27: Robert Johnson (3 page)

Charley Patton was, in fact, the first blues superstar. ‘Patton was the first one that matters,' wrote Charles Shaar Murray. ‘The basic Delta blues style – from which the post-war Chicago style was primarily derived – was, by all contemporary accounts, essentially Patton's style: Son House, Bukka White, Mississippi Fred McDowell and – by extension – Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters et al were following in his footsteps . . . His [Patton's] signature tunes, ‘Pony Blues' and ‘Banty Rooster Blues', are basic building blocks of Delta blues . . . If any one artist could be truthfully described as the true father of Delta Blues, he's yer man.'
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Frequently in the area, playing the juke joints, Patton would often be in a duo with Willie Brown; when they performed Robert Johnson would literally sit at their feet.

Life was providing Robert Johnson with the kind of songwriting material eagerly sought by bluesmen. A handsome boy, girls flocked to him, notwithstanding that half the time he was living with Estella Coleman. Then in 1929, at the age of nineteen, Robert Johnson married Virginia Travis. Perhaps he was seeking a more stable life than he had so far experienced, believing he could create a family of his own. Virginia herself was only fourteen when they wed. Robert and Virginia moved in with his half-sister Bessie and her husband on the Klein plantation east of Robinsonville. He tried hard to be a loving, devoted husband, reprimanding his brother-in-law for his bumpy automobile driving when it was discovered that Virginia had fallen pregnant. Although the newly-married Robert endeavoured to make a go of sharecropping, however, he couldn't put down his guitar, and was often away from home, playing for money. But that was Robert Johnson; on one hand searching for a warm, loving environment, but on the other holding any such world at arms' length, off leading his own slippery existence, the one in which he had learned to survive.

And so it was that when Virginia went into labour with their first child, Robert was on the road. When he arrived home to Virginia's parents' home, where she had been taken when she had gone into labour, he found that both his by then sixteen-year-old bride and baby had died during childbirth, on 10 April 1930. The full wrath of the Travis family came down on him; his devotion to the dark practice of musicianship was believed by them to have contributed to Virginia's death.

‘According to some researchers,' wrote Elijah Wald,
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‘this was a major trauma for him and set him to his life of rambling, but as far as I know this is pure speculation.' Indeed, Robert already seemed to be living the peripatetic life of the musician.

The tragedy of Virginia's death was alleviated to an extent when, around this time, Robert Johnson met Son House, nine years older than himself, who – following on from Charley Patton – would serve as a further musical inspiration.

‘Robert Johnson was the man who brought the Mississippi Delta blues to its absolute peak of refinement, sophistication and self-conscious artistry. Muddy Waters was the man who transformed the Delta troubadour's art into an urban ensemble music. And Eddie James ‘Son' House Jr was the man who inspired and tutored both of them.'
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Son House, a Baptist preacher since the age of fifteen, was a bluesman of considerable mystique. Although he did not begin to learn the guitar until he was in his twenties, his blues career, which he alternated with preaching, had been interrupted by a two-year spell in the Parchman Farm prison camp for shooting a man dead.

In 1930 Son House had moved to Robinsonville, Mississippi, where Robert Johnson was living. This move was largely motivated by his friendship with local bluesman Willie Brown, and with Brown's friend Charley Patton. Almost as soon as he arrived in Robinsonville, Son House began playing in a duo with Willie Brown. Charley Patton had taken Son House and Willie Brown to Grafton, Wisconsin, to a Paramount recording session. Now House and Brown were playing at local dances. Of a film made of Son House when he was in his sixties, Elijah Wald wrote that on this evidence his ‘best performances remain the strongest – indeed perhaps the only – argument for the blues musician as a sort of secular voodoo master'
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Son House recalled how he would play at Funk's Corner Store in Robinsonville on Saturday nights. It was an open-air venue, the audience seated on wooden benches pulled up in front of the store. ‘Robert, he would be standing around, and he would listen too, and he got the idea that he'd like to play. So he started from that and everywhere that he'd get to hear us playing for a Saturday night ball, he would come and be there.'
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Although the younger man was inspired by Son House's presence, this was hardly reciprocated. ‘Such another racket you ever heard!' was how he described Robert Johnson's first attempts at performing in public. ‘It made people mad, you know. They'd come out and say, “Why don't y'all go in there and get that guitar from that boy! He's running people crazy with it.”'
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Moreover, according to Son House, Robert Johnson's parents were aghast that he was frequenting such lowlife joints as Funk's Corner Store: ‘Guys would fight all the time, kill up each other, shoot each other . . . So they got afraid and they didn't want him to be out to those kind of places. But he got involved with it so well, and he didn't like to work anyway, because his father and mother they were farmers.'
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Accordingly, Robert Johnson would resort to that staple strategy of errant progeny, climbing out of the window when his family was asleep.

‘He used to play harmonica when he was 'round about fifteen, sixteen years old. He could blow harmonica pretty good . . . But he got the idea that he wanted to play guitar. He used to sit down between me and Willie.'
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When Son House and Willie Brown would take a break, stepping outside into the cooler air, Robert would pick up their instruments ‘and go to bamming with it, you know? Just keeping noise, and the people didn't like that.'

Although berated for his seeming lack of talent by Son House, Robert Johnson was undeterred. Every time he and Willie would take a break, the boy would be picking up their instruments again: ‘“BLOO-WAH, BOOM-WAH” – a dog wouldn't want to hear it!'
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Scolded by his peer musicians and his step-father, Robert Johnson eventually lit out of the area: ‘Went somewhere over in Arkansas,' Son House inaccurately recalled.
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Perhaps the death of his wife Virginia triggered thoughts of his own origins. In 1930, soon after she had passed away, Robert Johnson went in search of his real father, journeying the 200 or so miles back to Hazlehurst, where he had been born. While hunting for Noah Johnson he came across Ike Zinnerman, who would become his mentor.

Isaiah ‘Ike' Zinnerman had been born four years before Robert Johnson in Grady, Alabama. His family were farmers, and at first he had followed that line of work. From an early age, however, music dominated his life. He began to play juke joints in the area, until he headed south, ending up at the village of Beauregard, Mississippi, in an area known as The Quarters, next to the local cemetery. There Ike worked on road construction, a beneficiary of early efforts to end the crippling financial depression by building highways through the region. To an extent, this endeavour was a success, increasing the flow of cash to the local stores.

While visiting his brother Herman, who lived a few miles away in tiny Martinsville, Ike Zinnerman first encountered Robert Johnson in a juke joint store known as One Stop, on the corner of Martinsville Road and Highway 51. Robert himself had come over from Hazlehurst, six or seven miles away.

Needing a bed for the night, Robert went back to Ike's two-bedroom house in The Quarters, where Ike lived with his wife Ruth. Both Ike and then Ruth had taken an instant shine to the highly likable teenager. For a time he virtually moved into their home, and was assiduously coached by Ike Zinnerman in guitar-playing technique, Ike teaching him everything that he knew. Ike also gave him further instruction in harmonica-playing, at which Robert already was relatively proficient.

When Ruth was sleeping, Ike and Robert would walk over to the cemetery and play there, deep into the night, in order not to disturb the Zinnerman family. Here, it can be claimed, lie the origins of the allegations that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil.

What is true about Robert Johnson is that he seemed to have what would come to be termed a ‘photographic memory'. He would only need to hear a tune once on the radio or on one of the new jukeboxes to be able to play it perfectly, note-for-note – not even immediately after having heard it, but a day or so later. He was, quite clearly, a very gifted man.

Among the songs he and Ike Zinnerman would play were ‘Walking Blues' and ‘Ramblin' on my Mind', which Ike allegedly had written but which were later credited to Robert. Together they were said to have written ‘I Believe I'll Dust My Broom' and ‘Come on in My Kitchen', later credited to Robert Johnson alone. There are even suggestions from Ike Zinnerman's children that their father actually wrote those two himself. Learning from Ike, Robert Johnson began keeping a notebook, in which he etched the lyrics to his songs. The influences on his new songs were clear: Kokomo Arnold, Peetie Wheatstraw, Lonnie Johnson,
Skip James
and Scrapper Blackwell.

In May 1931, at the local courthouse, he married Calletta ‘Callie' Craft, who was ten years older than him, with three young children from her two previous marriages. Callie doted on her young husband, sufficiently for her not to object to the nights he spent away with Ike Zinnerman.
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(Presumably Callie was unaware of the child he had fathered in the neighbourhood with one Vergie Mae Smith?)

Along with Ike Zinnerman, Robert was soon playing juke joints and work camps from Saturday evening until Sunday night. ‘As time went by, and he became more confident of his abilities, he played more by himself,' wrote Stephen LaVere.
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Callie would frequently accompany him to these shows, but he told no one that the doting woman with him was his wife. Perhaps he was concerned that information would cramp his style with other women. Occasionally Tommy Johnson, who was a neighbour, would play, and during other acts' performances, Robert Johnson would display his flair as a tap dancer, for which he was noted.
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Still learning about himself and his art, Robert Johnson often played around Hazlehurst under an assumed name; to many he was known simply as ‘RL',
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which he said stood for Robert Lonnie, a reference to the great Okeh recording artist Lonnie Johnson, a particular hero of his who had begun recording in 1925.
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Lonnie Johnson's early records were the first guitar recordings displaying a single-note soloing style with string bending and vibrato – the origin of blues and rock solo guitar. Some of Robert Johnson's recordings would genuflect stylistically to Lonnie Johnson.

Perpetually suffering from itchy feet, he then took Callie and her kids from south Mississippi to Clarksdale. But Callie was not as hale and hearty as she appeared. Uprooted from her home and friends and family, she went into decline, physically and mentally. Robert deserted her, and she called home to Hazlehurst for her family to retrieve her. Callie died some years later, and though Robert did return to Copiah County, neither she nor her family ever saw him again.

Son House estimated the length of Robert's disappearance at six months, after which he returned with a new guitar. Others recalled it differently; that he remained in Mississippi, but went further south, staying away for up to two years, they claimed. Whatever; away from those who knew him, Robert Johnson had more opportunity to be himself.

Upon his reappearance, however, Son House was astonished – Robert Johnson had come back with an extra, seventh string on his guitar. He also had become a fantastic player, juxtaposing shuffling rhythms and slide guitar leads. ‘And when that boy started playing, and when he got through, all our mouths were standing open. All! He was gone!'
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Local people would say that to acquire such skills, which they adjudged supernatural, he had sold his soul to the Devil. And Robert Johnson, who clearly had a sense of show-business mythology, was happy to encourage this; if they wanted that explanation they could have it.

For another seven days or so, Robert Johnson was in Robinsonville, but he was anxious to go on the road. Son House took it upon himself to explain to him the perils of life as a travelling musician, notably alcohol and girls. Robert Johnson,
however, paid no heed: ‘He was awful moufy – a terrible big chatterbox – proud as a peafowl.'
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For a time Johnson's ‘hangout', according to House, was in Bogalusa, Louisiana, home to the Great Southern Lumber Company, and almost 300 miles south.

Now it was around 1931. Robert Johnson was twenty years old. He still looked very young, yet considered himself to be a man. Those he met found him extremely likable. Even though he was round-shouldered and small, he was a good-looking fellow. Always well dressed, the rigours of spending much of his life on the road never seemed to affect Robert's spruce appearance. ‘He seems to have impressed everyone with his self-possession and confidence, his air of knowing what he was about, both on guitar and on the road,' wrote Elijah Wald.
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When he started to play, you would notice his fingers. ‘His sharp, slender fingers fluttered like a trapped bird,' said the bluesman Johnny Shines.
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In fact, Robert Johnson seemed a man of considerable paradox; for example, he consumed large amounts of alcohol, yet never appeared drunk. ‘He was very bashful, but very imposing,' said Shines.
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Although warm and amicable, he could also be moody and withdrawn. All who knew him considered him a loner, someone always on the move. Robert Johnson became noted for his ability to disappear suddenly, even walking offstage in the middle of a song, not to be seen again for a couple of weeks, recalled Johnny Shines.
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