Robert Johnson--Demons on the Delta

Standing at the crossroads I tried to flag a ride Nobody seemed to know me Everybody passed me by. --”Crossroads Blues” by Robert Johnson

Robert Johnson died 50 years ago this week but it took three decades--and late-’60s tributes by rock royalty led by the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton--for the Delta blues king to be recognized as one of the most influential figures in American music. Like two other giants who died young, country’s Hank Williams and reggae’s Bob Marley, Johnson towered over his field.

The 29 songs that he recorded in 1936-37, before he was apparently murdered at 27 by a jealous husband who gave him poisoned whisky, revolutionized the Mississippi Delta style that became the foundation of the Chicago blues sound. As a tribute to the singer, the Music Machine hosts a 50th anniversary observance on Saturday featuring country blues veterans David (Honeyboy) Edwards and Johnny Shines--both of whom traveled and performed with Johnson--and a contingent from the L.A. roots rock scene headed by Phil and Dave Alvin.

Johnson exerted an enormous influence on his peers and subsequent generations of bluesmen like Muddy Waters. “Dust My Broom” (or “Dust My Blues”), “Walking Blues” and “Sweet Home Chicago” became blues standards, but several of Johnson’s best songs were so powerful--and harrowingly personal--that other artists have shied away from performing them.

Robert Johnson stood at his own personal crossroads, one foot embodying the tradition that spawned him and the other pointing toward the future when that tradition took the train north to Chicago, plugged in to amplifers, and left a deep imprint on the development of rock ‘n’ roll.

As a singer, Johnson lacked the gruff authority of a Muddy Waters or the genuinely awesome power of Howlin’ Wolf. But his plaintive, high-pitched voice had a conversational quality that made believable the emotionally desolate sentiments he often mustered in his striking imagery.

He was a dazzling bottleneck blues guitarist whose intricately detailed accompaniment tumbled out in a cascade of notes--almost as if he had too many ideas to fit into each song. On “Preaching Blues,” he somehow squeezed clear, bell-like bottleneck notes in between the percussive, rhythmic thump of his chords.

Johnson also played a vital role in the ‘60s rock-blues connection when rock bands looking for material zeroed in on his songs.

The Rolling Stones (“Love in Vain,” “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues”) and Cream (“Four Until Late” and--the pivotal performance that cemented Eric Clapton’s guitar god status--”Crossroads”) performed the best-known versions of his material. Led Zeppelin used a throwaway sexual aside from Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues” as the central image of the salacious “Lemon Song.”

The mythic dimensions that Johnson’s life had assumed by the ‘60s increased his allure to many rockers. He was reputedly a hard drinker, a womanizer and a wanderer who would disappear for weeks at a time.

And there were the persistent stories that Johnson had acquired his talent by selling his soul to the devil. The movie “Crossroads” was centered around an ineptly executed portrayal of the sort of Faustian bargain he purportedly struck.

Johnson apparently did nothing to discourage that rumor when he was alive, and he wasn’t the only Delta blues artist to claim this occult connection. Tommy Johnson, the Delta’s most popular bluesman when Johnson was growing up, had done the same, and one popular bluesman of the ‘30s recorded as “Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law, the High Sheriff from Hell.”

Most of these claims to supernatural powers were just macho bluster, but Johnson’s sounded different. His vocal delivery on “Me and the Devil Blues,” as he sang, “Early this morning when you knocked upon my door / I said, ‘Hello, Satan, I believe it’s time to go’,” and the descriptions of the terrors dogging his heels in “Hellhound on My Trail” were marked by a chilling matter-of-factness. Johnson didn’t sound as if he was dealing with mere metaphors.

Johnson’s recordings became widely available only when Columbia released two albums, “The King of the Delta Blues Singers” (originally released in 1961) and “Volume II” (originally released in 1970). Both are still in print.

Those interested in a detailed account of Johnson’s life and its musical context should look for Robert Palmer’s book “Deep Blues,” and the Peter Guralnick article “Searching for Robert Johnson” in the summer/autumn, 1982 issue of Living Blues magazine.

Robert Johnson was an illegitimate child born (probably) on May 8, 1911, in the southern Mississippi town of Hazelhurst. His father was Noah Johnson but his mother’s husband, Charles Dodds, had high-tailed to Memphis to escape a lynch mob two years before and adopted the name Spencer. That apparently accounted for much of the mystery surrounding Johnson’s early life--he was known as Robert Dodds or Robert Spencer as much as Robert Johnson.

Johnson stayed with Dodds in Memphis for several years before moving into the Delta region near Robinsonville, Miss. to live with his mother and a new stepfather with whom he clashed repeatedly. He married early in 1929 but his wife died in childbirth the next year.

By that time, Johnson was heavily involved with music. He was an adequate harmonica player, but he earned only scorn and ridicule when he attempted to play guitar during intermission at Saturday night dances headlined by prominent musicians like Charlie Patton, Son House and Willie Brown.

Then came the Faustian interlude: Johnson disappeared for about a year around 1931, although he apparently moved back to Hazelhurst and was briefly married again. After returning to the Delta and stunning everyone with his newly acquired prowess, Johnson began wandering, up to the Midwest and the Northeast and reportedly as far north as Ontario, Canada.

In 1936, Johnson went to the Jackson, Miss., music store of H.C. Speir, a record company talent scout responsible for recording most of the premier Delta blues musicians of the day--Tommy Johnson, House, Skip James, Patton, the Mississippi Sheiks. Impressed by Johnson’s audition, Speir referred him to Ernie Oertle of the American Recording Co.

Johnson’s first session was held in November, 1936, in a converted hotel room in San Antonio. The second was the following June in a makeshift studio in downtown Dallas. A dozen 78s were issued on the Vocalion label. The first one, “Terraplane Blues,” became a favorite in the Delta region.

Having records out meant little more to a bluesman like Johnson than increased prestige and and the chance to charge more money for performing at rent parties, juke joints and dances. He continued wandering, playing on street corners and chasing women.

The last proved to be his undoing when a man whose wife Johnson had been seeing hired him to play at a party and apparently served him the fatal liquor. Johnson lingered for several days before dying in Greenwood, Miss., on Aug. 16, 1938.

The inevitable “what if” speculation has an extra edge in Johnson’s case. John Hammond, the talent scout who signed Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen during his career, tried to track him down to appear at the first “Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938.

Big Bill Broonzy, Johnson’s replacement, became the most visible country-blues artist of the next two decades due in large part to the exposure from that historic concert. At the very least, it’s only reasonable to assume that Johnson would have had the opportunity to spread his blues far beyond the flat crossroads of the Mississippi Delta, a development that would have pleased his wandering soul no end.

You can bury my body down by the highway side

So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride . “