By Stephanie Thorburn
Full article at Voodoo - The Monthly Music Newsletter (Issue 46, August 2004)
Robert Johnson is often described as the architect of modern rock n'roll, whose album King Of The Delta Blues Singers Volume 1 influenced a whole new generation on its release in 1961, including Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. His haunting vocal presence, exceptional slide guitar and idiosyncratic rhythm created a precedent and enigma, which the blues community still reveres today. In his foreword prefacing Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, despite his entirely opposed socio-cultural background, Eric Clapton offers us a comprehensive and emotive insight into Johnson, describing his personal odyssey in connecting to the power and form of his playing: -
"It came as something of a shock to me .. it didn't seem to me that he was particularly interested in being at all palatable, .. it didn't obey the rules of time or harmony or anything - he was just playing for himself. It was almost as if he felt things so acutely he found it almost unbearable."
"I don't think there is any need to analyse it too much. It would just be great if people could simply appreciate his music for what it is, for its truth and beauty, without having to be a scholarly event."
Few commentaries have swallowed Eric's instinctive advice by keeping focussed solely on the essence and potency of Johnson's work. Recent commentaries have been controversial and reciprocated with mixed reviews. Wald's detailed revisionist biography, 'Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson and The Invention Of The Blues' (Amistad Press) explores the rhetoric's of his life and death cycle, with the alleged selling of his soul to the devil at the Crossroads and other tales from the empty whisky jar being exchanged for a slight intellectual debunking, apparently de-romanticising the facts. When confronted with accounts that utilise knowledge wisely, we might have little confidence left in our own convictions. It is seductive to forget this is contemporary American history, not so removed from today. Johnson's peers Honeyboy Edwards and Robert Lockwood Jr. are alive and well, entertaining at the Crossroads festival with Eric Clapton at the Cotton Bowl, Dallas. In fact, nothing in Johnson's native appeal or dynamic actually changed when the white 1960's blues-rock pioneers recognised Johnson as an arbiter of universal building blocks, fusing diverse forms of creative life.
Steve La Vere's writing is penetrative and fluent, perhaps the only archivist and historian of the 'peace' who offers us a short history with some dynamite perceptual leaps in putting to rest the two hyperboles of Johnson as deity or myth. In his liner notes for The Complete Recordings (1990), he groups the themes in Johnson's work like the Canterbury tales and has a perfect grasp of the entire milieu, pairing his struggle to escape the rural mentality as the seed to his self-destruction, forming a certain 'urban neurosis'. It is the strength of Johnson's work for La Vere that is the most powerful element in modern electric blues in 1950's Chicago and beyond. If the eleven 78-rpm records issues during his lifetime were viewed as 'race records' attempting to capitalise on the blues, then at least we have surely moved forward from this point.
Perhaps Johnson's greatest revelation is that of an uninhibited soul, his mono recordings complex in technical aerobics alone, express an intuitive world rich in depth and colour as he welcomes you into the warmth of his kitchen, a passing domesticity overshadowed by the constant hellhound on his trail- the unconscious mind.
"This subconscious without a thorough understanding of its implications is the most pathetic aspect in all of Johnson's being. It is the underlying element of and key to his romantic appeal, both to women in his own time and to others, almost years and lifestyles removed." Steve La Vere. Indeed, Johnson's most significant alternate take may not be on record, but with the whisky jar that ultimately became him. If his romantic disassociation affords him a degree of defence from the feminists on 'Love In Vain', then on '32-20 Blues' he damn well disgraces himself, taking the 32-20 and 'cutting her half in two'. But it is not the small boy responding to the naked impulses of the phallus that speaks to us, as Johnson oscillates once more to mature adult, philosophising the barely concealed vulnerabilities of the human condition, freed by his ability beyond the parochial myths of the 'devil's blues'.
Johnson In Perspective.
In exploring the current revisionist mood to re-appraise Johnson's legend, I have called upon some suitably evocative and informed viewpoints. I was certainly not disappointed by the input of the following connoisseur musicians and writers. My thanks to all the contributors who have spared time to exorcise some thoughts affirming Johnson as our 'King Of The Delta Bluesmen', whilst setting his regal status in perspective.
"With regard to the music of Robert Johnson, there is no doubt in my mind that he was one of the most important and original talents of his era and I always feel sad that he wasn't around long enough for us to know more about him; only his songs remain a hint at the man behind the music. It is also frustrating that during the 20's and 30's, record companies never even bothered to take photographs of their artists and in Robert's case there seems to be only one and this is more than we have of other great bluesmen such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson and countless others. I will always be touched emotionally when I listen to Robert Johnson and the only other thing I have to comment on is the mythical 'selling of the soul to the devil at the crossroads'; I regard this as total nonsense. The man was just a great musician who was able to express himself brilliantly but who unfortunately lived life too close to the edge with regard to his dalliances with the ladies."
John Mayall - Bluesbreaker extraordinaire..
"The thing that caught my imagination when I first heard about Robert Johnson was the whole "Crossroads"/selling your soul to the devil so you could play great guitar. As a young kid, I was really into spooky 'horror fillums' and books, so the idea that you could meet the devil and make a deal with him to become the most sexy, badass, bitchin' guitar player South Of The Pecos really got my attention. I think I first heard this, or became aware of it, when I saw a BBC series sometime in the mid to late 70's called "The Devil's Music" which was about the blues and always featured clips of great guitarists. I think it featured Clapton playing Layla, which I then went out and bought. The legend of Robert Johnson in this respect is so full of dark imagery and potent mythology, and the fact that he met his end in a rather ironic way, considering his dealings with the Devil, was also a salutary lesson to a young mind that when push comes to shove, the Devil gets his due!"
Mo Nazam, Freelance writer/ musician- Guitarist Magazine.
"If Robert Johnson had just written about the sufferings of the black population - prejudice, poverty, depression, racial violence and endless variations on the 'woman who done do me wrong', I doubt he would have become quite the seminal blues figure we acknowledge today. Dying young in mysterious circumstances after a life wrapped in its own enigmas certainly helped to create the legend - but it was what Robert wrote about - and the power of his poetry - that gripped the imagination of blues musicians since he laid down those 29 tracks over seventy years ago.
He expressed more poignantly than anybody else, those universals which have come to symbolise the timeless quality of the blues, transcending divisions of time, race or culture - he wrote about longing and the sense of not (be) longing - he wrote about pain and alienation. The Devil figures substantially in his work because in the cosmology of the time and the place, what wasn't manifestly righteous, worthy and god-fearing was satanic. So if you played music outside the confines of the Church, you were playing the hums of Beelzebub. And the crossroads was the Devil's natural haunt because it offered a choice away from the homestead, the fields and the Church, a temptation to roam in a time when most sharecropping families went but a few miles distance in a lifetime.
And it was this sense of what lay beyond that captivated young white blues musicians of the fifties and early sixties who like Norman Mailer's 'White Negroes' felt they didn't belong in the staid, confining and conventional worlds they inhabited. They responded to songs that validated their own sense of dislocation and which sent them off to find a new way back home."
Harry Shapiro - music journalist/ biographer, Slowhand- The Story Of Eric Clapton
"Robert Johnson was by no means the first blues musician to be recorded, that privilege would go to Papa Charlie Jackson. Neither was he that successful at the time for that matter, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Tommy Johnson sold multiple-times more than him and greatly eclipsed his fame a good ten years before the young Robert
ever held a guitar. There were also better players as far as technical acumen goes - Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller could play circles around him. As far as being an entertainer, it's unlikely Johnson could have matched Charlie Patton's crowd-pleasing
showboating that drove audiences wild and had them tuning up from miles around whenever he played. In fact, even a lot of his melodies were borrowed from well known songs at the time like Skip James 'Devil Got My Woman' (Hellhound On My Trail). Though a household name today, he wasn't even particularly successful and influential in his time. What's more, as far as his enigma and the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle goes, this was the regular lifestyle of any travelling blues musician of the time. He was even a latecomer on the devil at the crossroads story which was a commonly used myth at the times - the aforementioned Tommy Johnson had beaten him to the punch the previous decade as Peetie Wheetstraw even used the occult as an
advertising gimmick by calling himself 'the devil's son-in-law'. In fact, when I interviewed 'Honeyboy' Edwards he totally debunked the whole myth of the crossroads by telling me that it was common for musicians to go to the crossroads because it was away from the chaos of the town and quiet enough that you could sit with a jug of whisky and practice all night without being disturbed.
What we have left once the myth and flannel is stripped a way, however, is the almost supernatural intensity of his music. The music he recorded seemed to have a depth and feeling that prompt people to ask: How can anyone make the hair on the back of one's neck stand up with just an acoustic guitar and through such poor recording equipment at that? The raw emotion that comes through the crackle and pops of the recordings is probably why some people believe the deal with the devil. He seemed to also have a producer's ear in putting all the individual parts into the whole. Just listen to 'Come into my Kitchen', just before the storm brews he says 'listen to the wind blow' which he follows with a slash of the bottleneck on the strings. You really can hear the wind send a shiver through the house at that point. As visual as anything Pink Floyd did on The Wall."
Gianluca Tramontana - Freelance writer/ broadcaster. Rolling Stone.com
"Robert Johnson had a unique voice that transcends time and space. There is an emotional quality in his music that goes far beyond the clichéd imagery of travelling bluesmen in the dark and violent Delta. This emotional quality touches the heart of those who take time to tune in to this music echoing from a land that was very, very different from ours today. Robert Johnson's music is so intensely personal that it feels almost wrong to say much more beyond this. Every one of us who was moved by his music at some stage in our life, I am sure, has a unique perception of and associations with that extraordinary music. The fact that so much has to be left to imagination because of the lack of information about the man allows us to focus more on the music than on the cult of personality. I for one tend to take those Robert Johnson stories with a big pinch of salt. In fact, they are irrelevant to his music; just like the Mozart stories are to his compositions. The connection between Johnson and Clapton, to me personally, lies in the emotional honesty as a composer and performer outside the so-called blues genre. In a curious way, I find more in common between Johnson and Clapton's music in the album Pilgrim, which I consider to be Clapton's best work to date, rather than the recent Johnson tribute album. Johnson's music of course transcends minor details like the tool he used to create that music, or the tools that Clapton used for his, for that matter."
Saiichi Sugiyama- musician and adviser/ researcher, Christie's Eric Clapton guitar catalogue, 1999, 2004.
"Robert Johnson is to me the most important blues musician who ever lived. I have never found anything more deeply soulful... His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice.. it called to me in my confusion, it seemed to echo something that I had always felt". Eric Clapton. Sleeve notes- Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings (1990).
=== Copyright Stephanie Thorburn 2004. ===
