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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue “White Woman” as Jazz
Collector in the Film New Orleans (1947)
by Sherrie Tucker Katrina and the New Jazz Orthodoxy by Salim Washington Dusty Springfield and the Motown Invasion by Annie J. Randall Review: Searching for Robert Johnson by Nathan W. Pearson Review: From Paris to Peoria by Nancy Newman |
Review: Searching for
Robert Johnson by Nathan W. Pearson
Album cover of Robert
Johnson, King
of the Delta Blues Singers, 1961 During his short life Robert Johnson (1911-1938) was a blues musician
of minor prominence but great talent.
But since the reissue of his songs twenty-three years after his death
on the 1961 LP King of the Delta Blues Singers, he has become the most
influential and iconic of all the country blues musicians. His “Sweet Home Chicago” emerged as the signature tune
of the electric Chicago blues style of the early 1950s, and “Cross Road
Blues” became an archetype of blues rock after it was recorded by Eric
Clapton’s British rock group Cream in the late 1960s. For decades it has been nearly obligatory
for rock blues guitarists to cite Johnson as their inspiration. Frank Driggs’s notes to the King of the Delta
Blues Singers album set in motion a process of myth-making that
would endure for decades. Driggs and
early blues scholar Sam Charters portrayed Johnson as a deeply tormented
artist and an easily victimized primitive who never traveled far from
home. Speculations on the violent
causes of his unsolved death at the age of twenty-seven enhanced the Johnson
mystique. But the mythologizing of
Johnson took on grander proportions in 1966 when Pete Welding’s essay
entitled “Hell Hound on His
Trail: Robert Johnson” included a supposed quote from Johnson’s
mentor Son House speculating that Johnson had sold his soul to the devil in
exchange for blues greatness.
Generations of listeners have in
various ways clung to the supernatural tale, finding evidence of
Johnson’s ties with the devil in his songs such as “Hellhound on
My Trail,” “Me and the Devil Blues,” and “If I Had
Possession over Judgment Day.” The mythic aspects of Robert Johnson
grew so strong that they began to obscure his music and his impact upon the
development of the blues. Three recent books help correct the historical record
while exposing the process by which Johnson’s career was
mythologized. Read together, they
provide a remarkably full picture of one of the most important but
misunderstood American musicians of the twentieth century. Barry Lee Pearson [no relation to the
reviewer] and Bill McCulloch’s Robert Johnson: Lost and Found
(University of Illinois Press, 2003; $24.95) distills available source
material to provide fresh and insightful commentary on Johnson’s life
and music. In their preface, the
authors warn: “We are suspicious of both the process by which the
Johnson legend appears to have been constructed and the timing of the
construction project” and argue that “Johnson and his music are
best understood in the recollections of his peers and in the context of rural
African American culture as it existed during the lean times of the twenties
and thirties” (preface, p. x).
Pearson and McCulloch’s approach is unromantic, research-driven,
and underpinned by a deep understanding of both the music and its cultural
context. Of particular value in this book is a critical analysis
of Johnson’s lyrics. Pearson and
McCulloch effectively place Johnson’s songs in the context of his time:
“Johnson was very much a folk artist, but he was also canny and
businesslike in his mastery of the codes of commercial culture, albeit
largely within his own culture” (p. 71). An example of their insightful examination
of Johnson’s songs is their discussion of “If I had Possession of
Judgment Day”: “Paul Oliver claimed to hear evidence of
Johnson’s ‘tormented spirit’ here, but the melody is
straight out of the blues tradition and is known to most folks as
‘Rolling and Tumbling,’ the Delta national anthem. The verses focus on mistreatment and
seduction … but there is no hint of Faustian angst” (p. 75). They demonstrate that Johnson’s songs are strong and emotional, but not more focused
on the supernatural or the singer’s own anxieties than other performers
of the era. The picture that emerges
is of a talented professional musician—well-traveled, sophisticated,
focused on his career—not of a primitive. Pearson and McCulloch are passionate
admirers of Johnson who eschew flowery description and romantic images in
favor of presenting research that contextualizes Johnson’s life and
art. The book persuasively shows how
Johnson’s artistry included synthesis as well as innovation. “Johnny Shines claimed Johnson could
add a song to his repertoire after hearing it only once … but Johnson
did more that just cover the material of other artists; he was remarkably adept
at drawing what suited him from an array of sources and then melding the
fragments into a personal statement through his own voice, his instrumental
innovations, and his ability to project feeling” (p. 72). The reader
emerges with renewed appreciation of Johnson’s creativity and a deeper
understanding of the contexts in which he worked. Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta—Robert
Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (Amistad, 2004; $24.95) draws upon
a variety of primary sources in retelling and interpreting the Johnson
story. Citing a Fisk University and
Library of Congress field research project from the 1940s that describes
daily life and musical tastes in the rural South during Johnson’s life,
Wald argues that rather than being a place of unrelenting racial oppression
and poverty, by the turn of the twentieth century the Mississippi Delta was
for many black farmers a land of potential opportunity. The first generation
of blues innovators, including Son House and Skip James, who reached
prominence in the early 1920s, were thus the products of a relatively stable,
even optimistic African American rural world.
Wald further observes that by the 1930s many factors, notably the
Depression and more mechanized farming, dramatically worsened the economic
condition of the Delta. Poverty eventually replaced optimism and
stability. The second generation of
blues performers, including Robert Johnson, B. B. King, Muddy Waters, and
Howlin’ Wolf, would reach maturity during this period of economic
decline which was also marked by technological advancement, with radio and
the jukebox bringing new sounds and styles to the ears of these younger
players. Wald thus provides an alternative picture of the social
and musical context of Robert Johnson.
Rather than comprising a group of primitive tradition-bearers, Johnson
and his contemporaries, including Elmore James and Muddy Waters, emerged in
the late 1930s as progressives who would eventually relocate geographically
and evolve musically. James and Muddy
Waters would become the progenitors of the electric Chicago blues style, and
as Wald persuasively argues, it is
likely that Johnson’s music would have evolved in similar fashion had
he lived longer. Wald reinforces this
claim with compelling evidence that Johnson, like his contemporaries, was
inspired by the popular tunes of his day as much as by the blues. Wald’s discussion of Johnson’s songs is the
most thorough assessment I have encountered, providing insightful, detailed
musical portraits. In describing
“Me and the Devil Blues,” Wald notes that “There is a good
deal of dark humor mixed in with the fine singing, the brilliantly
understated guitar work … that make this one of Johnson’s most
fully conceived performances. The
range of tone he can pack into a few lines is astonishing. The first verse starts with his voice
sounding tight and forced … Then he steps aside, … talking in a
normal, conversational tone … then he is again singing the opening line
again, but now in a comfortable middle range, sounding like a more muscular
Leroy Carr” (pp. 178-179). By providing such perceptive musical
discussions and situating Johnson’s music in its historical and
cultural contexts, Wald’s book is the most accessible and broadly
informative account of Johnson and his music to date. Patricia Schroeder’s Robert Johnson, Mythmaking
and Contemporary American Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2004;
$24.95) has a different goal from the aforementioned studies. Rather than
attempting to assemble a historically accurate story of Johnson’s life,
Schroeder interprets the process of mythologizing that turned Johnson into an
iconic figure. She is highly skeptical about the validity of any historical
accounts regarding Johnson’s life, noting “… even the
simplest, most apparently factual details are open to dispute” (p. 19),
and consequently dismisses efforts to uncover the reality behind the myth as
neither particularly interesting nor valuable. Instead, she seeks to offer “a better
understanding of how Robert Johnson’s image has been used and what
those uses tell us about American society in general and postmodern culture
in particular” (p. 64). Schroeder offers as an example the U.S. Postal
Service’s 1994 release of a Robert Johnson commemorative stamp. She argues that originally Johnson’s
image on the stamp was used to signify America’s historical
appreciation of jazz and blues music, but that the stamp was eventually
highjacked by various interest groups including advocates of smokers’
rights, public health, and censorship.
Schroeder concludes: “In this process, Robert Johnson the artist
was all but erased, his image used to create cultural myths that reveal the
ideologies of different interest groups.
The truth about Robert Johnson
hardly matters. We invest the images
of and stories about Robert Johnson with our own values leaving Johnson as
another ‘evanescent presence,’ drained of his own history as he
comes to signify something about ours” (p. 13). She also explores some
of other ways writers, musicians, and filmmakers have appropriated the Robert
Johnson myth, turning the musician into someone quite different from who he
actually was. Schroeder frames her commentary by drawing upon Marxist
theory, John Fiske’s writings about the influence of “power
bloc” authority on culture, and other social and cultural
theories. Unfortunately, focus on these particular political or socio-economic
points of view regarding the creation and promulgation of Johnson’s
myth does not always illuminate as much as create a set of political
strawmen. If some of
Schroeder’s assertions had been supported by the kind of historical
research that she largely rejects, they would have been much more
convincing. For example, in examining
the various stories about Johnson’s violent death, she suggests “that
this veiling of history includes underestimating the violence of the
Depression-era Jim Crow South, violence that … was pervasive and
profound, stemmed from a variety of sources, and becomes visible in
Johnson’s life once we resituate it in its original time and
place” (p. 48). Yet
Johnson’s researchers have not in general avoided acknowledging the
violent, racist nature of the Depression Era south. Much of the writing that Schroeder
accurately describes as romanticizing Johnson in the 1960s indeed reinforces the
notion that he was the victim of violent times. Much of Schroeder’s book is devoted to critical
analysis of works of art, including books, films, and plays that re-imagine
Johnson or use the Johnson of legend as a key dramatic device. She notes that in novels such as Alan
Rodger’s Bone Music, Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues,
and Walter Mosley’s RL’s Dream, the authors “all
depict Johnson’s blues and their own art of storytelling as powerful
agents of multicultural transmission…” (p. 114). Her
book is valuable for this observation alone, but it would have been more
useful if its explorations of myth and culture had not been so tightly
circumscribed by the politics of critical theory and if it had offered more
evidence to back up suppositions about how Johnson’s image was constructed
and used. The brilliance of Robert Johnson need not be mythologized
to be widely appreciated, but nearly all those who are familiar with the
musician have encountered aspects of the Johnson myth. And while that romance will always play
some part of how he and his music are perceived, we benefit from the
research, interpretation, and contextualization that Pearson and McCulloch,
Wald, and Schroeder provide. Together these three books paint a rich picture
of Johnson’s life and music as well as his transformation into an
American icon, and will serve as benchmarks for future research into Johnson
and the country blues. —Nathan W. Pearson, Jr. Rye,
New York ISAM home Who we
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