Blues grows distant

Last May I wrote a column on what would have been the 100th birthday of Delta blues legend Robert Johnson, who according to folklore, traded his soul for his superior guitar skills. Black blues musicians playing Mississippi Delta roadhouses in the 1930s seemed almost as distant to our day as serfs tilling the soil of Medieval England.

Almost as distant.

I felt this sweet, good feeling, knowing one of Johnson’s contemporaries was still around, still with his faculties, still – at 96-years of age – in possession of his blues guitar and showmanship talents. David “Honeyboy” Edwards was 17 when he left home to hop freight trains and play fish fries and roadhouses with Johnson. Edwards was with Johnson at a Greensburg, Miss. Juke joint on the fateful night in 1938 when he drank from a bottle of whiskey that turned out to be laced with poison.

Edwards carried on. He was part of the Great Migration that brought African-Americans and the blues to the urban North where the old black folk music was amplified. Long after Robert Johnson, had receded into history and mythology, Edwards remained on stage – a fleshly, living connection to a time gone. He lived to see a world that Johnson could never have believed, real.

In the Jim Crow South, a black man caught after dark was at risk of being lynched. When Johnson supposedly sold his soul at the Crossroads, the real devil on his trail was the racist white man. A black man caught in daylight, not working, was also in danger of the rope. That’s why Edwards waited until sunset to go out playing for the folks.

However in January of 2009, he was welcomed and cheered on at Washington D.C.’s Black Cat nightclub. It was the eve of Barrack Obama’s inauguration as 44th President of the United States.

“I never thought I’d live to see the day a black man got elected president,” Edwards said.

This past spring Edwards was back in the Mississippi delta, celebrating his old friend’s centennial birthday bash in the land where blues was born. Honeyboy didn’t know that the show he gave at a Clarksdale, Miss. juke joint on April 17 would be his final performance, but it turned out to be so.

In July when Edwards’s manager Michael Frank announced he was retiring from touring due to health problems, I knew what would probably come next. The performance he would have given in Chicago on Aug. 29 was cancelled and Honeyboy Edwards died peacefully in his sleep.

The last man to have known or played blues with Charley Patton, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sonny Boy Williamson, Tommy Johnson, Sunnyland Smith, Peetie Wheatstraw, Son House and Big Joe Williams returned naked and to the dust from which he was born.

“That piece of history from that generation, people have to read about it from now on,” Frank said.

The Devil and Mr. Johnson

If I were in hell right now, catching a live, breathin’ Robert Johnson flesh out the devil’s music, my mortal soul would be aflame with the spirit as a primordial drive rocked my body into rhythmic sensations, most real and Biblical.

One hundred years ago, Robert Johnson, “King of the Delta Blues singers” was born in Hazelhurst, Mississippi on May 11, 1911, far as we know. The details of his life -- and death -- are muddy. http://www.msbluestrail.org/_webapp_1389781/Robert_Johnson_Birthplace http://www.mojohand.com/robertjohnsonbio.htm http://www.robertjohnsonbluesfoundation.org/ http://www.nps.gov/history/delta/blues/people/robert_johnson.htm

If I owned a Robert Johnson 78 rpm disc from the ‘30s, that’s the object I’d reach for if my house were on fire. There are collectors who own such treasures and I am covetous. I just don’t have $5,000 lying around that I can plunk down for an original wax pressing of “Terraplane Blues.” I’ll be happy to listen to the recently released CD – “Robert Johnson: A Centennial Collection,” a re-issue of the 49 songs Johnson is known to have recorded in his short life.

Delta blues thrived throughout the 1920s and ‘30s. http://www.pbs.org/theblues/roadtrip/deltahist.html A slew of artists were recorded for posterity – Bukka White, Skip James, Blind Blake, Tommy Johnson (no relation), Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Willy Brown, Son House… Robert Johnson’s recordings, made in 1936 and ’37 were the last hurrah for this era, but his music was delta blues at its pinnacle. He took it places it had never been to before.

Johnson incorporated a percussive sound, boogie-woogie bass line, ragtime, masterful “bottlenecking” techniques and drastic changes in pitch. Keith Richards has described his technique as almost “Bach-like,” in the way it sounded like more than one person playing. His lyrics were simple, poetic narratives of forlorn love, hard times and drifting. http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/a269/poetic-devices-in-the-songs-of-robert-johnson-king-of-the-delta-blues In songs like “Crossroad Blues,” his voice was low down and in “Kind Hearted Woman Blues,” it reached a jangling falsetto.

Johnson was said to be a mediocre guitarist when left Robinson, Miss., in around 1930, only to return around a year later with his uncanny talent. The myth, of course, is that he traded his soul for his talent. Supposedly, he went to the crossroads – the intersection of highways 61 and 49 outside Clarksville, Miss. and made a pact with the devil. http://crossroads.stormloader.com/

The “deal with the devil” story-line has precedence, stretching at least as far back as Medieval times. German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used this theme for his play, “Faust,” in the 18th century, and the idea spread to America with Washington Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker” and Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Italian violinist, Niccolo’ Paganini – for only one example -- was rumored to have sold his soul to Satan.

There is a tendency, I guess, to explain away dazzling talent by attributing it to witchcraft and the diabolical. Maybe that seems more plausible than the possibility that someone worked his ass off.

The story of Robert Johnson’s deal with the prince of darkness was given legs by Son House, and Johnson, himself. Here’s what I think: Tommy Johnson (one of Robert Johnson’s mentors) was telling that story about himself back in the ‘20s. Robert Johnson just stole (or borrowed) that tale for himself and used it for his own PR.

He was ambitious and out to carve his niche. The few recordings he made showed he was serious. I think Johnson was a savvy artist who played on the devil theme with songs like “Preachin’ the Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)” “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day” and “Me and the Devil Blues.” The “devil” in these songs, I believe, was a metaphor for a white-dominated system bent on holding the black man down – economically, socially, politically, psychologically and spiritually. Hell was the life he had to live on earth. The impending doom he sang about represented what might happen to a black man found on the street after dark. Lynch mobs were perfectly legal back then.

His early death at age 27 didn’t come about through a Faustian pact. It happened because he had a sweet tooth for women and booze, and one night he made love to the wrong woman and when her husband offered him an open bottle of whiskey, he foolishly accepted it. Unfortunately, the drink was laced with poison and he died three days later. (He died on Aug. 16, 1938 – exactly 39 years prior to the date when Elvis Presley would die in his Graceland bathroom.) If Johnson hadn’t died young, that story might not have caught on.

As it happened, the folk revival of the 1960s brought many of Johnson’s contemporaries out of obscurity, and while they finally received the acclaim due to them, Johnson’s fame was posthumous. If only Johnson had lived another 30 years…he could have played an electric guitar and jammed with Hendrix. It would have been natural. “Me and the Devil Blues” sounds just as haunting as “Voodoo Chile.”

No, Johnson’s not in some Dante-like inferno. Nor is he on a cloud, playing lily-white church pop on a harp. I think his body lies mouldering in a pauper’s grave. (His remains are disputed to be at three different locations.) http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20110515/FEATURES05/305150002/Bluesman-Robert-Johnson-remembered-Clarksdale-Mississippi-centennial-nears He’s at rest, awaiting the words, “Robert Johnson, rise up” and the kingdom come.

Those old 78’s are obscure, nearly impossible to find, but Robert Johnson and his joy-giving music belongs to all of us. He’s in our DNA – the waters that feed the Mississippi River, the wind that blows along U.S. 61 – our American mythology.