27: Robert Johnson (4 page)

He probably had good reason to slink away; Robert Johnson clearly had several simultaneous relationships with women. But he also loved moving from town to town, some new adventure always on the edge of the horizon.

The permissive town of Helena, Arkansas, just across the Mississippi, was a favourite destination for Robert Johnson, as it was for most musicians, and he regularly played its Kitty Kat Club. Robert Lockwood's mother Estella lived in Helena, and Robert Johnson made camp in her home. From there he would play all over the Delta And in the years leading up to his death he would take his music to many parts of the United States, in taverns, in speakeasies, in mining and levee camps – even as far as New York and Canada.

Johnny Shines, whose mother was another girlfriend of Robert Johnson, was a man who shared a similar wandering minstrel heart. Johnny Shines had been born in 1915 in Memphis, where he started playing slide guitar at an early age, performing for money on the streets; Charley Patton had been an inspiration. When he moved to Hughes, Arkansas, in 1932, Johnny Shines started farming instead. After a chance meeting with Robert Johnson, he returned to music, working with Robert.

Most nights Robert Johnson was playing shows in the environs of West Helena, Arkansas. When Shines was taken to see him by a friend, he thought ‘Robert played a good guitar . . . about the greatest guitar player I'd heard.'
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The pair went on the road together, even though Johnson's style was to keep everyone at arm's length. From 1935 to 1937, Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines toured all over the eastern United States. Blues duos were commonplace, but Robert and Johnny rarely played together. They were travelling companions; on arriving in a town, they'd set up in opposite ends of a park, or on separate street corners, establishing a mood by their very presence. By the evening they might be playing one after the other in some local juke joint. Often ‘jukes' would be set up in people's homes, the furniture shifted to one side. Artists like Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines earned as much as six dollars a night; lesser acts would only get a dollar and maybe a meal. As the year wound down, there was money to be earned; in the fall it was the harvest for cotton and corn farmers. From September until January was the time to pull in money.

Jumping trains, they travelled to New York, where they played in speakeasies. They also journeyed to Chicago, Texas, Kentucky, Indiana, Canada. ‘I tagged along with him 'cause I knew he was heavy and I wanted to learn,' said Shines.
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As soon as people saw them in the street carrying their instruments, and then heard them play a snatch of a tune, they would be offered gigs. There were many fights, one or other of the pair waking up with a black eye or a loose tooth. ‘'Cause he'd jump on a gang of guys just as quick as he would one, and if you went to defend him, why, naturally you'd get it!'
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And what did Robert Johnson play? The purest blues? No, not at all; he played what people wanted to hear: polkas, Bing Crosby hits, country and western and hillbilly songs, show tunes, pop hit ballads.

Yet above all Robert Johnson wanted to have his own work recorded; an ambitious man, he knew this was the only way for his songs to be heard on a large scale. And there was only one man in the Delta who he knew could help him in this – H.C. (Henry Columbus) Speir, who owned a music store in the black district of Jackson, Mississippi, a white man with an awareness of the black community's distinctly separate tastes, to which he specifically catered. Speir essentially was a talent scout, and provided artists for – amongst others – Columbia, Victor, Okeh, Decca, Paramount, and Vocalion. Already he had been involved in the recording of Charley Patton, Son House, the Mississippi Sheiks, Skip James and Tommy Johnson, as well as other noteworthy bluesmen. (Ultimately H.C. Speir would come to be seen as one of the most influential figures in modern American music.)

In 1936 Robert Johnson came into Speir's store, seeking him out in the hope that he could start transferring the songs he had written to discs. In his shop Speir had a machine for vanity recording, for which he would charge five dollars a song. It was onto this device that prospective artists also would record demonstration discs. The songs would be recorded onto hardened beeswax on a metal plate for the master recording and sent to whichever company Speir was then working for. If they liked them, they would arrange for a session in a recording studio in one of the larger nearby cities such as Memphis. At the time that Robert Johnson approached him Speir was working for ARC, the American Recording Company. ARC's preferred southern recording location was Texas. Robert was given an address in San Antonio, Texas, and sent a train ticket. The bluesman was extremely excited that Speir was taken with what he had recorded for him, and that he was sending him to the Texas city to record. ‘I'm going to Texas to make records,' he proudly told his sister Carrie.
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The broad catalogue of material that the bluesman had become accustomed to performing live stood him in good stead. ‘Johnson was the first bluesman who systematically learned from records (as opposed to reworking his local traditions),' wrote Charles Shaar Murray, ‘and he seemingly conceived his songs as records in the first place. Rather than simply string out a series of common-stock verses over standard riffs and changes, he composed tight, set-piece songs custom-designed for the three-or-so-minute limits of a 78 rpm single.'
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The first Robert Johnson recording session was held on Monday, 23 November 1936, in room 414 of the Gunter Hotel at 205 East Houston Street in San Antonio. The sessions were set to conclude on Friday, 27 November. Don Law was the A & R man in charge, with Ernie Oertle the engineer.

At Law's suggestion, Robert also provided guitar backing for two groups of Mexican musicians, led by Andres Berlanga and Francisco Montalvo, and by Hermanos Barzaza. Suffering from nerves, he played with his back to the other musicians. Absurdly, this has been interpreted as further proof of his alleged diabolic leanings; rather, it seems simple proof of his nervousness on what was the biggest day of his life so far. And there is another, equally plausible explanation for Robert Johnson's insistence on recording while facing a corner of the room, with his back to everyone else present – that he had figured out that the natural reverberation of his voice and guitar bouncing off the two walls would make them sound larger on the mike.

On that first day Robert recorded eight songs. These included ‘Sweet Home Chicago', ‘I Believe I'll Dust My Broom', and ‘Terraplane Blues'.

The next day, however, Tuesday, Don Law had to bail Robert out of the Bexar County jail. He was in on a vagrancy charge, a common problem for black Americans wandering the streets of southern cities during the daytime – why weren't they off picking cotton someplace? Later Robert called Don Law from his hotel room, saying he was lonesome. And that as a consequence of this lonesomeness he had someone with him, a woman, who required fifty cents, while Robert didn't even have a nickel to his name.
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On the Thursday, Robert Johnson recorded ‘32-20 Blues'. The next day, Friday, 27 November 1936, he put another seven tunes on wax. These included ‘Cross Road Blues', the song that became inseparable from the curious mythology established around the soon-to-be-legendary bluesman.

Returning home, Robert Johnson was flush, with hundreds of dollars in his pocket – more cash than he had ever had in his life.

‘Terraplane Blues' was released as a 78 rpm single, becoming a regional hit and selling over 5,000 copies. Now Robert Johnson could be heard on the new invention, the jukebox. He was a star and celebrity. The song seemed to be an ode to a desirable car, the Terraplane, but is actually a metaphor for sex. Manufactured by Detroit's Hudson Motor Car Company, the Terraplane was inexpensive but powerful, with sensual deco lines; John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson's getaway vehicle of choice, its very name carried a certain outlaw cachet.

Pleased with the success of ‘Terraplane Blues', ARC booked a second set of sessions with Robert Johnson on 20 and 21 June 1937, on the third floor of a warehouse in the Vitagraph building in the business district of Dallas, Texas. The sessions were scheduled for a Saturday and Sunday – specifically, so that traffic noise in the bustling Texan town would be at a minimum.

It was a typically hot Texas June day. Pails of ice were brought into the studio. Robert Johnson recorded in between the Crystal City Ramblers and Zeke Williams and his Rambling Cowboys, appropriate company for a man for whom rambling was – as he had sung in the San Antonio sessions – always on his mind.

Arguably, the second of these two Robert Johnson recording sessions was even more successful than the first. Out of it, for example, came ‘Hellhound on My Trail' – ‘universally recognized as the apogee of the blues'.
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It was released as a 78 rpm single on the Vocalion label in September 1937, after Robert Johnson's death.
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In Dallas on 20 June, alone, he recorded ten songs: ‘Hell Hound on My Trail', ‘Little Queen of Spades', ‘Malted Milk', ‘Drunken Hearted Man', ‘Me and the Devil Blues', ‘Stop Breakin' Down Blues', ‘Travelling Riverside Blues', ‘Honeymoon Blues', ‘Love In Vain Blues' and ‘Milkcow's Calf Blues', in that order. As at the San Antonio sessions, second takes were made of most of the numbers.

*

Robert Johnson's recording success probably hastened his end. Always adored by women, this was only enhanced by the success of ‘Terraplane Blues'. His complex web of girlfriends, their husbands and boyfriends, these older women, mother figures off whom he would live – or , at least, survive – seemed to be circling him, like vultures. Ironically, he faced deadly danger after an entanglement with a younger woman.

The demise of Robert Johnson has spawned a couple of theories other than that he was poisoned to death: that the true cause was death from syphilis, which was possibly hereditary; that he died of Marfan syndrome, a connective tissue disorder. Unfortunately for these imaginative speculations, there were credible witnesses to the events leading up to the end of Robert Johnson on 16 August 1938. Specifically, Robert's fellow bluesmen David ‘Honeyboy' Edwards, with whom he was booked to play at a dance on Friday 12 August 1938, near Greenwood, Mississippi, and Sonny Boy Williamson, who was also on the bill.

During July 1938, Robert Johnson had started an affair with the young wife of Ralph Davis, a 39-year-old sawmill worker. Robert would rendezvous with the woman every Monday at the home of her sister, in Baptist Town in Greenwood, and they would spend the day together.

During this period Robert Johnson stayed with friends who lived on the nearby Star of the West Plantation, playing dances around the neighbourhood.

For the night of 13 August, Robert was offered a dance at a country juke joint at the intersection of Route 49 and Route 82; he was, in other words, going down to the crossroads.
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Around eleven in the evening, after he had been playing in the juke joint for two hours, Robert Johnson paused for a break. He was handed a jar of corn whisky – bootleg whisky, as this was a dry state – by one Craphouse Bea, the very woman with whom he had been having the affair, the wife of Ralph Davis, the sawmill worker who also ran this juke joint. Unbeknownst to Bea, her husband had dissolved mothballs in the liquor; he was fully aware of the sexual relationship between his wife and the bluesman, and now he was taking his revenge. But did Ralph Davis intend to kill Robert Johnson? Possibly not – mothballs in alcohol was a common method of administering poison, though it was not commonly fatal. Sometimes it was used to remove drunkenly troublesome individuals from bars – they would vomit and almost pass out, but generally recover after a few days. ‘This man had a good looking woman, and he didn't want to lose her. And Robert was about to take her away,' said Honeyboy Edwards.
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Robert Johnson returned to the stage, where he resumed playing. At around two in the morning, however, he became violently ill. A man called Tush Hog, who had become friends with him, took him back to his home on the plantation. Although the estate had a doctor on call, the cause of Robert's illness could not be identified, and the attendance of the medical practitioner was not requested by the plantation owner.

With his immune system weakened by the effects of the poisoned whisky, Robert Johnson caught pneumonia.

Robert Johnson's mother told the blues archivist Alan Lomax that she was present at her son's death. ‘When I went in where he at, he layin' up in bed with his guitar crost his breast. Soon's he saw me, he say, “Mama, you all I been waitin for.” “Here,” he say, and give me his guitar. “Take and hang this thing on the wall, cause I done pass all that by. That what got me messed up, Mama. It's the devil's instrument, just like you said. And I don't want it no more.” And he died while I was hangin his guitar on the wall.'
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All things considered, some might expect Robert Johnson's mother to provide such a lyrical description of her son's end.

However, it was pneumonia that the pioneering bluesman succumbed to on Monday 16 August 1938. An affair between Robert Johnson's older mother and a younger man had brought him into life. Now his own cuckolding of an older man had brought about his end.

It was just the kind of subject matter that inspired people to write blues songs.

Clapton, Eric,
Clapton: The Autobiography
(London: Century) 2007

Cobb, James C.
The Most Southern Place on Earth: the Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press) 1992

Dylan, Bob,
Chronicles Volume One
(New York: Simon & Schuster) 2004

Evans, David,
Tommy Johnson
(London: Studio Vista) 1971