History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (14 page)

On acoustic but sometimes uncannily resonant steel-bodied guitars, the Delta players made a loud, percussive music. A knife, or a bottle on a finger, drawn down the strings, matched and extended the timbre of the voice, so that a song would say what its words never could, and hint at the notion that some things couldn’t be put into words, or shouldn’t be. Inside the loudness was a music of almost infinite subtlety: a complex of style and emotion that brought out the individuality of the singer so forcefully that the drunk making noise in a juke joint could suddenly appear as a trickster or a prophet, placed in front of you to take what you had, or give you knowledge you didn’t want, reveal truths about yourself you didn’t want to hear.

On the radio, on phonographs or jukeboxes, Johnson listened to Son House’s “Preachin’ the Blues” and to Willie Brown’s “Future Blues”—and to the smooth-voiced singer Lonnie Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers’s blue yodels, and Skip
James’s unearthly “Devil Got My Woman,” just as in years to come he would take in Bing Crosby’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” and Leroy Carr’s rolling piano reverie “When the Sun Goes Down.” As an itinerant musician, often traveling with the guitarist Johnny Shines, he played whatever anyone called for. “Polka,” Shines once said. “Irish. Jewish. Well, like ‘Stardust.’ ‘Danny Boy.’” The records Johnson made, though few sold well even by local standards, made him a name. If at first he often performed with his back turned away from other musicians, near the end of his life he may have been playing with a pianist and a drummer, with
Robert Johnson
painted on the bass drum.

The story of his death—according to a death certificate discovered in 1968, he died on 16 August 1938—is, depending on how you want to look at it, romantic or squalid. It tells you tales you want to hear, even if it tells you nothing about why the music Robert Johnson left behind sounds like part of a tradition mostly in the sense that in it you can hear what all who preceded him in the blues tradition, and all who followed him, seemed to have been reaching for. It says nothing about why his songs can sound as if they came out of nowhere, as if for all he shared with his contemporaries, or even you or me—the English language, a suit and tie—he sang and played in a language that was his alone.

That sense of things is most obvious in an obviously dramatic song like “Cross Road Blues.” The singer is faced with
a terror he can’t or won’t name, let alone escape; the guitar is muscled and unyielding. But “Cross Road Blues” soon surrenders to songs where nothing is obvious. In other hands, “Dust My Broom” and “Sweet Home Chicago” are declarations of pride and adventure. What’s so striking in Johnson’s originals is the way, in the choruses, Johnson drops the bottom out of the tunes, suddenly replacing all that was optimistic and energetic—the fabulous Chicago grin of “I’m booked, and I gotta go!”—with fatigue and doubt. No matter how carefully fashioned, the music is never completely stable. You can feel the artifice in “Kind Hearted Woman Blues”; you can feel it burn off like fog as Johnson’s voice goes up high and then all but disappears with “Oh, babe— my life don’t feel the same,” leaving the song as abandoned as the woman in the song has left the man. In “Traveling Riverside Blues,” danger and risk, flight and hesitation, are foreshadowed in the opening guitar flourishes—but everything comes back harder, scarier, in a split second at the end, as if the fine story of sex and whiskey Johnson has told was a con, softening up the listener for a truth the singer can tell only by concealing it.

The ground comes out beneath your feet: you don’t know where you are in Johnson’s songs. You are in the somewhere they come from, the somewhere they go—and never more so than in “Come on in My Kitchen.” There were two versions; in the recording that was originally released, in 1936,
the music slips away from the song, the words miss each other like people walking in the dark. That was the second take. But with the first, which only saw the light of day in 1961, on
King of the Delta Blues Singers,
everything is in perfect balance—a balance so perfect you are aware that a single wrong breath could tumble it all to ruin. And that balance, as Bob Dylan once described the experience of writing “Like a Rolling Stone,” would have been a matter of “a ghost is writing a song like that, it gives you the song and it goes away”—and when it’s gone, it’s gone.

In deathly quiet, a man sings to a woman; simply by opening his mouth he reveals their absolute isolation, each isolated from the other, both alone in the world. What a trance Johnson must have put himself into in that San Antonio hotel room to play and sing as he did on that day! Between each couplet, a void opens, and with impossibly evanescent high notes Johnson traces a bridge that isn’t there. It’s a cadence where beauty is married to dread; a movement slipping forward toward death, where every second counted off on the guitar is one more second used up in life. There’s a sting at the end of the last note of the progression; like a snake’s tail, the note curls back. Again, again, again: what these passages enact is forgiveness. Of the woman in the song, for needing to be saved. Of the man singing, because he can’t save her. Of the world, for leaving both of them stranded, bereft, needing what they can’t have.

If Robert Johnson hadn’t died when he did, on the same day Elvis Presley would die thirty-nine years later, he might very well have been part of John Hammond’s “Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall on 23 December 1938, along with the Count Basie Orchestra, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Big Joe Turner, Mitchell’s Christian Singers, Sonny Terry, Jimmy Rushing, and the Golden Gate Quartet. Hammond, who was stunned by Johnson’s records, had scouts searching for him; when he learned that Johnson was dead, Hammond replaced the already-advertised Johnson with the blues singer Big Bill Broonzy, but still played his 78 of Johnson’s “Walking Blues” from the stage.

If Johnson had been there in the flesh, he might have gone back to Mississippi; if so, there is no reason to think he would not have disappeared from public life as completely as Tommy Johnson, Skip James, Son House, and many more—artists who lived on in obscurity for decades after they wrote their names in invisible ink on the American map, unseen and unheard. If Johnson hadn’t been killed, he might have settled in Chicago ahead of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. But there are other ways to tell the story.

On 20 December 1938, Robert Johnson took the train from Memphis to New York City; later that week he performed “Terraplane Blues” and “Me and the Devil Blues” at Carnegie Hall. The next month he recorded with John Hammond
for Columbia; the sessions, led by Louis Armstrong and featuring clarinet and trombone, were soon abandoned.

It wasn’t Johnson’s first time in Manhattan. As a traveling blues singer he’d been through Chicago and Detroit and played on the streets in Harlem. But in the audience at Carnegie Hall were the novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, the poet Langston Hughes, the future novelist Ralph Ellison, the heiress and ultrabohemian Nancy Cunard, the comic-strip artist George Herriman, and PaPa LaBas, the hoodoo theorist at the very center of the deep Harlem intelligentsia, who would turn up in 1972 as the hero of Ishmael Reed’s novel
Mumbo Jumbo.
LaBas immediately recognized Johnson as a loa—a god that had to be fed, in this case with offerings of books, women, alcohol, and most of all, good company. After the performance LaBas brought Hurston and the rest backstage to meet Johnson; they left together and were soon inseparable.

In 1961, Hammond would tell Bob Dylan he was sure Johnson had read Whitman, and he was right—Johnson had based “Come on in My Kitchen” on both the Mississippi Sheiks’ “Sitting on Top of the World” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” But in Harlem, in what amounted to a salon, Johnson read much more—Richard Wright’s
Uncle Tom’s Children
and
Native Son
(people got tired of Johnson getting drunk and announcing at every party, “
I
am Bigger Thomas!”), Hurston’s
Hoodoo in America
and
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(no one got tired of him reciting, really half-singing, so quietly, “The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God”), Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises,
and his favorite, Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
(unlike the poets in Greenwich Village bars, Johnson never raised his voice for the famous last lines of that one, but at any moment, apropos of nothing, he would simply proclaim, with endless delight, “Her voice was full of money!”).

He performed for the salon, sometimes in clubs. He moved in with Cunard, just then getting over her breakup with the jazz bandleader Henry Crowder. Falling in with Bill Broonzy, he wrote part of what would become Broonzy’s signature song, “Just a Dream”—the White House verse, which at first Broonzy didn’t want to use. It was too much, he thought. It would break the everyday realism that underpinned everything else in the song, the verses about women, gambling, children—

I dreamed I was in the White House, sittin’ in the president’s chair

I dreamed he’s shakin’ my hand, and he said, “Bob, I’m so glad you’re here”

But that was just a dream, Lord, now, what a dream I had on my mind

Now, when I woke up, baby, not a chair there could I find

—when what the verse really did was rescue the song from its own smallness. “‘
Dream,
’” Johnson said, walking away, leaving the song to Broonzy. “Dream
big.
”

In 1941, through Cunard, he met Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, who already knew his “Hell Hound on My Trail”; together they composed “Blues in the Night.” When the sheet music and the film with William Gillespie’s original recording appeared, there was no credit and no money; Johnson complained. The publishing company responded that Arlen and Mercer had never heard of him—and while Bing Crosby sought him out to play guitar for his recording of the song (“The only version,” Johnson would say, “worth worrying about”), it was a lesson he never forgot.

When the war began, Johnson flew under the radar of the draft. At the salon, he worked with Ellison on what would become
Invisible Man
—at first, Ellison had only the opening lines, which he carried around like a tune he couldn’t get out of his head. He went to Buddy and Bob’s on Lenox Avenue
and bought the 78s of Johnson’s records; “Dead Shrimp Blues,” the song about impotence, scared him, and he played it only once, but he listened to the rest over and over again. At first, the song Ellison’s underground man plays in his underground bunker with its 1,369 light bulbs running on bootleg electricity wasn’t Armstrong’s “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue,” but Johnson’s “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.” Johnson suggested Geeshie Wiley’s “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” pulling the ten-inch disc out of a bag, telling Ellison she was the greatest blues singer who ever lived. The song stuck in Ellison’s mind. It was a minstrel number; in 1930, with her partner Elvie Thomas, Wiley had tossed off its ugly lines with precisely the insouciant
fuck you
Ellison’s hero, not to mention Ellison himself, would take years to grow into.

Get off my money, and don’t get funny

’Cause I’m a nigger, don’t cut no figure

Gamblin’ for Sadie, she is my lady

I’m a hustlin’ coon, that’s just what I am.

“But you need something people
know,
” Ellison’s editor told him ten years later, when the book was done. The editor knew his business; Ellison went for Armstrong, and that first scene struck a chord that rang down the years. But when Ellison reread the only novel he would finish in his lifetime,
he still heard Wiley singing in those opening pages—and in 1962, ten years after
Invisible Man
appeared, in his essay “On Bird, Birdwatching, and Jazz,” Ellison would use the song as a metaphor for the life and especially the afterlife of Charlie Parker, Bird picked clean by imitators and acolytes down to the bone.

After Cunard left Johnson for Bill Broonzy—Broonzy was much better looking—Johnson ended up in Los Angeles. He worked in Johnny Otis’s band, learning the music business—learning firsthand from Otis, not as a mentor but by example, that you never let anyone know what you had, who you knew, or who you were: Otis, who ruled the world of race music in Los Angeles, whose title “the godfather of rhythm and blues” did not call up images of family picnics, was an olive-skinned Greek-American from Berkeley passing for black. He took a piece of every session, part of the publishing or even writer’s credit on the songs that went through the studios he controlled. Johnson wrote for the band; he began producing records for people he heard in after-hours clubs. In 1948, after a year spent making a name and being held up for producer’s fees and composer’s royalties, he hired Easy Rawlins—the unlicensed private eye who specialized in cases of blacks passing for white and whites passing for black, and who in 1990 would appear in the first of Walter Mosley’s detective novels based on his exploits—to unmask Otis. It took a week; Johnson always said it was
the best $300 he ever spent. “But I’ve loved you ever since I heard ‘Terraplane Blues’ on the radio in Berkeley in 1936!” Otis said. “Love or money,” Johnson said. “You can’t have both.”

After that, it was Johnson who held the gun on Otis. With the postwar shift from the likes of Otis’s and Louis Jordan’s big touring show bands to small harmony groups and solo singers, from race music to rock ’n’ roll, from professionals to, so often, amateurs right off the street, Johnson took over as the producer to see in Los Angeles. He cut hits by Jesse Belvin, the Cuff Links (“Guided missiles, aim at my heart,” he wrote for their hit “Guided Missiles.” “Down to destroy me, tear me apart / Guided missiles, none of them true / Now I know, the enemy is you”), Etta James, Chet Baker, Richard Berry, and the early demo session on the jazz label Western Pacific for the Doors; the record he was most proud of was Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool.”