Delta discoveries

Solving the riddle of Robert Johnson

by Franklin Soults

Did Robert Johnson invent rock and roll, or did rock and roll invent Robert Johnson? For a long time, the first question seemed like such an intriguing possibility that its inverse would have surely struck many fans of the mysterious and masterful 1930s bluesman as an absurd insult. Today, however, it's clear that Johnson would never have become so renowned without a rock audience there to adore him. In his lifetime, this proverbial enigma-wrapped-in-a-mystery was about as obscure as Vincent van Gogh was in his. The Dutch artist sold exactly one painting before taking his own life; the Mississippi country blues guitarist had exactly one moderate hit ("Terraplane Blues") before being murdered in 1938. Their violent ends and reputed inner torment -- van Gogh teetered on the edge of madness; Johnson supposedly sold his soul to Satan for the right to play the guitar like a devil -- have become major selling points in an age when public actions and private lives are fatefully confused and when romanticism survives most perfectly in the guise of celebrity worship. As a result, the sold-out van Gogh exhibit in Washington got more hype than Pearl Jam's summer tour, and when the 29 songs and alternate takes known to have been recorded by Robert Johnson were finally put together, in 1990, and released as The Complete Recordings (Colombia/Legacy), these stark, scratchy songs briefly climbed past Madonna on their way to going platinum.

It's certainly not all about biographic hype, however. It took ages for both artists' tragic lives to turn into romantic myths, a long slow ascent that seems to have followed the gradual recognition of their work, not vice versa. Perhaps that's proof not only of the enduring strength of their art but of its ultimate transformative power -- a possibility that takes us back to that first question about Johnson as rock and roll's great lost grandaddy. I came across the idea in probably the same place thousands of other rock-and-roll obsessives did: Greil Marcus's monumental 1974 Mystery Train. Marcus acknowledges that "a good musical case can be made for Johnson as the first rock-and-roller of all" based solely on his "vibrancy" and "rhythmic excitement." But what really interested Marcus is how Johnson frames the limits to which any rock-and-roller can go -- and therefore any American performer, regardless of his or her era. As Marcus hears it, Johnson's driven, haunting blues paint a desolate landscape of failure and betrayal, a landscape that any American might dimly recognize as the flip side of the American dream as it stretches from the Puritan's desire for a sanctified City on the Hill to our own wish for a nice house by the lake. The proof of this fearsome achievement is that "Johnson's music draws a natural response from those who outwardly could not be more different from him. . . . It is no exaggeration to say that Johnson changed the lives of people as distant from each other as Muddy Waters, who began his career as a devoted imitator; Dion, who made his way through the terrors of his heroin habit with Johnson's songs for company; and myself."

To that list Marcus could have easily added many of his most stellar contemporaries in rock music and rock journalism, from Keith Richards and Eric Clapton to Peter Guralnick, a dedicated blues, rock, and country historian who went so far as to publish his own thin volume on his obsession in 1988, Searching for Robert Johnson. In turn, that book helped stir interest in The Complete Recordings, which followed little more than a year later.

Now, in a final twist, the opening section of Guralnick's primer has been reworked as a new essay for a remastered reissue of King of the Delta Blues Singers (Columbia/Legacy), the original compilation that magically appeared in record stores in 1961 and first introduced people like Guralnick, Marcus, Richards, and Clapton to the natural wonder of Johnson's music. Although its 17 tracks offer no song that is not already available on The Complete Recordings, this budget-priced piece of history does serve as a fitting tribute on the 60th anniversary of Johnson's death (August 16, the same date as Elvis's fateful slump to the bathroom floor). For completists, it also offers the honest-to-goodness final discovery in the musical search for Johnson, a recently uncovered alternate take of "Traveling Riverside Blues." (Apparently it was always known about, just misplaced.)

For the rest of us, it also offers the most succinct answer we'll ever hear to the question "Why Robert Johnson?" The Complete Recordings may be a great historical document, but King of the Delta Blues Singers is a great album, and like all great albums, it lays out a unified vision. There is nothing extraneous here to the looming image of Johnson painted by Marcus. You might add a song or two -- "Love in Vain," for sure; perhaps "Kind Hearted Woman Blues" or "Phonograph Blues" -- but in selecting roughly half of Johnson's total output for the album, the original producers demonstrated a keen ear for just those songs that would attract, astonish, and ultimately transform the crucial portion of their generation who first heard these numbers side by side on this LP.

That's not to say that a new generation will undergo the same rebirth with this CD reissue. To some extent, history must give the lie to Guralnick's claim that this music requires "no translation," that its emotional power is always "direct" and "alive." If it helped change the world once, by definition most new listeners cannot approach it in the same way again.

As luck would have it, on the week following the album's release, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, in Cleveland, staged a week-long series of events that indirectly addressed the problem of this ineluctable historical chill. The occasion was the Rock Hall's third annual American Music Masters Series, a hugely ambitious get-together that focuses on one of rock and roll's early influences each September. This year, the honoree was "Robert Johnson and the Blues" and the various events -- a book reading, an art exhibit, a play, two film screenings -- were topped by a day-long scholarly conference and three evenings of multi-artist tribute concerts, each in a different Cleveland venue.

The conference was segmented into panels that often split between rock critics arguing for the timelessness of Johnson's work -- in the words of keynote speaker Guralnick, "Our presence in the room makes not the slightest difference to the creation of the art" -- and the folklorists, musicologists, and other academics who wanted to recontextualize Johnson in the Delta-blues tradition -- in the words of BMI archivist David Sanjek, to stop "the ill-informed ephemeralization of an African-American genius." Yet the folklorists helped explain why Johnson would have been "ephemeralized" in the first place. It was not because he was so existentially heavy but because he was so comparatively light: his speed, songcraft, and technical prowess made the Delta tradition more accessible, more vivid than anyone else could. As Chicago bluesman Joe Louis Walker put it in the informal musical chat at the end of the conference, "What's not to like about Robert Johnson? Hear him one time and you like it. Son House you gotta get in there and feel the anguish. But hear Robert Johnson once, and you're there." In short, Johnson had the genius to plumb the depths of mortal terror, and the chops to make you dig it.

At their best, the multi-artist concerts caught a piece of this contradiction, but more often they were just caught in the chill of history themselves. It came home with bittersweet poignancy in the first acoustic concert on Thursday, which was headlined by Robert Johnson's adopted "stepson," Cleveland resident Robert Lockwood Jr. At one point, Lockwood was joined on stage by Johnson's contemporaries David Honeyboy Edwards and Henry Townsend (the latter cut his first sides in the 1920s), and the ragged looseness of their playing flickered like a shadow of a memory.

The worst of the concerts went one more fatal step, making the blues feel positively embalmed. Although the Saturday-night show included a rare appearance from shy and oddly charming former Fleetwood Mac guy Peter Green and a warm, imaginative set by Southern bottleneck specialist Sonny Landreth, too often it descended into the broad, good-times boogie in which so much Chicago blues has been stuck for decades. In this reactionary context, even G Love and Special Sauce seemed daring for fronting their hippie hip-hop shtick. (G. Love: "Eric B. was playing blues music! Disco was just blues music!" The crowd: "Bullshit! Fuck that! Go to hell!")

The best moments escaped this chill by glancing off the image of Johnson the mythic doomsayer while drawing strength from his deep showmanship. Longtime country blues aficionado Rory Block tore up a version of "Terraplane Blues" not only with her amazing slide work but by changing two syllables in the last line from "give me" to "guilty," thereby opening up a whole new world of meaning. (Block's version can be heard on the 1997 Rounder anthology, Gone Woman Blues: The Country Blues Collection.) And on Sunday's festival closer, jazzbo Cassandra Wilson strutted through "32-20 Blues" like a sexy gangsta rapper, Taj Mahal turned "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" into a Wilson Pickett hit, Grammy winner and Seal wanna-be Keb' Mo' tossed off "Love in Vain" with pop aplomb, and Bob Weir with gifted bassist Rob Wasserman mused over a long experimental suite that sounded at times as sweet as "Friend of the Devil," only tinged with worry and danger. They all made their nod to Johnson, but they all took his advice and kept moving, 'cause in this life, the blues never stop falling down like hail.