Myths are lies that tell the truth, so the saying goes. Robert Johnson’s appearance, from the start, is as a figure stepping out of foggy mists of midnight graveyards. The great record producer John Hammond, who brought Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Bob Dylan and many other seminal musicians to the forefront, had discovered Johnson’s recordings in 1937. In 1938, Hammond wanted to bring Johnson to NYC, to perform at the “From Spirituals to Swing” concert he’d organized. Learning that Johnson had died a few months before, Hammond instead played two of his songs, Walking Blues and Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil), with an empty stage, for the audience. Even in his first large public presentation, Robert Johnson was a ghost, a disembodied voice and guitar.
There’s people who’ve never heard a Robert Johnson song who know the story of the blues singer who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. It’s an indelible tale. Prefigured in Faust, in Johnson’s case, the reward for his soul was the ability to play the blues better than anyone.
Robert Johnson as a young man was shunned by more seasoned blues players, such as Son House, who had moved to the Robinsonville, Mississippi area where Robert lived. The local blues players considered Robert a very bad guitarist and didn’t want to let him onstage at the juke joints, though he would pester them to let him play. Taking the hint, Johnson soon disappeared, for over a year, and when he returned, he was playing the guitar in ways other bluesmen had never heard. The change was so startling, Johnson’s virtuosity on the instrument so complete, that the story rose up that he got his remarkable new technique from selling his soul to the devil.
Which in a way, he did. When his young wife, sixteen-year-old Virginia Travis, died in childbirth, Johnson, heartbroken, took it as a sign that he wasn’t meant for the normal life of a husband and father, and accepted that playing the blues, which the church saw as the devil’s music, was his fate. He embraced it. So this was a crossroads in his life, and he went onto the road most men wouldn’t travel, in the role of an itinerant musician. But what accounted for the sudden ability to play better than anybody else? The devil?
No. It was Ike Zimmerman. Zimmerman was a blues guitar player who lived close to Robert’s birthplace in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. Johnson had gone there, and Zimmerman took the young man in, almost as family, recognizing his zeal to learn the blues, his dedication to it. For over a year he mentored Johnson, who soon came to surpass his mentor. They would play together in cemeteries, sitting on gravestones at night, for the quiet and, yes, undoubtedly, the atmosphere. Interestingly, a young man whose life was deeply haunted by the ghost of Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, was born with the name Zimmerman, no relation, at least that anyone knows.
So there was no devil, no physical crossroads, but in this case the actual story is as strong as the myth. Robert Johnson transformed himself through learning, practice and sheer will. He had an indomitable spirit. Blues musician Johnny Shines, who for years was Johnson’s traveling partner, has told the story that one day they came into a new town, to a juke joint they were playing, left their guitars and went to get something to eat. When they returned a few hours later, they found the joint had burned down, along with their guitars. They made their money as they went, and without guitars, they were basically stranded. Robert, however, had a harmonic in his pocket. They walked out to a main road with a stop light. Robert played harmonica for the people in their cars who were waiting for the light to change, and after several hours, got enough money busking to be able to buy guitars for both himself and Johnny. He had that charismatic something, obviously. There are other stories from those who knew him, of his ability to instantly win over a crowd wherever he performed.
You can hear unadulterated commitment in his voice and in his lyrics, which are perfect. Some songwriters write perfect lyrics - Hank Williams, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Stephen Foster. Robert Johnson wrote perfect, at times perfectly terrifying lyrics, seeped in suffering, blasted clean of artifice by his life experience, the rural south during the 1930’s, as a wandering musician on a mission to pledge the blues, speaking the raw, uncomfortable truth of life as it sometimes was. Jealousy, hatred, attachment. Hellhounds. To Robert Johnson, playing the blues was the personifying of evil, to objectify it, transcend it, understand it, free yourself from it. In his voice, you hear something so elemental and true, it sends shivers through you.
Me and the Devil Blues
Early this mornin', when you knocked upon my door
Early this mornin', ooh, when you knocked upon my door
And I said, "Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go"
Me and the devil, was walkin' side by side
Me and the devil, ooh, was walkin' side by side
And I'm goin' to beat my woman, until I get satisfied
She say you don't see why, that you will dog me 'round
(Now, babe, you know you ain't doin' me right, don'cha)
She say you don't see why, ooh, that you will dog me 'round
It must-a be that old evil spirit, so deep down in the ground
You may bury my body, down by the highway side
(Baby, I don't care where you bury my body when I'm dead and gone)
You may bury my body, ooh, down by the highway side
So my old evil spirit, can catch a Greyhound bus and ride
The final line of Me and the Devil Blues is a surreal scene from a horror film, Robert Johnson’s ghost on a Greyhound bus, driving to nowhere, anywhere, everywhere.
I once heard violinist Jascha Heifetz’ recording with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto and immediately fell in love with it. I then went out and bought a half-dozen other versions, with different violinists playing it, and had the startling realization that what was on the manuscript page of the concerto written by Tchaikovsky and what came out of any particular violin were two radically different things. In each case, the notes were indeed the same, but inflection, slight differences in the time and emphasis spent on particular notes, the attack, FEEL is the correct word, was incredibly different. It was as if Heifetz’ playing was spatial, three-dimensional, and the others were flat, cartoonish in comparison.
This holds true for the music of Robert Johnson. When someone tries to play it close to the way Johnson did, it usually withers into lifelessness. The Rolling Stones did right by Johnson twice, with their ethereal, stately “Love in Vain,” and the true-to-its-spirit rocking up of “Stop Breakin’ Down,” with Johnson’s immortal boast/warning to women - “stuff I got’ll bust your brains out, gonna make you lose your mind.”
Eric Clapton, who clearly loves Johnson’s music, recorded a number of his songs on Me and Mr. Johnson, where, to Clapton’s credit, he didn’t try to play them exactly like the originals, he uses a band, but still they come across as museum pieces. Something under glass. “Here’s the Robert Johnson exhibit, folks…” Listeners can say, “Oh, that’s cool,” and then pass by.
To hear Robert Johnson, you need a silent room and a quiet mind. Late and lights out is good. And you will meet there a living soul still walking the highway, haunted, guitar in hand.