Illustrator Christopher Darling Brings the Myth of the Legendary Blues Musician to Life
Robert Johnson:
Devilish Detail
Illustrator Christopher Darling Brings the Myth of the Legendary Blues Musician to Life
Today's (WEDNESDAY, MAY 4, 2011} premiere commemorates the 100th birthday of late bluesman Robert Johnson. The film, which features illustrations from Brooklyn artist Christopher Darling, centers on the urban myth of the singer-guitarist selling his soul to the devil, a tale fueled by his itinerant lifestyle, otherworldly talent and renowned prowess as a ladies' man. In celebration of the May 8 anniversary, Sony has released a new box set of Johnson's late 1930s recordings, The Complete Original Masters: Centennial Edition, which includes a double-disc CD, a DVD of the 1997 documentary The Life and Music of Robert Johnson: Can't You Hear the Wind Howl? and 12 vinyl reproductions of his original records. Johnson died tragically young at the age of 27, allegedly poisoned by a jealous lover. He was famous for his unusually long fingers, with which he nimbly performed complex compositions. "Bryan Jones first played these records for Keith Richards in the early 60s, and Richards said, 'But who's the other guy playing?' And the answer was, 'It's just one guy!'" says multi-Grammy-winning producer Steve Berkowitz, who helped to mastermind the project. Berkowitz compiled his top-ten list of blues talent from Johnson's era below.
"Blind" Willie Johnson
His best songs are "If I Had My Way I Would Tear This Building Down," and "God Moves On the Water." It's gospel music, but it's all blues and otherworldly. He was a guitarist and also sang with his wife; it's just the deepest, scariest most wonderful, uplifting, reverential music.
Louise Johnson
There are only four songs of hers ever known—all spectacular. No one knows much about her, other than she recorded with Son House and Charlie Patton. There's a story about a car ride from Memphis to Wisconsin: she was Patton's girlfriend, but they were in the same car as Son House, and by the time they arrived she was Son House’s girlfriend. Something was going on in the back seat!
Lonnie Johnson
He did one of the first guitar solos ever with Louis Armstrong, and is one of the greatest players that ever lived. I love his version of "September Song," which is right at the end of his life, on an album you can't really find anymore called The Living Room Sessions.
Leroy Carr
Carr is a piano player who was a great influence on, among other people, Ray Charles. He unfortunately drank himself to death, after recording hundreds of songs. The last he recorded was "Six Cold Feet in the Ground." And then he died!
Scrapper Blackwell
There weren't that many solo guitar players in a group context. Scrapper's one of them. Scrapper Blackwell and Lonnie Johnson are two of the most seminal early guitar players, which extends from blues to jazz to country, to bluegrass to rock and roll and R&B, and forward. Listen to any of the songs he played with Leroy Carr.
Blind Willie McTell
A terrific songwriter. I love "It's Your Time To Worry." Bob Dylan wrote a very beautiful song called "Blind Willie McTell."
The Mississippi Sheiks
The supergroup of the blues. Their song "Sitting On Top of the World" has been copied by everybody. They're at a crossroads of blues, jazz, folk, ragtime and bluegrass.
Tampa Red
One of the earliest on the scene in Chicago. He was a guitar player and a singer, idolized by Muddy Waters and a lot of the then-younger Chicago blues musicians who had moved up from the South. His song "You've Got To Love Her With a Feeling" is wonderful. He also had a band and went electric pretty early.
Big Maceo Merriweather
He sings one my favorite songs of all time, which is called the "Poor Kelly Blues." Big Maceo was an original, and the most important piano player in Chicago.
Little Walter
The Jimi Hendrix of harmonica, a beautiful singer and writer. At first he was in Muddy Waters's band, and then he left and had his own hits. He had a short, tragic, alcohol-filled life. "Can't Hold Out Much Longer," "You Better Watch Yourself," and "Blues With A Feeling" are some of my faves.
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"This essay is reprinted here with the exclusive permission of Radio Silence, a magazine of literature and rock & roll. http://maintainradiosilence.com/pages/did-robert-johnson-sell-his-soul-to-the-devil"
Did Robert Johnson
Sell His Soul to the Devil?
By Ted Gioia
The history of the blues is a bit like scripture. It’s full of stories of trials and tribulations, and draws on the hard-won wisdom of a people set free after ages of enslavement. It has its prophets and sages; its deluges of Biblical proportions (Mississippi River, 1927); even its three kings: B.B., Albert and Freddie. And, of course, it has its Devil.
The Devil plays a surprisingly large role in the history of blues music. Blues musicians sing about him. They have been castigated for fraternizing with him. Blues has even been called “the Devil’s music”—both by its critics and fans. And, if you believe the rumors, some performers have cut a deal with Satan—including the most famous blues musician of them all: Robert Johnson.
Johnson is that grand rarity in the music world—a recording artist from the 1930s who can sell millions of records in the modern day. He left his stamp on the work of almost every later blues musician, and Johnson’s influence has also crossed over into the fields of rock, pop, folk and jazz. “From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up,” Bob Dylan writes in his memoir Chronicles. “I immediately differentiated between [Johnson] and anyone else I had ever heard.” “Up until the time I was 25,” Eric Clapton admits, “if you didn't know who Robert Johnson was I wouldn't talk to you.”
But the rumors of Johnson’s dealings with the devil are even more famous than his recordings. I’ve found that people who know nothing else about the blues, have often heard that story. When I tell a casual acquaintance that I write about the blues, a frequent response is: “Wasn’t there that fellow who sold his soul to the devil?” Or: “I saw that movie about the guy who learned to play the blues from the devil.”
The movie in question is the 1986 film Crossroads, about a Juilliard guitar student traveling to Mississippi to learn more about the legend of Robert Johnson and his pact with the devil. The film is full of hokum and misinformation, but kept moviegoers captivated, especially with its culminating guitar battle between the Juilliard student (with behind-the-scenes help from Ry Cooder) and an emissary of Satan (played by real-life guitar wiz Steve Vai).
Blues scholars tend to look at these Hollywood-enhanced stories with distaste and embarrassment—sometimes with scorn and anger. Elijah Wald in his book Escaping the Delta, tells blues fans to “get over the cliché.” “I do not see why, except because some disenchanted urbanites want to create a mystical Delta fantasy, we need to single out Robert Johnson for satanic honors,” he writes. “If the Devil was real to him, the same was true of John Milton and Paganini, of Jelly Roll Morton and any other believer in the powers of light and darkness.” Wald adds his verdict: imposing these simplistic views of a world caught in a battle between the God and Devil on to “Delta dwellers of the 1930s” is “condescending bullshit.”
Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch go even further in their book Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. “There is no verifiable link between Robert Johnson and the Devil,” they confidently proclaim. “The historical evidence is tainted by hearsay, dubious research, compromised methodology, and questionable reporting.” Patricia Schroeder, in her book on Robert Johnson, finds this whole devil story revealing—but about Johnson’s misguided fans and followers. “The idea that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil reflects the youth, the threatened masculinity, and the countercultural attitudes of the musicians who recognized his musical genius and are largely responsible for popularizing his music.” It is a romantic vision “created from 1960s rebelliousness and nostalgia.”
Can this be true? Is it possible that the most famous story in the whole history of the blues needs to be scrapped? Is it a relic of the 1960s, and not an authentic survival from the 1930s? Certainly this is the main thrust of a whole generation of revisionist scholars who have turned their attention to Robert Johnson. But I’m not quite convinced. Let’s look into the evidence and the history behind this often-told tale, and see what they tell us.
Probing into the biography of Robert Johnson is not a simple task. He may have lived in modern times—born a scant century ago in Hazlehurst, Mississippi—but he might as well be a quasi-mythic figure from the distant past for all we know about him.
For the longest time blues fans didn’t even know what their hero looked like—in 1971, a music magazine even hired a forensic artist to make a composite sketch based on various first-hand accounts—until two photos of Robert Johnson finally came to light. The dapper young man pictured in the most famous photo, dressed in a stylish suit and smiling affably at the camera, hardly looks like a man who has sold his soul to Lucifer.
There is no shortage of anecdotes and second-hand stories about this seminal figure, many of them implausible or contradictory. Researchers have no doubt confused him with other people named Robert Johnson who played guitar in the Mississippi Delta, while Johnson himself seems to have adopted a host of pseudonyms, perhaps a half-dozen or more—further complicating the task of anyone who later hoped to track his movements and activities. Even the story of how he developed his skills on the guitar remains a mystery, both to commentators today and those who knew Johnson in his day.
This paucity of hard facts, when viewed in light of Johnson’s remarkable talents as a guitarist and blues singer, has fueled speculation about a supposed deal with the Devil. Johnson had been an amateurish guitarist when he first encountered his mentor Son House in 1930. “You can’t play nothing,” the elder guitarist told him. Soon after, Johnson disappeared for a brief spell. The next time House heard him, Johnson was a master on the instrument, one who stood out from his peers and surpassed House himself in technical proficiency on the instrument. The transformation was as breathtaking as it was unexpected.
Pearson and McCulloch link the “first explicit suggestion” that Johnson made a deal with the devil to an interview with House published in 1966. The bluesman told Pete Welding that the younger guitarist had “sold his soul to the devil in exchange for learning to play like that.” In their attempts to dismiss the story’s importance, Pearson and McCulloch call attention to the lengthy gap between Johnson’s death in 1938, and the appearance of this colorful tale almost three decades later.
Yet other reasons might have emerged, even during Johnson’s life, to stir up speculation that he was aligned with dark and dangerous forces. When the guitarist’s wife Virginia Travis died in childbirth while Johnson was traveling from town to town as an itinerant musician, her friends and family no doubt denounced him for his absence. Given the stigma of the blues during that era, some no doubt saw this tragedy as divine punishment for Johnson’s allegiance to the “Devil’s music.” The young musician’s dealings with guitarist Ike Zinermon, one of Johnson’s teachers, no doubt also raised eyebrows—Zinermon had bragged about going to a graveyard at midnight, where he played music while perched atop tombstones.
Even if Johnson never spoke about a deal with dark powers, the very fact that he played the blues—or just performed on the guitar—might well have been sufficient to spur others to say these things. B.B. King has recalled the hostility he encountered in his youth when he performed with a gospel vocal group—many ministers would cancel the performance when they learned that a guitar would be brought into the church. Son House would later comment that, during his youth, he thought just laying his hands on a guitar might be sinful. Howlin’ Wolf’s mother cut off all dealings with her son because he sang the blues. The history of early blues music is full of such stories.
By the same token, blues musicians often took advantage of this notoriety—the same way satanic rockers would do in a later age. Scandal sells music, and that was just as true in the Great Depression as it is today. Around the same time Johnson met up with House, blues singer Peetie Wheatstraw began releasing records with his nickname “The Devil’s Son-in-Law” listed on the label. Or sometimes he called himself the “High Sheriff of Hell.” Mississippi bluesman Skip James, whose music clearly influenced Johnson’s, recorded his song “Devil Got My Woman” in 1931—publicity posters even showed James brandishing a pitchfork and adorned with a devil’s horns and tail.
The most famous and fascinating story connecting blues music and the Devil relates to another Mississippi blues musician named Johnson—Tommy Johnson, apparently no relation to Robert, but the latter would have known of his recordings, which were very popular among blues fans during the late 1920s. Years later, Tommy Johnson’s brother Ledell told an interviewer how his sibling explained his skill at the guitar. “If you want to learn how to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where a road crosses that way, where a crossroad is,” Tommy Johnson had told his brother. “Be sure to get there just a little ’fore twelve o’clock that night so you’ll know you’ll be there….A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he’ll tune it. And then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s the way I learned to play anything I want.”
Blues scholars who look down on devil stories, and want to link them with the attitudes and fantasies of 1960s fans and undiscriminating critics, have a hard time dealing with anecdotes such as this one. David Evans, the Harvard-trained scholar who conducted the oral history with Ledell Johnson, has pointed out the he did not ask about the Devil in his interview—Johnson spontaneously offered the account. But critics of such legends can rightly point out that this tale is about Tommy Johnson, not Robert Johnson, and though these artists lived and performed around the same time and place, we have no obligation to look at a story about one in understanding the other.
But what happens when we focus attention on Robert Johnson himself and examine his most revealing legacy—namely his 42 surviving recordings? In truth, this is the hardest hurdle of all for scholars who want to sweep the Devil under the carpet. Johnson himself was clearly obsessed with Satan, and his songs reflect the anxieties of a man who had something to fear from this quarter. His “Cross Road Blues” seems to explicitly reference these tales of a crossroads as a place where dark powers are afoot—a view, by the way, which is a clear carryover from African belief systems. Johnson’s concerns about the afterlife surface in his song “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.” And his “Me and the Devil Blues” builds on the image of a man haunted by Satan himself. Johnson also gave his “Preachin’ Blues” the subtitle “Up Jumped the Devil.” These references must be an embarrassment to modern critics trying to sanitize and secularize Johnson’s music—and one admires their perseverance in trying to cleanse these songs of biographical references. But the whole legacy of the blues is as a music of self-expression and personal revelation. Any attempt to portray Robert Johnson as singing about someone else’s life and someone else’s attitudes inevitably sounds hollow and unconvincing.
The hardest song to sanitize is the piece Johnson recorded in his last day in the studio, June 20, 1937, the anguished “Hellhound on My Trail.” This is one of the most powerful blues ever recorded, and explicitly relates the horror of a man pursued by demonic forces. Churchgoers of the day—a group that accounted for the vast majority of Mississippi’s residents, circa 1937—would have been very familiar with the image of hellhounds hunting the souls of desperate sinners. But no church painting or sermon of the period could come close to matching the intensity and immediacy of Johnson’s recording.
When researching my book on the Delta blues, I pondered long and hard over these references to the Devil and tried to reconcile them with the claims of scholars who dismissed the tale as a product of the over-heated imagination of 1960s white blues enthusiasts. To help me, I turned to Mack McCormick, a reclusive scholar who spent years doing first-hand research on Johnson for a much anticipated but never published biography, and who was a major source for Pete Guralnick’s 1989 book Searching for Robert Johnson. I confronted McCormick point blank about the crossroads story, asking whether the time had come to put it to rest.
McCormick vehemently disagreed. “When I went to New Orleans in the late 1940s to visit some record collectors,” he related, “they told me that same story. You need to remember that almost nothing had been published on Robert Johnson at that time. A little bit had been written around the time of the Spirituals to Swing concert, and a couple of record reviews had appeared, but they were full of mistakes. Yet these record collectors had heard about Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil. I subsequently heard the same story within the black community. The fact that the same story circulated among these two groups—groups that had very little contact with each other—impressed me. It suggests that the story had deep roots, probably linking back to Johnson himself.”
This testimony alone seems to unravel the whole case of the hellhound deniers. If the story was circulating in the 1940s, how could it be the result of attitudes from the 1960s? But other sources further undermine their revisionist account. I found a revealing admission by Johnson’s friend and traveling companion David “Honeyboy” Edwards among folklorist Alan Lomax’s unpublished papers in the Library of Congress—here Edwards states, in a document that dates back to the early 1940s, his view that the famous guitarist was involved in the “Devil’s business.” At least two former girlfriends of Johnson’s later made similar assertions. As far back as 1938, John Hammond, Sr. mentioned “tall, exciting tales” about Johnson—suggesting that strange rumors were circulating even back then, just a few months after the artist’s death.
But even without this body of evidence, one might have reason to doubt an attempt to link stories about Faustian bargains to the secularized free spirits who embraced traditional blues in the 1960s. In contrast, these accounts are very much in the spirit of the worldview of Mississippi Delta residents during the early days of the blues. Not many blues fans are aware of the researches of Harry Middleton Hyatt, who conducted 1,600 interviews and collected more than 13,000 spells and folkloric beliefs from blacks in the American South—many of his oral histories completed during the exact same period when Johnson was performing and recording. Hyatt’s 4,766-page study is now out-of-print and almost impossible to find, but is full of stories of demons and devil-dealing similar to those related about Johnson.
I recently consulted Gayle Dean Wardlow, one of the first blues researchers to do fieldwork in the Mississippi Delta, about this same matter, and he takes a balanced approach—blaming later commentators for focusing on the tale, but also accepting its connection to Johnson himself. “I do think the devil story was manufactured primarily by the blues writers of the ’60s and ’70s up through Peter's Guralnick's book, as they didn't have any biographical history to write about,” Wardlow related. But then added: “I don't think RJ would have necessarily denied it—the devil at crossroads story—if asked by some jookers or fans. I also believe his recordings of especially ‘Me and the Devil Blues’ contributed greatly in his lifetime, as did ‘Hellhound On My Trail,’ to any such speculation about his association with the Devil by those who thought the blues was the music of Satan."
The late blues scholar Stephen Calt shared with me his own research on Johnson, which is full of interesting observations. Calt paid close attention to the crossroads story. In his unpublished manuscript on Johnson, which Calt sent me shortly before his death in 2010, he wrote: “It was probably no coincidence that “Me and the Devil,” released May 18, 1938, was Johnson's most current record at the time of his murder, which occurred a mere ninety-two days following its release. Whoever did away with Johnson was almost certainly acquainted with “Me and the Devil,” and must have regarded its author as such a worthless or evil character that his murder was an act of merit.”
If Calt is correct, the story of Johnson selling his soul might even be linked with the guitarist’s apparent murder —still a matter of debate and speculation, although the most plausible account tells of Johnson dying after drinking poisoned whiskey given him by a jealous husband. The authorities and community certainly showed little interest in probing into the peculiar circumstances of Johnson’s untimely death at age 27, and even if the alleged killer had other motives, many Delta residents would no doubt have seen this ending as all too appropriate for a blues musician with Johnson’s personal history. An oft-told story, well known among blues fans but dismissed again by scholars—one more unseemly anecdote they would prefer to ignore—tells of musician Sonny Boy Williamson II paying a visit to Johnson in his final hours, only to find the guitarist crawling like a dog on the floor and moaning in agony. Even if the tale itself is untrue or exaggerated, its survival as a word-of-mouth legend testifies to prevalent attitudes of those who would have expected the hellhounds to catch up with Robert Johnson on his deathbed.
Such stories, indeed the whole soul-selling tale, are certainly awkward matters for academics who want to deal with this music in cold, clinical terms, or purge the sociology of the blues of its theological overtones. But all their efforts are for naught—you can’t separate Robert Johnson from this story about a midnight deal done at a crossroads. Nor should you try. This tale is part and parcel of his musical legacy as well as of his biography—and, of course, inseparable from his fame and legend. To sanitize is, in this instance, also to falsify. Yes, maybe the time has come for blues scholars to take their cue from Robert Johnson’s legion of fans and, finally, give the Devil his due.
Ted Gioia is the author of Delta Blues, Work Songs, and The History of Jazz. Twice winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, Ted is also an accomplished musician. He founded jazz.com and formerly taught at Stanford.
Some early blues songs about the Devil:
Clara Smith, “Done Sold My Soul to the Devil” (1924)
Skip James, “Devil Got My Woman” (1931)
Johnnie Temple, “The Evil Devil Blues” (1935)
Robert Johnson, “Me and the Devil Blues” (1937)
Bo Carter, “Old Devil” (1938)
Lonnie Johnson, “Devil’s Got the Blues” (1938)
Brownie McGhee, “Dealing With the Devil” (1941)
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his website here.
by Alissa Fleck