There are many American Robert Johnsons. Here is the most common one.
Johnson went to the crossroads. He sold his soul to the devil. Listen to his playing, unlike anything—before or since, sure, but more importantly, unlike anything made by man. This is not of human hands; this is mystical. And Johnson, with praise in this timbre, was made into an artist untethered from time. Our Shakespeare, a bard above the realities of the present; he speaks a universal truth. In your gut.
And yet, Johnson, like the bard, also is an avatar of a specific time: the ghostly outline of a world that died, a man who was killed, and a vague past. I can tell you the exact years. But that hurts the whole idea, man. It is better left unpeopled and undetailed, for us at least. Because here is a sound that maybe never lived beyond a few years in the Mississippi Delta. Yet, it has convulsed for decades—eternal and trapped—as our music: American. Don’t ask the obvious question: When did we Americans become a we? In fact: Don’t think too much. Feel it. I said in your gut. The holy belief in the tangible reality of sound.
When the German tourists come to the Mississippi Delta to find the blues, they’re climbing down our myths to find America—and we didn’t bother to even totally figure out what any of that means; the poor Germans end up at podunk gas stops, white skin dying in heat, seeing nothing but poverty, flies, and stillness. I remember seeing them, in hats, baking in the sun in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Why? I thought. And then they ask: Where is the crossroads? Who has the heart to tell them it depends on who is selling what that day. No one can even decide, really, where he sold his soul. The state has thrown up plaques all around these cities because it is poor as hell down there, and people visiting a faux-past is as good an industry as any. What else can you sell? Touch the American antiquity of Charley Patton at Dockery Plantation. This is commerce. And that’s American. Do you know what I mean? You don’t have to. If you haven’t heard of Robert Johnson, at least you’ve heard of the devil’s gift. He taught a man to play guitar.1
That’s the simplest way to talk about Johnson, the blues, and the Delta—which is to say you try to mention it without knowing it. It’s the same stupid way you’ll hear people talk about country music—a genre invented as a marketing scheme (as all genres are) that the silliest men have taken to heart as truth. Politicians love to mistake folklore for history.2 You can watch Keith Richards, here, do the usual dance. He describes Johnson’s playing as mathematical and yet anti-intellectual.3 It comes “from the gut level”:
That is the first story of Johnson. The one you half-know. And then, beyond these myths, there is the next step. There is the way my favorite writers have taught me to think about Johnson.
For that, join me, and let’s think of an era from 1925 to 1939: the age of the scratchy recordings fetishized in the 1960s to create folk, and to create what we now know as rock. So, imagine it is 1960. You are a college student, lit on fire by the sound of a past to a nation that is trying to make sense of itself. It is modernity now, and in opposition: What is history? What is past? Is it the old homeland, fled, or the new one half-made?
This is a young nation born on genocide; so, on what is thought of as a blank slate—actually a tapestry half-covered in white paint—we, Americans, must draw a myth. Who do we accept? How can you assimilate to something when we’re not sure what it is? You do what kids in cities keep doing and go back 20-something years4 and make an idol. The bluesman. Robert Johnson! He sold his soul to the devil. He plays like nothing before or since. And he’s dead—so, you can invent him all yourself.
Except, a hitch. You can learn a few things. He might have died, but not everyone did. We did not have enough time as a nation to cover up the dirty tracks of making our lies before we needed to deploy them, and so the people who knew our heroes could speak to go-getters. Really think about it for a moment. Robert Johnson would’ve been 90 in 2001. Or let me say it like this: It’s entirely possible to imagine the famous bluesman watching the news and seeing a plane fly into the World Trade Center. That’s the hard part about America.
So, the obsessives find out what they can. These intelligent fans discover that Robert Johnson was supposedly neat, shy, born in 1911 (we think), and dead by 1938. Women—and there were many—told stories of him passing through their lives. He used them, it seemed, as way-stops. Other bluesmen, immigrating north in a mass exodus, or staying put in the Delta—sometimes dying and sick, many still alive, almost all poor, often found in Chicago—tell you: Well, we remember Robert, of course, what do you want to know? He had a charm. He had a minor hit with “Terraplane Blues.” He played guitar so poorly at first, Son House would say, they kicked Johnson off the stage. Then, he went away, and Johnson came back an immaculate player. Is that the devil? Or practice? Johnson would turn his back on the audience while playing sometimes. He did not want them to steal his secrets. He died randomly, in pain, in Mississippi. Some say he was poisoned.
And so this is the second beat of the second story. This is the frame for the discussion of the many Robert Johnsons. It is an idea that there were multiple versions, many myths, and also a real person. Beyond all that, there was the music.
**
In July, as I was picking up a book for a friend’s birthday from a small sidewalk sale, I happened upon Peter Guralnick’s slim volume, Searching for Robert Johnson. I had been meaning to read it for years. It’s a quick one, just 70 pages. And I’ve always loved Guralnick’s music writing. (His big biography on Elvis, Last Train to Memphis, is one of those tomes I’ve been promising to take a summer to dedicate my life to.)
For a while, I’ve thought of the mystery of Johnson as he describes it in the book, and as I’ve tried to above: What was this myth really? How did this music come from this man? Who was this man? And—as seemingly everyone seems to say—yes, all this mythologizing and fetishization aside, god what a musician.
Guralnick follows this path, basically. He outlines the history better than I can. His final two lines sum up the divide between reality and myth. “For them [that knew him], the real Robert Johnson exists lodged firmly in memory,” Guralnick writes, after quoting the bluesman interviewed to give biographical details. “For the rest of us he remains to be invented.”
Well, yes, I thought for the first time in my life, but why? Usually, I immediately say to myself: Can’t you hear it? The awesome man! The bard! Robert Johnson’s unearthly beauty!?
But, this time, for some reason, I didn’t just assume his greatness. Instead, I had a very dissonant experience. After reading the book, I found myself thinking about the other way to think of the many Robert Johnsons. Not the idea that Guralnick presents: the many myths, the real man. I did not think of fabrications versus the music versus the human. I thought about the literal other possibilities of who we, as Americans, could have honed in on, examined, and created. Who else could have been myths?
Guralnick mentions, almost as an aside, that the day Johnson went to the record studio, multiple other groups recorded. In 1936, right around Johnson’s time, the gospel group the Chuck Wagon Gang laid down a track. And there was a group of Tejano musicians that day, too: Andrés Berlanga, Francisco Montalvo, Hermanas Barzaza. In 1937, it was two groups: the Crystal City Ramblers; and Zeke Williams and His Rambling Cowboys.
After reading the book, I looked up songs for each. And I found myself wondering, after truly enjoying them all—but especially the Tejano music: Why did we not fetishize this as our America?
There is an easy answer: The music wasn’t as good. In some ways, I agree. I can’t help but hear God in Johnson. I’d agree that Andrés Berlanga isn’t as haunting, interesting, or resonant. But, assume that away for a moment—and join me in a thought experiment.
What does Johnson have that others do not? For me, it is that when I listen to Johnson, and the blues of this era, I feel something so deeply I can’t quite explain it, that is not musical so much as occult. I am pulled into the past.
Greil Marcus’ famous line comes to mind: The Old, Weird America. I recently emailed him about this slogan. I was curious if he even liked it. He responded over here. You should read the whole response, but here’s one thing he said about it:
The phrase also had its root in one of Bob Dylan’s explanations of the allure of what he called traditional music, from a 1965 interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, quoted in the book (and I’ve quoted it many times): “There is—and I’m sure nobody realizes this, all the authorities who write about what it is and what it should be, when they say keep things simple, they should be easily understood—folk music is the only music where it isn’t simple. It’s never been simple. It’s weird, man, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts. I’ve never written anything hard to understand, not in my head anyway, and nothing as far out as some of the old songs.” And I defy anyone to listen to William and Versey Smith’s “When That Great Ship Went Down” as collected by Harry Smith on his 1952 American Folk Music and not have the word “weird” come to mind before anything else. The Smiths may not have sounded weird—odd, inexplicable, untranslatable, outside the known world, Why do they sound like that?—to themselves or their neighbors, but probably to people the next town over, and, I’d bet, to the Paramount record men who recorded them in Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1927, as in, I’ve never heard anything like this before. I bet I can sell it.
For me, it wasn’t meant to keep anyone or any sound behind a closed door. It was my attempt to open a door. I think it might have helped do that. But it wasn’t my intention to paint a slogan on it.
Now that got me really thinking about these other potential Robert Johnsons. The great obsession with the old in the 1960s took on a sanctified nature. But I think we might’ve misunderstood it; the way we’ve tried to close off and enshrine certain ideas. What is the holy thing, the special feeling, imbued in weird? I think it is that blues records, in particular, allow us to touch that past, while actively creating it. We are listening to something, deciding it is what was killed by modernity, and therefore indicates our history. It allows us create a sense of nationhood. And I hear that in the music of Robert Johnson. And I hear it in all blues. In short, like many: We are imagining a past to create a future.
John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote about this a bit in his 2008 piece in Harper’s. In it, he’s wrestling with the ideas I began with: the legitimate love of blues, the funk of that love (“the all-white, authenticity-obsessed, country-blues cognoscenti”), and then the subsequent overindulgence of self-hatred of people obsessed with not fetishizing the blues but loving it. This whole thing is the “art can be separated from the artist” discussion of loving old-time music. Which is to say, and I think Sullivan does: It is a discussion that predominates and usually asks all the wrong questions. You don’t have to worry about this so much unless you’re enjoying art all wrong anyway.
In the middle of it, JJS says what I think is the most important part of what listening to some of this music does. He writes of a tune’s revelations of his own history (my emphasis added):
When this song comes up I invariably flash on my great-grandmother Elizabeth Baynham, born in that same year, 1897. I touched that year. There is no degree of remove between me and it. I barely remember her as a blind, legless figure in a wheelchair and afghan who waited for us in the hallway outside her room. Knowing that this song was part of the fabric of the world she came into lets me know I understand nothing about that period, that very very end of the nineteenth century. We live in such constant closeness with the abyss of past time, which the moment is endlessly sucked into. The Russian writer Viktor Shklovsky said art exists “to make the stone stony.” These recordings let us feel something of the timeyness of time, its sudden irrevocability.
Here is what I have then been trying to swirl around, maddeningly: the timeyness of time, and its sudden irrevocability. Johnson, and blues, holds that. The past is never past, yes, but that answers only one question. Which past? That’s the question! Which one becomes undeniable—irrevocable?
For the first time in my life, I found myself, reading Guralnick, tired of the question of the many Robert Johsnon—a bit exhausted from thinking about the mythiness of myth, the unknowability. And instead, focused on the timeyness of time. What we are looking for in these tunes is a Proustian madeleine to send us back to a history that maybe never happened. We want to listen to Robert Johnson and make up American history. And maybe that’s why he sounds great. We cannot separate the power of this art from our conception of its needs. And yet that is felt in the body. Which is weird!
That makes the other Robert Johnsons, who recorded that day, so interesting. We know what we did not choose. It is the Chuck Wagon Gang, a gospel group that is still technically active through its ancestors. You can hear what they recorded here, in the 1930s. And you can hear the country sounds of Zeke Williams here. The day before, the Hi-Flyers laid down music. There was Roy Newman and His Boys. Many of these groups played in a genre called Western swing, a jazz and country hybrid, that mostly to me—and probably to you—just sounds like the background track to someone dancing around in some 1920s montage in a movie. I could go on, explaining more, but go listen. Do you feel a damned thing? Are you touching on any past hearing this? I feel nothing. I like it. But it’s all so man-made.
I do not think that is for a lack of talent, or importance, but instead a conjuncture. Johnson stood at the center of a thing that we would become or maybe just aspire to be. These bands, for whatever reasons, did not. And so we work backwards, hearing in them little and hearing in Johnson the devil. He helps us touch our ancestors, even if he was less indicative of what they heard day-to-day.
Most interesting of the people recording at the time of Johnson, on those same days in the studio, were the Mexican-American musicians. Andrés Berlanga played along the border, in bars. He goes over his career wonderfully, here, in an interview, telling of the particulars of that era, catching freight trains during the Depression to play bootlegger corridos. “I guess people had a lot of fun back then,” the interviewer notes. “Yes sir you better believe it,” Berlanga replies.
That’s the American past, too, of course. Border crossing and songs in Spanish. Berlanga recorded duets with Montalavo, and played with an accordion. This laid the basis for Texas-Mexican conjunto tunes. And that led to Flaco Jimenez and the Texas Tornadoes.
I have begun rambling, and I could go off now, listing all the connections. (You can get from Flaco to Dwight Yoakam, then go through Dwight back to the blues, and end up in full circle folklore.) But Flaco died just as I am writing this, and I suppose the mourning of that loss gets to my point in the end. It was sad for those who knew, or cared. But here was another Robert Johnson—an American icon—who changed sound forever, and lived long enough to be forgotten. If he had died young, and we’d had time to invent, maybe Flaco would be more of a God to the average man. Or, more accurately: I wonder if this nation had needed another kind of myth of America, if our thoughts had been about the border instead of the Delta in the 1960s, it’d be front page news, with countless volumes about some deal a dead man made with an accordion.
If you would like to hear the horrific realization of the worst version of this attitude, try out Eric Claption. It’s a disgrace, and he wraps up his dog poop renditions of blues tunes in the legends of Robert Johnson, like a prankster with a newspaper, leaving us all to accidentally grab shit.
Go hear J.D. Vance talk about the idea of the Kentucky dream dashed and embedded in Readin’, Rightin’, Rt. 23. He’s not wrong about the soul devastation of factory work. Or the decaying death of suburban living. But this is also a man trying to intellectualize being sold a past and believing it. All the emotions are right; none of the details matter. Same for Johnson. Same for America.
It’s, ironically, the worst version of a somewhat cool Frederic Jameson line on music from the introduction to Jacques Attai’s Noise: “Music, however, presents very special problems…for while it is by no means absolutely unrelated to other forms and levels of social life, it would seem to have the strongest affinities with that most abstract of all social realities, economics, with which it shares a peculiar ultimate object which is number.” Jameson goes on to say that this tie to economics gives us a sense of music not only as indicative of a specific set of social conditions, but predictive of them. He continues (emphasis mine): “The originality of Jacques Attali's book then becomes clear: he is the first to have drawn the other possible logical consequence of the ‘reciprocal interaction’ model—namely, the possibility of a superstructure to anticipate historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way. The argument of Noise is that music, unique among the arts for reasons that are themselves overdetermined, has precisely this annunciatory vocation; and that the music of today stands both as a promise of a new, liberating mode of production, and as the menace of a dystopian possibility which is that mode of production's baleful mirror image.” Pretty cool! In music, we not only see the past, but the present, and even a set of possible futures.
The timing is funny here. If you think about Johnson’s recording in 1937 becoming famous in 1962, that’s 25 years. How different is all this from indie sleaze bullshit? How embarrassing.