by Alan Rodgers
The bluesmen of the Delta call the song Judgment Day — because that’s when they’ll sing it. Gabriel will blow his horn, and all the Hoodoo Doctors everywhere will hear, and they’ll sing Judgment Day. And the sound and the resonance that rise up from their truest song will shatter the Eye of the World.
When it shatters the Apocalypse will be upon us.
Terrible things that weigh on a song — things that would hang like doom impending if Judgment Day were just another simple four-four melody. But Judgment Day it isn’t just a song; it’s an unmasterable riff that lives only in the deepest secret hearts of Hoodoo Doctors. Only one man alive has ever deduced the song and sung it just exactly so — and that man was Robert Johnson, and what he sang and when he sang it are the deep root beneath this tale.
Robert Johnson
Greenville, Mississippi
August 1938
Robert Johnson played the bar in Greenville, Mississippi, for two weeks before he got in trouble. Some say he should’ve wound up dead even sooner than he did — and God knows those folks may be right. Certainly Johnson spent those weeks begging for trouble. He played up to the owner’s lady, snarled at the customers — and worst of all he let his music fill the air with possibility and magic. Every moment Johnson played, men found themselves enraptured by women not their wives, and women found the mystery inside their hearts that leaves love an unrequited question, and families broke on the altar of love and possibility that was Robert Johnson’s bone guitar.
The owner didn’t take it well. He wasn’t any hoodoo man, but he knew enough about the blues to see what Johnson was about. By the time Johnson played his club three days that man had to wish he’d never heard of any Robert Johnson.
But no matter how he felt, he never said a word. Maybe the man was too used-up inside to care, or maybe he had a long fuse.
Or maybe the man who owned the Greenville bar spent those weeks giving Johnson rope enough to hang himself.
On what was to be Johnson’s last night in Greenville — Saturday, August 13, 1938 — Sonny Boy Williamson joined him on the club’s lineup. Williamson got to Greenville two hours after sundown, took a room in the local boardinghouse, stowed his gear, and headed to the bar. He got there near the end of the first set, just a moment after Johnson began to sing his “Terraplane Blues.”
Williamson had been hearing about Johnson for years, but till that moment he’d neither seen nor heard the man.
What he saw and heard when he entered the bar astounded him. First he saw the owner — a small, dark, nasty-looking man who’d come to Memphis in July to book them both — saw the owner glowering at Johnson from behind the bar.
And then he saw Johnson, standing on a stage at the far end of the room, playing his guitar.
The room from here to there was thick with hoodoo, and the hoodoo man was Robert Johnson. His music was in the smoky half-lit air, and the air held the crowd the way the river holds the land; everyone who heard him knew him, and they owned him as he owned them. Drifts of smoke writhed and twisted through the air, following the hoodoo currents swirling through every heart and ear; Johnson howled and the mirrors brayed back to him, echoing his song.
Sonny Boy Williamson was only a journeyman bluesman in 1938, but even then he had the sight and the talent to see Johnson was a hoodoo man. He worked his way to the front of the room, where he stood watching from the shadows left of stage.
Johnson saw him watching.
He knew who Williamson was, and he reveled in the awe he saw in Williamson’s eyes; he played to it just as he’d played all week to the desire in the heart of the owner’s lady.
Halfway through “Terraplane” he began to improvise, bending the long mournful howls that punctuate the lyrics until they dominated the song, metamorphosing the blues into an animal cry in the half-lit darkness of the bar.
Three wolves howled to answer him from the hills above Greenville. Someone gasped; when Williamson turned toward the gasp he saw the owner’s lady staring at Johnson with eyes full of desire, fear, and awe.
She shivered as Johnson’s song rose to harmonize with the howling of the wolves.
Williamson took it all in uneasily. Johnson was getting himself in deep — deeper than anybody but a Hoodoo Doctor ever ought to go. And no matter what kind of talent Johnson had, he wasn’t any Hoodoo Doctor.
Of course he wasn’t any Hoodoo Doctor! Robert Johnson was alive.
When the set was over Johnson went to the owner-lady’s table and ordered a bottle of whiskey. Williamson looked up just in time to see the owner gaping at the sight of Robert Johnson sitting down beside his wife. The owner’s face was a mask of rage, and Williamson knew what was in that man’s heart. He didn’t need no hoodoo to see it, either: the owner man was mad enough to kill, and maybe he meant to do it.
“Williamson!” Johnson shouted, knocking back the last dregs of an old glass of whiskey. “Sonny Boy Williamson!”
He waved Williamson to the table, pushed a chair toward him.
Williamson hesitated for a moment. Johnson was a gloater; he had the kind of vanity that makes some men lord it over everyone they find. Williamson had already seen enough to know Johnson was about to run a line of shit on him. He didn’t want to sit for it — but when he thought a moment he knew there was no way to avoid it short of walking out of the room, away from the bar, getting back in his beat-up car, and driving away from Greenville.
Williamson wasn’t ready for that. He needed the money he’d make in Greenville — needed it bad. So he left the shadows beside the stage to join Johnson and the owner-lady. He smiled at Johnson, and he tried to make it friendly, but that wasn’t any use: Williamson dreaded Robert Johnson, and both men knew it.
“I been hearing about you, Sonny Boy,” Johnson said, all coy and patronizing, like a nice white planter coddling his boys. “I hear you know your licks.”
Then he laughed just a little and so quietly, like they both knew it didn’t matter worth a damn whether Williamson could play or not, because there was a talent in the room, very near a Hoodoo Doctor made whole alive, and that was Robert Johnson in the flesh.
Williamson laughed long enough to be polite, but he thought Johnson was out of his mind. Johnson had the gift, all right — but he was alive. No one ever lived to be a Hoodoo Doctor, and everybody who ever tried ended up in hell — or someplace worse.
When Johnson was done laughing at him, Williamson leaned forward across the table to look him in the eye. “I know that tune,” Williamson said, whispering. “But I wouldn’t ever sing it.”
The song he meant was Judgment Day, and they both knew it. It was a lying boast: Williamson didn’t really know Judgment Day. Three times in the summer of 1937 he’d heard whispers of the melody inside his head, but he’d never imagined the whole, and would not yet conceive it for a lifetime.
“I bet you do,” Johnson said, derisively. “You know it all, don’t you, Sonny Boy?” He laughed again, this time mocking Williamson openly.
Williamson scowled and swore. “You know I do,” he said. “Day going to come you wished you had a little respect.”
Robert Johnson pushed his chair away from the table. “My ass,” he said. He grabbed his guitar and started toward the stage.
Before he got out of reach Williamson grabbed his arm and pulled him back toward the table. It wasn’t hard; Johnson (for all his bluster) was a scrawny man where Williamson was muscle-bound and stocky.
“This is my set,” Williamson said. “Don’t you need to rest your chops?” He stood, put his free arm on Johnson’s back, and eased him into a chair. Lifted his guitar by the handle on the case, and stepped up to the stage.
There wasn’t a day in his life where Sonny Boy Williamson could hold a candle to Robert Johnson, but God knows he tried to lift the light that evening. He played “Honest Woman Blues” and “Jac
kweed” like he’d never played them in his life. As he sang three verses of Judgment Day came to him, and he sang around them, moving the melody of “Jackweed” sideways and away until the tune metamorphosed toward the chords whispered in his ear, and though the words he sang were words from “Jackweed,” everyone who heard Sonny Boy Williamson sing that night saw the Eye of the World weeping in his dreams.
When “Jackweed” was over the applause was thunderous, and even Robert Johnson — still watching angrily from the owner’s table — regarded him with a measure of respect.
But Williamson faltered in his third number, when he heckled Robert Johnson with three mocking verses of Johnson’s own “Hellhound on My Trail.” Williamson should have known better, even in 1938: using the music for ridicule makes a mockery of the gift. Someone snickered halfway through the second verse of “Hellhound”; before he could sing another line the spell that bound the room to “Jackweed” was broken. Johnson sneered at him, and gestured; Williamson knew he was defeated. He played the third verse to a close, climbed down from the stage, and rejoined Johnson at the owner’s table.
When he got there Johnson was whispering in the owner-lady’s ear. She was smiling, glowing satisfied triumphant like she was his and he was hers, like she owned him and she liked it.
That man is going to get himself in some awful kind of trouble, Williamson thought as Johnson kissed the owner-lady too long too deep too intimate right there in the open where her fuming husband had to watch. He thought about Johnson sneering at him, thought about a gesture he’d made toward Williamson on the stage. And he wanted to think It’ll serve that bastard right, but he didn’t have the heart. Williamson was a bluesman, even if he was only a journeyman in 1938, and he loved the gift with all his heart. It wasn’t in him to wish evil on a man who had the gift in him so strong as Johnson did.
And maybe Johnson heard him thinking what he thought. Because the dark thin man got to his feet as Williamson approached the table, and he greeted Williamson warmly. “You ain’t all bad,” he said. He didn’t say it nasty or derogatory, the way Williamson would’ve thought. Just the opposite, in fact: Robert Johnson reached out to take Williamson’s hand. He slapped the big man on the back and smiled. “You ain’t bad at all, Sonny Boy,” he said, and he said it like he meant it. “Barmaid!” he shouted. “What happened to my whiskey?”
Almost like she’d known he was about to call her, the bar girl came around the corner with the whiskey on a tray. She set the bottle and three glasses on the table and left without meeting their eyes.
The seal on the bottle was cracked and oh-so-carefully nestled back in place. It looked plain enough, and any everyday man would have took it for a ordinary whiskey bottle. But both bluesmen had the sight, and they could see the poison sifting through the liquor where the owner-man had poured it in.
Robert Johnson laughed. “That fool thinks he’s going to kill me,” he said. He laughed again, laughed like he’d just told the sweetest joke he’d ever heard.
And maybe it was — but if it was, Williamson didn’t see the humor. “You ought to have a care,” he said. “It doesn’t do a man no good to gather hate like that.”
Johnson took the bottle from the table and twisted off the cap. “You know who I am,” he said. “You think I’m afraid?”
Williamson scowled. “I think you ought to be.”
Hoodoo Doctors eat poison all the time. It doesn’t touch them, and wouldn’t hurt a one of them, even if he were alive — because the truth in the music inside a Hoodoo Doctor is enough to purify any poison. But Robert Johnson wasn’t any Hoodoo Doctor, no matter how he held himself in high regard.
“I’m not afraid,” Johnson said. “The gift is in me. The gift will purify me, no matter what the poison is.” And he hefted back the bottle, and opened his mouth to drink —
But before the liquor touched his lips Williamson was on his feet, knocking the bottle from Johnson’s hand. It tumbled to the floor and shattered; in three places the whiskey caught fire as it spread across the floorboards.
Johnson stared at Williamson, stunned and angry. For a moment Williamson thought he was about to attack him. “You got to watch yourself, Robert Johnson,” Williamson said, tamping out the fire on the floorboards with the leather sole of his boot. “Just because you got a gift don’t mean the ones who hate you don’t got theirs.”
The owner-lady pushed her chair away from the table and hurried away.
Johnson didn’t even notice. He scowled and swore, reached across the table and grabbed the big man by the collar. He shook Williamson three times — hard and masterfully, as though their sizes were reversed. Then he pulled him across the table and whispered angrily. “I swear to God, boy,” he said. “I swear to God, you ever do a thing like that to me again, I’ll peel your hide right off your bones. I swear to God I will.” He eased Williamson back into his seat. “Barmaid,” he shouted, “we got a mess over here. And we need more whiskey.”
The second bottle was poisoned, just as the first had been. Johnson didn’t care; he opened the bottle, threw away the cork, and drank deeply of the poison. Williamson tried to stop him — not because he didn’t fear the threat, because he knew damn well Johnson could make it good — Williamson tried to stop him because he could see Johnson and the poison, and he knew that no matter what kind of bluesman Robert Johnson was, he wasn’t any Hoodoo Doctor. And there’s no way a decent man can stand by and watch while a fool poisons himself.
But it didn’t matter how he tried. Because Johnson had a hoodoo on him, and no matter how he struggled he could not leave his chair. He watched Robert Johnson lift the bottle to his lips, watched the flames that only he could see swirling ripple in the whiskey where the owner’s giftie poison corrupted good brown mash. And he wanted to shout, but couldn’t do that, either. All he could do was watch Robert Johnson drink the fiery poison down.
Johnson caught fire before the bottle was half empty. Williamson kept expecting him to open his eyes and see the hoodoo flames around him, but he never did. Later when he thought back he realized that Johnson never saw them — that he was too young and vain and reckless to realize that the barkeeper had a gift of his own, even if it was a petty gift for poison. He never saw the ripping sheets of flame that Sonny Williamson saw consume him; he never imagined he was going to die until the last drop of whiskey was inside him and the flames consumed his heart. But his eyes went wide when he felt his center burning, and the bottle fell from his hand to shatter and disintegrate as the hoodoo poison broke the shards again and again, and now there were no shards of glass across the filthy barroom floor, no shards of glass but only glassy grains of sand as Robert Johnson died.
Slowly, slowly, the poison and the hoodoo burning and reburning, consuming the man and his heart and his gift. He fought the poison as best he could, but it wasn’t any use. He stumbled, caught himself on a table, backed away and stumbled into a wall.
On the wall there was a kerosene lantern. Johnson brushed against it as he fell to the ground — upsetting the reservoir, sending the wick and the glass tumbling in opposite directions.
That was bad.
Bad bad.
Because the wick, still burning, found its way to a bale of straw someone had brought in the night before to use as wallflower seating. In a moment the hay caught fire, and now the fire found the spilled kerosene soaking in the floorboards.
Now the whole bar was on fire.
Sonny Boy Williamson lifted Robert Johnson from the fiery floor where he lay dying, and carried him to safety.
And watched over the man, as best he could, as he lay sweaty and convulsing all night in the dewy Mississippi grass.
Not long before morning the owner-lady found them. She was bruised and bloody, and the moment Sonny Boy Williamson saw her he knew that that small and angry husband of hers had beat her half to death. She looked hateful and
vengeful, like she meant to do her husband something even worse than he’d done her.
“You follow me,” she said, and Williamson lifted half-dead Robert Johnson up onto his shoulder and carried him into the hills. “I got a shack up here,” the owner-lady said. “It come to me through my mamma. That man don’t even know it.”
She led them to a tiny weather-beaten place that looked down on Greenville from the ridge above the town. Inside, the shack was spare but tidy — there wasn’t any furniture, wasn’t anything at all but a sooty lantern and a worn straw mattress. But there was a gift in that place, and Williamson could feel it — the kind of gift that a mother passes to her daughter, and to her daughter, and to her daughter unto her, and he knew just what that place was. He couldn’t see it the way he could see the fire still flickering to consume Robert Johnson, but he could feel it, and he knew that it was there.
“He’s going to be okay,” the owner-lady said as Williamson set Robert Johnson to rest on the mattress. She stopped to whisper in the sick man’s ear. “You’re going to be fine, Robert Johnson, I know you are,” she said. That sounded like a lie, but it wasn’t a lie Williamson was going to argue with. “I’m going to call a gospel man. He’ll make you right with God,” she said. “He’s a man who knows how to stop a hoodoo.”
Williamson shook his head. “This man needs a Doctor,” he said. They both knew he wasn’t talking about any physician from the white doctor school.
“The gospel man knows Doctoring,” she said. “He knows it best of all.”
“He ain’t going to do no good,” Williamson said. “There’s a graveyard by the crossroads. Go there tonight. Clap the bones three times and tell them Robert Johnson needs him a Doctor.”
“I already called the gospel man from Beaumont,” she said. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
