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. 14: The Blues, from the Delta (Son House) to Chicago (Tampa Red)

National resonator guitar.

I somehow got it in my head that both artists featured in this post plied their trade in Chicago. They did not, so I’ll cover the Chicago blues as a pivot to the second artist and continue on the Delta blues with…

Son House, Between God and the Blues
Edward James “Son” House, Jr. was born in 1902, on a plantation between Clarksdale and Lyon, Mississippi. His parents split when he was young, which, then as now, meant bouncing between households - the Clarksdale area with his father, Eddie House Sr., and various stops in Louisiana with his (for some reason, nameless) mother, including New Orleans. House’s father was a musician - a tuba player - who came in and out of the church as House grew up. When drinking drove at least one of those separations, Eddie Sr. tossed the bottle, straightened out, and became a deacon in the church. Both parents passed down their religiosity to Son House, and his faith weighed heavily and challenged him throughout his life - and it got hold early too; according to Wikipedia, he preached sermons on visits at his mother’s in Algiers, New Orleans, by age 15. To the extent music came into House’s life at all, he didn’t see it as a positive - and that tied to the culture and his upbringing. As a little bio on Musician Guide noted:

“Blues was so disreputable that even its staunchest devotees frequently found it prudent to disown it. If you asked a black preacher, schoolteacher, small landowner, or faithful churchgoer what kind of people played and listened to the blues, they would tell you, 'cornfield n*****s.'"

The heart of the Mississippi Delta didn’t provide many career options, so House, like most Black Americans grew up working on the old plantations, picking cotton, gathering tree moss(?), or whatever came his way. He married quite young, and against his parents’ wishes, to an older New Orleans woman named Carrie Martin. The moved to Centerville, Louisiana to help work her father’s farm, but House soured on both the marriage and farm-work after a couple years and ended both. Preaching became his next calling - he even found paid work for a time, but, like his father, he wrestled between drinking and bringing in the sheaths.

The challenge grew deeper when he got his first real, intoxicating sniff of the blues. It happened in 1927, though the specific accounts differ: the Musician Guide piece frames the moment as a chance encounter, while Wikipedia presents it as hanging out with “drinking companions.” Both sources agree on the two men in question - Willie Wilson and James McCoy - and the broad outlines: Son House saw one of them play bottleneck guitar and decided he’d found his calling. He’d gone from “Just putting your hands on an old guitar, why, looked like that was sin" to “Jesus, I like that! I believe I want to play one of them things” in an afternoon. He ran out and bought a $1.50 guitar, Wilson taught him how to tune with his ear and McCoy gave him a couple before they sent him on his way, and this is where his career starts. Sort of...