Crash Course Timeline, No. 16: Robert Johnson, the Devil's Own

Or so they say...

If you watch Netflix’s Robert Johnson: Devil at the Crossroads, you’ll get a taste of how much of the legendary blues artist’s reputation rests on a mix of rumor and projection. It’s worth the time, if for the interviews alone, but that documentary (part of their Remastered series?) also confirms most of what I read about Johnson around the web, but I’ll be damned if I can keep up with them for visuals…

The biggest surprise I found when researching Robert Johnson was how few recordings he left behind: Wikipedia puts the number at just 29 songs, if with 13 alternate takes over his entire career. That just builds the legend, of course, but the way people wax about both his voice and his playing points to something heard only by people with the right kind of ears. After a week plus with his catalog, I hear the singular voice, but I'm taking the rest on faith. (And Wikipedia has some good notes on his musicianship and the quality of his voice and his use of “microtonality” in the depths of its entry.) With that, time to introduce the man himself…

Robert Johnson was the 11th child in a family, most born out of wedlock, but he still had a good anchor in his life. Charles Dodds, the man who raised him, did pretty well for himself between managing land and making furniture - too well for prominent local whites in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. His success came at the right before one of those spikes of White resentment that, unfortunately, seem baked into the American DNA, so Dodds fled town on threat of lynching. He left behind his wife, Julia, who reconnected with Johnson’s biological father, Noah Johnson, but he stepped out of the picture again before long. Johnson eventually reconnected with Dodds wtih a move to Memphis, Tennessee. Having learned the terrible lesson of the times, Dodds had adopted a new identity as Charles Spencer. Johnson carried the Spencer name through his childhood.

Most sources agree Robert Johnson lived in Memphis for a while. Most also agree he had some decent state-provided education during that time, but only one source offers anything concrete that hints at his love for music: that’s Blackpast.org, who references people who remember him playing a diddley-bow, i.e., “…wire attached to nails sticking out of houses. A person could then hit the wire with a stick and use an empty bottle that slides along the wire to change the pitch.” The story picks up with Johnson following Son House and Blind Willie Johnson around the blues juke joint circuit asking for tips on how to play. Son House (covered earlier in this series) recalls that, while Johnson wasn’t too bad on the harmonica, he wasn’t so good on the guitar:

“such a racket you’d never heard!… ‘Get that guitar away from that boy,’ people would say, ‘he’s running people crazy with it.’”

Crash Course Timeline, No. 15: Big Bill Broonzy's Achingly Slow Climb to Blues Royalty

Later days, I'm guessing.

“’He treated his life story as a set of fluid possibilities, as opposed to fixed events,’ Riesman says. ‘And his imaginative powers were formidable. As Studs Terkel said, “Bill is telling the truth — his truth.”’”
- National Public Radio retrospective, 2011

In other words, everything I’m about to tell you about Big Bill Broonzy could be a lie, but at least it’s a good one. There’s a main narrative, then a counter-narrative reconstructed by Broonzy’s biographer Bob Riesman, who most sources quote extensively. Also, most of them misspell Riesman’s name as "Reisman." The ground is thin, in other words, but let’s walk it anyway.

The man who became Big Bill Broonzy was born somewhere between 1893 and 1903. Some sources insert “Broonzy” as a final surname, some don’t, but they all agree on some variation on Lee Conley Bradley for a birth name, while also generally agreeing he did not have a twin sister (Laney, by name). Other stories from his early life - e.g., serving in World War I (of which, I’m still on maybe), and moving to the Mississippi Delta region during a flood, etc. - are generally read as thoughts he borrowed to serve as memories of his own; a site called broonzy.com pushes that line the hardest. One story supported by two sources claims he made a fiddle from a cigar box as a teenager and played picnics with a young guitarist named Louise Carter - segregated picnics, according to Wikipedia. In a fun twist, a couple sources say Broonzy learned to play his improvised fiddle from an uncle named Jerry Belcher, a man Riesman doesn’t think ever existed. Now, moving on to things that most sources agree on…

Big Bill Broonzy did start on the fiddle. There’s also general agreement that he left music behind, married, and worked as a sharecropper in the fields around Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The story of how he got back into music starts 1) with something his wife, Gertrude, did and 2) makes most sense in the context of him serving in World War I. Sometime before the Great War, but also after or during a drought that devastated his farming plot, someone offered Broonzy $50, a new violin and $14 dollars in tips to perform at a three-day picnic(!?); the sources that mention the story agree that Gertrude spent the money before he got his advance, which forced him to play the picnic. A site called culturalequity.org fleshed out that story the best, while also noting a period of inactivity from (circa) 1918 to Broonzy moving to Chicago in 1920 - and without a wife. So, again, I’m inclined to accept that Broonzy might have served in Europe (also, culturalequity felt like the best source; read that in full for the most thorough history).