of the building, leaving all of the freedom they’d stumbled upon behind, and good riddance.

With their melodies intertwined, “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” always circled back to “Peggy Sue Got Married”; together
they made a Möbius strip. A “rock ’n’ roll folk heroine,” Jonathan Cott called Peggy Sue; he meant that like Handsome Molly or Pretty Polly or Omie Wise or Barbara Allen, the folk heroines Bob Dylan sang about in the Gaslight in 1962, Peggy Sue too had entered the language, floated free in cultural space and time. She “continued to live on,” Cott wrote, “making an appearance not only at the living room party” in Bobby Darin’s “‘Splish Splash’ but also in” his “‘Queen of the Hop’ and Ritchie Valens’s ‘Ooh My Head’—finally to be scorned and discarded for a younger rival in the insolent ‘Barbara Ann’: ‘Played our favorite tune / Danced with Betty Lou / Tried Peggy Sue and I knew she wouldn’t do—’”

Cott even finds Peggy Sue in the first two letters of the Beatles’ “P.S. I Love You”—but the real story of how Peggy Sue lived on is closer to the tale Buddy Holly told, and acted out, throughout his career.

Before “Peggy Sue” was a song, Peggy Sue Gerron left Lubbock Senior High, where she’d first met Buddy Holly— rushing to make an assembly where he was to perform, he knocked her over, apologizing for not having time to help her up, but taking the time to tell her she had pretty lips— for Sacramento, California, finishing high school at Bishop Armstrong Catholic Girls School. In James Marsh’s 1993 documentary film
Peggy Sue
—a biography, as Marsh conceived it, of the song, not the person—Peggy Sue Rackham,
by then co-owner of the Sacramento sewer and drainage repair company Rapid Rooter, describes going to see the Crickets in 1957 at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, and hearing herself coming off the stage. In Marsh’s film there is fabulous silent color footage of the band, not in perfect focus but carrying excitement, pride, triumph, the band in handsome dark suits, Holly on his knees, Joe Mauldin on his back, Jerry Allison moving behind his drum kit as if he’s spinning in circles—but as Peggy Sue tells the story, she doesn’t sound altogether happy. She is not a woman who smiles.

In her early fifties, Peggy Sue looks her age as anyone would want to. Dressed in a black-and-white striped blouse and pants, she is a trim woman with short blonde hair— the same haircut she had in high school. From about 1957, there’s a picture of her in a cheerleader costume, her legs splayed out on the school grass in a shockingly seductive pose. And then we see another woman, thickset, with a blonde brush-cut: a Sacramento businesswoman named Donna Fox. There’s a picture of her at fifteen, when she was Donna Ludwig: she’s so pretty she makes you blink. Ritchie Valens’s “Donna” plays on the soundtrack. He had sung it for her over the phone, but she had no idea it was a record until she heard it on the radio, cruising the strip with her girlfriends, and they all began to scream. “It was wonderful,” she says thirty-five years later, all heart.

“I never knew there was a Peggy Sue,” Fox says in the film; Peggy Sue didn’t know there was a Donna. “And it was even more amazing,” Rackham says, “to find out we were living in the same town—and had for years. I called Donna at her office, and luckily got her on the phone. ‘Is this Ritchie Valens’ ‘Donna’?” ‘Yessssss . . . ’” Rackham remembers Fox saying, her guard up—she’d had calls like this before. “‘Well—this is Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue.’

“‘Want to do lunch?’”

The film ends with a TV commercial for Rapid Rooter: workmen repair a broken line, fix a pipe. “Oh, yes, I’ve used Rapid Rooter many times,” Donna says from behind her desk. “Last time, my drain was clogged, and by the time I got out of the shower and blew my hair dry, there was a note on my door, thanking me for my business. I’ve recommended it to all my friends.” Then Peggy Sue, standing next to a Rapid Rooter van: “When there’s a plumbing problem,” she says, “we’re here for you.”

Peggy Sue Rackham and Donna Fox were appearing as themselves, both ordinary and immortal. That someone could be both was, really, the Buddy Holly story; the story Buddy Holly had just time enough to tell.

Instrumental Break

Another History of Rock ’n’ Roll

On 21 February 2012, at the end of a White House blues night, President Obama sang a chorus of Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago.” Two weeks later, to mark Johnson’s centennial—likely a year late, not that anyone cared—the Apollo Theater in New York staged the tribute concert “Robert Johnson at 100,” featuring, among many others, the Roots, offering “Milkcow’s Calf Blues,” Living Colour with “Preachin’ Blues,” Elvis Costello with “From Four Until Late,” both James Blood Ulmer and Taj Mahal in turn with “Hell Hound on My Trail,” Bettye LaVette with “I’m a Steady Rollin’ Man” and “When You Got a Good Friend,” Macy Gray with “Come on in My Kitchen,” Shemekia Copeland with “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues,” and Sam Moore with “Sweet Home Chicago.” It’s hard to imagine that had Robert Johnson lived any longer than he actually did, or lived a different life, he would have ever gained greater renown or respect, or that his music would have traveled any farther than it has.

Listening to the records Johnson made in the 1930s, you may find yourself entering the world of an African-American
in his mid-twenties, from Mississippi, in an area centered around Clarksdale, in the midst of the Great Depression, with that distant, closed place, where blacks worked on plantations or in the peonage of the tenant farm system, and were not allowed to vote, serve on juries, or fulfill any of the civil rights of an American citizen, rendered in a handful of compositions falling into the already defined school of what would later be called Delta blues. At the same time, you will find yourself in a world where no geographical or period definition holds and no social or stylistic boundaries are fixed: in a confusion of desire and terror, satisfaction and defeat, that has always marked men and women and their deepest art. What you hear may seem impossibly far away, with unfamiliar place names and archaic phrases, and the emotional impact may be instant, the sound of love and hate, affection and estrangement, fatalism and nihilism, life and death. And yet this music was almost lost.

When Columbia issued the first collection of Johnson’s recordings, in 1961, he was all but unknown outside of small circles of such Mississippi-born Chicago bluesmen as Muddy Waters and equally small circles of fiercely cultish blues record collectors, and that made the title the album carried—
King of the Delta Blues Singers
—go off like a bomb. The idea of some forgotten nobody ruling over a kingdom of music as deep as the Mississippi—what was this, the Man in the Iron Mask? “I immediately differentiated him from anyone
else I had ever heard,” Bob Dylan later wrote of hearing a prerelease copy of the album he was given by his new Columbia producer, John Hammond. Dylan had never heard of Johnson; neither had his Greenwich Village mentor Dave Van Ronk, who, it had seemed, knew everything there was to know about everything. Before long Johnson would be celebrated as the most influential of all blues artists. The likes of Taj Mahal’s 1967 “The Celebrated Walking Blues,” Cream’s 1968 live version of “Crossroads,” Led Zeppelin’s 1969 performance of “Traveling Riverside Blues,” and, from the same year, the Rolling Stones’ increasingly dreamlike recordings of “Love in Vain,” made Johnson’s music common coin. More than forty years later, after scores if not hundreds of musicians had pursued the investigation of Johnson’s twenty-nine recorded compositions as if they were detectives and the music was the crime, only the full fathom five of Cat Power’s 2002 dive into “Come on in My Kitchen” was a surprise.

In 1986, Robert Johnson entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of its first class. That same year his “Cross Road Blues” sold Cross Road Beer; in 2000 it powered Toyota’s “Crossroads of Value” campaign. By 1994, his face was on a U.S. postage stamp. Robert Johnson was a commodity. But despite the discovery of the facts of his life and even photographs—in 1961, when there were almost no facts and no known photographs, for the Johnson album
cover Columbia made do with a painting of a man bent over his guitar, shown from the back—he remained a myth, the sort of figure Dylan could say “seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus.”

The files showed that he had recorded in a San Antonio hotel room in 1936 and in a Dallas office building in 1937. Interviewed in the 1960s, blues players who had worked with Johnson, or said they had, told researchers he had been killed after a show at a juke joint near Three Forks, Mississippi. He had taken up with the club owner’s wife and was given poisoned whiskey. It was said that he was found on his hands and knees, “barking like a dog.” “Men and women are down on all fours growling and snapping their teeth and barking like dogs,” the cultural critic Gilbert Seldes wrote in 1928, in
The Stammering Century,
a history of the American eighteen hundreds as a history of utopian cults and religious insanity, describing a camp-meeting revival in Kentucky around 1800—and you can imagine that the storied description of Johnson’s death is less a literal account, or even a rumor, than a mandated cultural memory, a way of saying that when one plays with the devil, as Johnson did in “Me and the Devil Blues” and “Hell Hound on My Trail,” this is how that person’s fate must be described. The lack of facts magnified such stories; in the postwar imagination Johnson was a myth before he was a real person, and because of the character of his music, that is what he remains. “A dog, a
dog,” David Lynch wrote in 2001, in his song “Pink Western Range,” “barking like Robert Johnson.”

Legends, like snakes, began to wrap themselves around Johnson almost immediately after his death: tall tales, hints of the supernatural, of someone who could be in two places at once, of magic potions, of disguises and false names and impersonations, spring up straight from the kind of blues Johnson wrote and sang, the hoodoo tradition in which he staked a claim. The story that Johnson sold his soul to the devil first appeared in print in 1966, when the blues historian Pete Welding interviewed the Mississippi Delta bluesman Son House. House told Welding—as he had earlier told the blues promoter Dick Waterman, who in 1964 found House living in Rochester, New York, unknown and forgotten— that in the early ’30s in Clarksdale, when House had records with his name on them, Johnson was a pest. “Man, he was always hanging around with me and Willie Brown, wanting to sit-in and do a song,” Waterman remembered House saying. “We let him sit-in and he would up and break a string, and where we gonna get a new string late Saturday night, man? And we had to tie that broken string together and tear up our fingers! We didn’t want
him
to play.” R. Crumb once drew a picture of the milieu: as the older bluesmen Charley Patton and Willie Brown compose on a front porch, a lithe teenager, his eyes wary as they dart toward the two, passes by. Then Johnson went away. When he returned, a year later,
maybe more—no one had missed him—he confronted the men who had driven him off with a propulsive rhythmic charge that was like a train they could never catch, a delicacy of technique they realized they could never master, and a treasure of feeling none of them would ever express. “He sold his soul to the devil in exchange for learning to play like that,” House told Welding. But the notion of the blues singer selling his soul to the devil was a commonplace, and for that matter a selling point: “That word ‘devil,’” the blues singer Henry Townsend once said. “You’d be surprised how
effective
it is.” Tommy Johnson, from Jackson, Mississippi, whose late ’20s recordings about women and alcohol— “Cool Drink of Water Blues,” “Big Road Blues,” “Canned Heat Blues,” and more—made indelible marks on the body of American music, bragged about it, and even detailed how to do it. Howlin’ Wolf did nothing to dissuade people from the rumors that he had made the pact—the fierceness of his sound and the anarchy of his performance seemed to confirm it. The story of Robert Johnson and the devil was circulating in New Orleans in the late 1940s; well before Son House told his tale, the Chicago guitarist Mike Bloomfield said in an interview in 1981, just before he was found dead of an overdose in his car in San Francisco, he had heard the story again and again from South Side blues players.

It was in the 1970s that the music scholars Mack McCormick and Steve LaVere, working independently, were able to
track down Johnson’s surviving half-sister in Baltimore and reconstruct his life. Unless they found the sister of another Mississippi blues singer with the same name, as some have claimed—Johnson went by several names—he was born on 8 May 1911, in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, in the southwest corner of the state. His childhood was a confusion of parents and stepfathers, spent first in labor camps, then in Memphis, then in Robinsville, Mississippi, forty miles south of Memphis, in the Delta, a place that was by 1915 the spawning ground of Mississippi blues, and a center of artistic inspiration hotter than anything the Surrealists would conjure up in Paris. As a boy, Johnson like anybody else fooled around with a diddley bow, a wire stretched on a length of wood or the side of a house. He played Jew’s harp, then harmonica. But now he encountered the first recognized progenitors of the Delta blues: Patton, Brown, and House, musicians who would one day be named the founders of a tradition that underwrote all of modern popular music. It was a shibboleth, perfectly sent up in
All You Need Is Cash,
Eric Idle’s appallingly perfect Beatles parody, where all of the music of the Fab Four is traced back to one Ruttling Orange Peel, telling his tale to an interviewer from the BBC as the Mississippi unwinds in the background (“They got it all from me”)—a shibboleth of irresistible poetic force. “It was the first time in history,” the singer Jack White said in 2013, as he prepared to reissue recordings by Patton and others, “that a single person
was writing a song about themselves and speaking to the world by themselves.” “Listen,” the producer T Bone Burnett said the year before, “the story of the United States is this: One kid, without anything, walks out of his house, down the road, with nothing but a guitar and conquers the world.” Jonathan Lethem made the case best of all: “Pop was a trick, a perverse revenge against the banality of daily life dreamed up collectively by ten or fifteen Delta bluesmen and a million or a hundred million screaming twelve-year-old girls.”