Strong in its composition and execution, both lyrically and musically, “Me and the Devil Blues” has gained primary importance among those theorists who see it as evidence of Robert’s alleged pact with the devil at the crossroads. His use of the devil theme seems, however, to be more of a nod to the many devil songs that preceded him than it is an admission of allegiance to the dark forces. Casey Bill Weldon’s remake of Clara Smith’s “Done Sold My Soul to the Devil,” Lonnie Johnson singing about “making whoopee with the Devil,” or Peetie Wheatstraw calling himself “the Devil’s Son-in-Law” are only a few examples of earlier blues musicians mentioning the devil in their music or self-promotion. Certainly Robert was aware of these recordings and both the agency and humor they could bring to the artist and the song’s performance. Almost always such songs were done with an element of humor. As other scholars have pointed out, black folklore is replete with the use of humor when addressing violence against its people. As Muddy Waters even said to Dave Van Ronk after hearing the latter perform “Hoochie Coochie Man”: “But you know, that’s supposed to be a funny song.”18 And when Robert sings the third verse, “I’m going to beat my woman until I get satisfied,” the satisfaction to which he referred might have been sexual satisfaction, not a satisfaction from physically beating her. Although beating a woman was a fairly common theme in the blues, and that might have been what he meant, his pleasure may have come from other sources and not from the physical violence. There are literally dozens of blues, from Ma Rainey’s 1927 “Slow Drivin’ Moan” to Curly Weaver’s 1928 “No No Blues” to Big Bill Broonzy’s 1930 “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” in which the idea of being satisfied was related to sexual or romantic satisfaction. There seems little doubt that this is what Robert meant. Such a line probably amused most males in his audience, and rang somewhat true to the females. His final verse is something of a contradiction and doesn’t entirely fit with the preceding verses. On the one hand he gives specific instructions as to how and why he should be buried by the highway side—“So my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride”—yet he adds the spoken, “Baby I don’t care where you bury me when I’m dead and gone.” Why he should offer such a disparity in his lyric is a puzzle.
“Honeymoon Blues” was his eighth song, all eight requiring two or three performances. The transition between “Honeymoon Blues” and “Love in Vain” is of particular interest because just prior to the second song one can hear Robert say, in his normal street voice, “I wanna go on with that next one myself.” His spoken words were not heard by the public until the 1991 centennial release of his complete recordings. If you listen carefully there seems to be no doubt those are his words, but that statement makes little sense out of context. Obviously Robert had been performing all his songs by himself, so he couldn’t have been referring to playing solo. Was he referring to setting the time himself? Could he have been switching the order of the songs he had intended to record? Robert had just finished recording “Honeymoon Blues,” in which he specifically called out to a woman named Betty Mae: “Betty Mae, Betty Mae, you shall be my wife someday, I wants a little sweet girl, that will do anything that I say.” This is only the second time in any of his songs that he actually uses the name of a woman. It seems more than coincidental that in the very next song, “Love in Vain,” he once again makes a specific reference to a woman by name, this time Willie Mae: “Ou hou ou ou ou, hoo, Willie Mae … All my love’s in vain.”
In “Honeymoon Blues,” Johnson is deeply in love with Betty Mae but needs to depart, promising that he will return with a marriage license. In “Love in Vain” it is Willie Mae who is apparently leaving, and Johnson mourns the fact. At that time in the South the use of Mae as a middle name for a woman was fairly common, but in spite of that it seems extremely curious that in two successive songs, two of only three songs in which Robert actually uses a woman’s name, he refers to the first as Betty Mae and the second as Willie Mae. Could he be referring to the same woman in his mind? Could he have recorded “Honeymoon Blues” and immediately realized he had made a pledge to Willie Mae to record a song about her and quickly wanted to “go on with the next one”? These are all conjectures and we’ll never know, but these two songs, back to back, each mentioning a woman with the name Mae mediated by Robert’s statement remain a minor mystery.
“Love In Vain” was based upon a melody used by the popular city blues singer Leroy Carr from his 1935 Bluebird release “When the Sun Goes Down.” The song was so popular that both Memphis Minnie and Bumble Bee Slim covered it for the Vocalion and Decca labels. But Robert struggled with the verses to get the master that Law wanted. Its lyrics were similar to a May release by Black Ivory King (David Alexander) on Decca 7304. Recorded in February 1937 in Chicago, “The Flying Crow” heralded a streamlined passenger train on the Kansas City Southern that ran from Port Arthur, Texas, into Shreveport and then on to Kansas City. Robert’s lyrics explained: “When the train it left the station, with two lights on behind / Well the blue light was my blues … and the red light was my mind.” In contrast, Black Ivory King sang: “There she goes, there she goes, with two lights left behind (X2). One is my trouble, and other’s my ramblin’ mind.”
Robert had been recording at least two takes of each song for a full day and had to be tired, and there is no sound of jocularity in his spoken words like one hears in the voices of Son House, Willie Brown, and Charlie Patton during their 1930 Grafton session. Robert’s voice is intent and direct: this one is mine. Both takes of “Love in Vain” are virtually identical, with only an eight-second difference in length between them. In both versions he croons sad lyrics about a love who’s leaving, using a powerful image of a passenger train leaving the station with his lover onboard. His last verse was patterned after Leroy Carr’s moaned vocables in “When the Sun Goes Down,” but Robert added his loved one’s name—Willie Mae—fulfilling his promise to put Willie Mae Powell’s name on a record.
Map of Redwater, Texas. Bruce Conforth
Robert ended his recording career with an old standard blues that dated back to pre-record folk tradition: “Milkcow’s Calf Blues.” Son House had included one of the lines in his 1930 recording of “My Black Mama Part 1”: “Well if you see my milkcow, tell her to hurry home / I ain’t had no milk since that cow been gone.” Kokomo Arnold also recorded a more complete version of the song in 1934. It seems that Robert, not realizing this was to be his last recording opportunity, chose a song he probably heard as a child.
Robert completed ten songs that day, walked out of the Park Avenue third-floor studio, and sent a postcard to his half sister Carrie in Memphis:
My dear sister,
Hope you are okay. I will be home soon. Tell all hello. I haven’t wrote Louis. Sorry, but haven’t had time. Tell mother I wrote you. Yours truly. Robert Johnson.19
With another pocketful of cash, Robert began his trek out of Texas on Highway 67 to rejoin Johnny Shines, who had been waiting for Robert’s return. The two met again, as planned, in Redwater, a small community of approximately 250 persons, twelve miles from Texarkana. It’s directly on Highway 67, the most direct route for Robert to take to meet Shines. One day in late June Shines was playing on its streets, as he had been doing in Texarkana, when he saw a slim guitarist and recognized him as his friend, Robert Johnson, on his way back. “I caught him in a place called Red Water [sic], Texas. Robert had made his records.”20
The two found playing jobs to stay in Texas for a while, and then they followed Highway 67 north to Little Rock, Arkansas. From there Robert continued on north and east and Shines headed to his mother’s home near Hughes. It was early fall 1937. “We worked Texas until the cold weather began to set in, then we headed for the southern part of Texas. Robert and I came back into Arkansas as far as Little Rock. I can’t recall just what happened, but my mother was in Arkansas not too far from Hughes and I ended up there. Robert went on, but I stayed in Hughes. We worked around there together, and most of the time individually. What
I mean by that is that there were very few songs that Robert wanted to play with anyone, so we played mostly in turns. Hughes was a small town, but if anything was going on anywhere it was there. We made the paydays at Stuttgart, Cotton Plant, Snow Lake, and many other places, together and sometimes separately. If we were both in Hughes at the same time we shared the room, or whoever was there on Monday paid the rent.”21
Soon Robert was returning regularly to Robinsonville to play for friends like Elizabeth Moore. The pride he exhibited after his San Antonio sessions was now built up even further by the fact that he had just returned from another session making more records. To Moore, his most memorable recordings were “Terraplane Blues” and “Kind Hearted Woman Blues,” his first release from the San Antonio session.
The rural jukes Robert returned to had a very important function in his life: he made more money there than in towns such as Greenwood and Clarksdale where cafes had jukeboxes that could hold ten records of the latest race issues, including his own. The noise in a cafe made it difficult for an acoustic guitar player to be heard, and the owner didn’t have to pay a live performer if he had a jukebox. The owner also got half of the take from the jukebox company. There was a second, perhaps even more important, reason for Robert to like country jukes: he had no competition on Saturday nights on the plantations. With his reputation, he could play on the streets on Saturdays for tips and to advertise where he would be playing that night for a dance. Because of his records, he would draw sharecroppers from miles around. They came in wagons, on mules, or in old beaten-up, run-down cars. The dances were held indoors, where old rusty black kerosene lamps provided dim lights, and the food was cooked over a wood-burning stove. In the summer, catfish and brim were fried in big, black-iron pans over a blazing wood fire in the backyard.
Robert had been in and out of big cities like Memphis and Saint Louis, where he faced competition from recorded guitar and piano players. But there were few, if any, pianos available for black musicians on plantations. And the women loved a guitar man who could sing to them personally. But their boyfriends and husbands hated it. That’s what made the juke houses especially dangerous. Joe Callicott vibrantly recalled the dangers of playing in a juke and attracting the wrong women. “I say, look here honey, your man gonna get jealous. You gonna get me killed. When ’em women get to shakin’ them fannies and start talkin’ that trash to you, you gotta be careful,” Callicott emphasized. “If you don’t, you might get killed.”22
But juking was Robert’s life and livelihood. He couldn’t seem to stay away from imminent dangers or dangerous women. He had no love for working in the cotton fields and the church had no appeal. All he could do was keep moving and try to outrun danger, both imaginary and real. He was moving toward his most impressive journey.
15
WHEN I LEAVE THIS TOWN I’M GON’ BID YOU FARE, FAREWELL
As Robert was taking advantage of his newly found renown among the Delta’s black folks, one thousand miles away his reputation was being made in an entirely different way and to an entirely different audience. A Columbia record producer was reviewing his records for the first time—and, during his lifetime, probably the last.
John Henry Hammond II was born into privilege. The youngest child and only son of John Henry Hammond and Emily Vanderbilt Sloane he very early became a lover of black culture and music. Romantic anecdotes relate that Hammond acquired this love of black music from listening to his family’s black maid sing gospel or blues songs, but by his own admission he actually acquired his taste for jazz during a 1923 trip to London when he was thirteen years old, where he heard the great jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet. Upon his return to America he began buying race records from stores in Harlem.1 He disappointed his family by dropping out of Yale to move to Greenwich Village to listen to, write about, and produce black musicians. Hammond seemed to have a great ear and eye for talent, and among his musical successes were introducing Benny Goodman to Fletcher Henderson, as well as convincing the former (his future brother-in-law) to integrate his band. Hammond also produced some of Bessie Smith’s last records, and in 1933 he “discovered” Billie Holiday. He also wrote for numerous music magazines, and his word was highly respected.
Although distinctly involved in left-wing circles, Hammond was initially protective of his family name when he wrote a column for the March 1937 issue of the Communist magazine New Masses. Using the pseudonym Henry Johnson, in the article he included a short albeit glowing review of Robert’s records. It read,
Before closing, we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest Negro blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us in the tunes “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” and “Terraplane Blues,” to mention only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur.2
Ever since John Lomax had introduced Lead Belly to left-wing, East Coast society in 1933 the songster had been a darling novelty of a truly exotic savage who could be both charming and entertaining at their concerts or affairs. He was either heralded as the greatest Negro songster to be recorded, or vilified as thieving and dangerous. He was considered many things, but of all of them he was certainly considered authentic. For Hammond, even writing under an assumed name, to call Lead Belly a “poseur” and to champion another musician in his place was almost heresy. But Hammond wasn’t finished mentioning Robert in print. In the July issue of the same magazine Hammond (this time using his own name) again praised Robert: “Hot Springs’ star is still Robert Johnson who has turned out to be a worker on a Robinsville [sic], Miss., plantation.”3
It was these two musical comments that began the Robert Johnson myth among white scholars, musicologists, folklorists, and the public. Whether Hammond knew the inaccuracies he was reporting—that the recordings were not made in deepest Mississippi or that Robert was not a plantation worker from Hot Springs—didn’t matter. His few published lines created a mythic Robert Johnson for a white public.
Even unaware of the reviews, however, Robert knew that there was something special about the home of John Henry Hammond II and New Masses, New York City. Charley Patton had recorded there, and the nearly seven million inhabitants necessitated hundreds of clubs and speakeasys, radio stations and theaters, professional sports and arts venues. In less than three months the prospects of money and fame would draw Robert to the city’s streets.
While Shines went to Hughes, Robert continued his rambling into Memphis and then north to Saint Louis, where he met Henry Townsend, a long-standing professional musician who had started his recording career in 1929. Townsend’s earliest years had been spent in Shelby, Mississippi, and then near Lula, listening to the local blues musicians. During the 1930s he recorded with musicians Roosevelt Sykes, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Robert Nighthawk, and Mississippi-born Big Joe Williams and Walter Davis. With Robert’s recordings only recently released, Townsend was unaware of his abilities and had no knowledge of Robert as a musician of any note: “his name didn’t mean anything to me.” He recalled, “How I really came across Robert, I was playing at one of the fellow’s homes, it was, we called it a speakeasy, but it was just a big house that had plenty of room, and I was doing work for him more or less weekends, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. So one of the Saturdays I came over there, he had hired Robert Johnson and I thought at that time maybe he’s got rid of me but he wouldn’t let me leave, he said, ‘No, I want both of you.’ He was only giving me, I think it was two dollars, and everything, all the drinks and all that was two dollars was my compesary [sic] there, as much as I ever got from him. I don’t know what he was paying Robert. But anyway, we got together, and Robert was somewhat a shy guy, but when it come to his playing … You had to get his confidence before he would let you see all the works that he done. I was only with him a couple of weeks, or maybe a little less, and I only got about two of his chords,
because he was secret with it.”4
Robert, because of his newfound recording fame, became even more guarded of his playing techniques. Never again would he teach someone to play his style the way he had to Robert Lockwood. He was no longer a “meat-barreler,” as Speirs had described: he was a recording artist, with the emphasis on the last word. His songs, his tunings, his playing style were all his: he owned them.
After playing with, and impressing, Townsend and the other Saint Louis musicians, as well as whatever women he could seduce with his music, Robert worked his way back down to West Memphis and Memphis, to Robinsonville (where he played at a juke called Perry Place), Friars Point (the Blue and White Juke), and into Helena. Eventually he made his way to Hughes and met back up with Shines. “One night I had come in from a joint to where I was staying at and the lady I was renting the room from told me, she says, ‘There’s a young man in there. He says he knows you.’ She was a young lady and I said, ‘Yeah? What does he look like?’ So she described him to me and I knew who it was. ‘And Johnny, he sings like a bird.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s Robert.’ He had told her that he knew me and he was in my room, in the bed. I went in and woke him up. And that was when we took off, going north.”5
John Henry Hammond II. Jason Hammond
Although Robert had learned to drink when his boyhood friends were still playing children’s games, his alcoholic consumption may have surpassed that of his contemporaries. Henry Townsend recalled his excesses: “Oh, he would drink. At that time I don’t know if you would consider that heavy drinking or not because I guess everybody was lushing so hard then until you couldn’t distinguish who was the worst!”6 According to Shines and others who knew him then Robert drank “more often than not,” with his main drinks being Ten High, Dixie Dew, Old Taylor, or Old Grand Dad (all bourbons or corn whiskeys). Shines had to rescue him from more than a few scraps that were caused by his love for bourbon. Robert and whiskey resulted in a brew that brought out the worst of his traits. Though even when sober he would rail against God and the church, when he was drunk his vitriol against religion reached new heights. His words were more than enough to convince even the most skeptical listener that his blues really were the devil’s music. And, most unfortunately, especially for any companion of his such as Shines, he got nasty and wanted to fight with anyone he had a notion to attack. “If Robert wasn’t drinking he wasn’t really wild, but once he got a few drinks in him it didn’t make him any difference what he did. He wasn’t able to take care of himself when he started drinking. As a matter of fact he wasn’t man enough to take care of himself when he wasn’t drinking. He couldn’t punch hisself out of a wet paper sack. He just wasn’t able to maneuver and take care of himself for some reason. I’ve seen many people with the same build that he had that were much more capable of taking care of themselves than he was. He wasn’t a scrapper or a fighter, but he tried, and he’d get the hell beat out of you if you didn’t watch out. ’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…. It’s a wonder my head isn’t as big as a garbage can, you know, the way he used to get my head knocked in. ’Cause he’d mess with people, mess with people’s wives and things like that, women, he didn’t have no respect for nobody. When he got to drinking. [It was very seldom that] he wasn’t drinking too heavy.”7
Up Jumped the Devil Page 18
