Biography of Robert Johnson

I. Biographical facts of Robert Johnson's early life.Information on the events of Robert Johnson's life is rather scarce as few are now alive who were around then to remember or who had cause to remember him. Indeed, some of the early blues researchers encountered a rather difficult time finding any information about him, even in the years immediately after his death. The historians weren't even sure of the name of the man they were asking about. He also went by the names Dodds and Spencer at various times in his life, as well as that of his natural father, but never by that of his mother (Major) or of her second husband (Willis).Robert Johnson's mother was Julia Ann Majors, whose parents had been born into slavery. In 1889, she married Charles Dodds, a carpenter and furniture maker, also the son of former slaves. They owned their land and their house and by any standard they were fairly well off. But, after narrowly avoiding the noose inHazelhurst, Charlie changed his last name from Dodds to Spencer and fled to Memphis. Apparently he had injured a member of a prominent, local white family in a fight and had to flee Hazelhurst with a lynch mob in close pursuit. Over the next couple of years Julia sent each of her ten children, one by one, except for her twodaughters, to stay with their father in Memphis. While Charlie was there, he had taken a mistress and had two children by her. Julia had, meanwhile, taken up living with Noah Johnson, an itinerant sharecropper by whom she conceived Robert. Robert Leroy Johnson was born out of wedlock, on May 8, 1911, near the town of Hazelhurst, Mississippi. For the first few years of Robert's life he lived with his mother moving from plantation to plantation. His half-sister Carrie would often watch over him while Julia chopped cotton. In 1914, Julia took her family to Memphis where she, her ten children, Charlie Dodds, his mistress, and their two children, apparently got onfairly well together. However, Charlie seemed to resent the young Robert, the outside child, who was evidently already a discipline problem as well. Julia disappeared not long after the family arrived in Memphis and shortly after that they heard that she had died. In 1916, Carrie recognized her mother on a street in Memphis--she had returned to ask for Charlie's permission to remarry. Charlie agreed, on the condition that Julia take the 4 or 5 year old Robert with her. So, Robert went to live with his mother and her second husband, Willie "Dusty" Willis, in the shanty-town of Commerce, near Robinsonville, Mississippi. Robert showed no interest in farm work, which, apparently was a source of conflict between him and his stepfather. He preferred to playmusic and trade songs with his friends. In 1927, he got his first guitar.In 1929, at the age of 18, Robert fell in love with and married Virginia Travis. The young couple moved in with Robert's half- sister and Robert stayed close to home and did more farm work than playing music. In August, Virginia became pregnant. On April 10, 1930, both she and the baby died in labor. She was 16 years old.A few months after Virginia died, perhaps providentially, Son House came to Robinsonville, following a recording session, now historic, in Wisconsin with Willie Brown. The older House, constantly badgered by the young Robert, tried to teach him some guitar, but, apparently, he showed little promise on the instrument. He would occasionally make a nuisance of himself by commandeering a guitar when House or Brown were on break and running the patrons out ofthe juke joints with his inexperienced playing.During late 1930 or early in 1931, Robert went to Hazelhurst, and began searching for his father. This is the period of Robert Johnson's life during which he reputedly disappeared from Robinsonville, where he had been learning how to play from Son House and Willie Brown. In Hazelhurst, he began taking guitarlessons from Ike Zinnerman.In May of 1931, during his stay in Hazelhurst, he married Calletta "Callie" Craft, an affectionate woman, who was twice married with three children. Johnson was a reputed ladies' man to whom women "were like motel or hotel rooms," in the words of Johnny Shines, another blues performer, who frequently traveled with him. WithCallie, Robert established a pattern that he was to follow in the coming years wherever he went. Seeking out older, often less attractive women, or a homely young girl, for whom there would likely be no competition, he would exchange his attentions fortheir kindness and a place to stay: using the time and their labor to advance his musical skills. One researcher found at least half a dozen women who had relationships of this kind with Robert, most of them lasting two or three weeks. The women who frequented many of the places Robert played were of a stronger constitution than the average. When he sang "squeeze me,'til the juice runs down my leg" and "stuff I got'll bust your brains out baby," his female listeners knew what he meant. Robert usually had a little money, too, which appealed to many of the interested local ladies. While many blues artists got nothing but a meal or free booze for their work, Johnson was also paid several hundred dollars for the songs he recorded in Dallas and San Antonio.Described by David "Honeyboy" Edwards, as tall and skinny, Robert also had a bad eye, evidently due to a cataract. Two photographs, found years after his death, show us what he looked like. In one of them he looks young and optimistic in a pinstripe suit and a hattilted at an angle, his long fingers form chords on his guitar. In the other picture, he is "heavy-lidded, ageless, and hard," a cigarette dangling from his mouth.Part of the mystery regarding Robert's life is due to amisunderstanding on the part of Don Law, who recorded Robert for Vocation Records. Apparently, Law misinterpreted Johnson's guardedness around white people as naivete, and spread the story that Robert had spent his entire life on a Mississippi plantation, leaving it only to record sixteen of his songs in a makeshiftstudio in San Antonio, Texas, in November of 1936, and another thirteen of them in Dallas the following June. In fact, Robert was a very widely travelled man. By the time he recorded, Johnson had hopped boxcars or thumbed his way all around the Mississippi Delta and to places as far away as Chicago and New York, Texas, and even Canada, earning his living solely through music. II. Robert Johnson's musical education.Apparently, Robert's earliest musical desire was to be a harmonica player, but that soon grew old and he decided that he wanted to be a guitar player like Willie Brown and Son House. Robert, would sit at the feet of Willie, Son, and maybe Charley Patton as well, studying their technique and arrangements, absorbing their stylesin the rowdy atmosphere of the juke joints. In Hazelhurst, Robert had met Ike Zinnerman, a veteran guitarist from Alabama, and apprenticed himself to the older musician. He would often spend entire weekends playing with Zinnerman, an excellent unrecorded guitarist who was fluent in both the East Coast and Delta styles. By all accounts, Robert had one of the quickest ears in the Delta. Johnny Shines claims that he could keep up a conversation while listening to a song on the radio and play it, note for note, hours or even days later. Shines also says that, when playing for money on street corners, Robert was just as likely to honor a request for "Tumbling Tumbleweeds," or a Bing Crosby tune, or a current jazz tune as he was to play one of his own songs. Not many people recall him ever practicing or working out new songs. Whenever he picked up the guitar with people around, it was to work. Some women recalled that they would wake up in the middle of the night to find Robert noiselessly fingering the guitar in the dim light of the window. When he realized that they were awake he would stop. III. Robert Johnson's songs and music.Robert recorded twenty-nine songs in five sessions divided between a hotel room in San Antonio and a warehouse in Dallas. Some of them were released as 78 rpm singles, called "race records." These recordings were aimed mainly at the urban Southern blacks who hadgrown up listening to the blues sung and played by professionals and some true geniuses in barrelhouses and jukes all the way from the Atlantic to Texas, Mississippi and the Delta south of St. Louis and north of New Orleans. To have heard Robert Johnson on thoseoriginal records, only twelve of which were released during his lifetime, one would have been a member of fairly large audience that Don Law had targeted with great success in the late 1920s to mid-1930s, or one would have been a collector of 78s, a musicologist, or a serious blues musician.Most of Robert Johnson's songs can be traced to other older and contemporary bluesmen like Tommy Johnson and Lonnie Johnson, Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, Big Bill Broonzy, among others whom Robert probably heard personally or on a record somewhere. Any song Robert Johnson played automatically became his own. Robert took even the most derivative of songs and made them sound like they were his.IV. The Legend of the Devil and Robert Johnson.In 1931, the legend goes, Robert disappeared from Robinsonville, where he had been hanging around with Son House and Willie Brown, and journeyed to Hazelhurst. During those months away, he married Callie Craft, fathered a son, and studied guitar with Ike Zinnerman. Ike claimed that he learned how to play guitar by sitting in a graveyard on tombstones at night. When Robert returned to Robinsonville, his playing had improved so incredibly that people began to speculate that he had met the devil and swapped his soul for such ungodly ability. Son House was emphatic "he sold his soul to the devil to get to play like that." What wascertain was that he didn't need any more lessons. The awkward kid who could barely play the harmonica and who had little command of the guitar had been changed into the kind of charismatic, virtuoso musician who commands attention. Robert apparently sings of such a Faustian pact in his "Crossroad Blues," in which he begs "theLord above" to "have mercy now, save poor Bob if you please."In a superstitious society such as that of the Mississippi Delta in the thirties, some of Robert Johnson's more peculiar traits might have been seen as slightly demonic, for instance: the cataract inhis eye and his practice of playing with his back turned to the other musicians, which some took as proof that he had something to hide (he probably wanted to prevent other musicians from stealing his fingerings). He also favored unusual tunings, which might seem like a fairly innocuous practice until you consider an interestinglegend related by LeDell Johnson, the brother of Tommy Johnson, another bluesman supposed to have entered into an unholy pact. Johnson says that if "you go to where . . . a crossroads is . . . a big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he'll tune it". In the context of hoodoo or voodoo, the powerful figures of Papa Legba and Baron Samedi (among others) appear in theCaribbean and the southeastern United States late at night at a crossroads under a cottonwood tree, "awaiting appropriate need and propitiation, empowering the disempowered." (Banks)Robert Johnson's lyrics are full of dark and demonic imagery. Devils and demons fill his visions as in his "Hellhound On My Trail" and "Me And The Devil Blues" for example. Like all Southern blacks, Johnson had to live with the specter of the Ku Klux Klan and institutionalized racism which prompted the black curfewregulations mentioned in "Crossroad Blues". Demonic imagery also abounded in the songs of Robert's predecessors. The idea that a performer is evil incarnate evidently caught the interest of 1930sblues audiences. The rumor that a man had the Devil on his side probably amounted to a form of protection against some of the unruly characters who assembled in the roadhouses and 'juke' joints in which the bluesmen played. Many of the locals regarded such itinerant musicians as privileged outsiders, interlopers out tosteal their women. In many of Robert's songs the figure of the devil takes on a more universal, and thus a more threatening, aspect. Very often in Robert's music, the devil and the myths of damnation "signify and dramatize the complex forms of social and sexual pathology, especially toward women, that lie just beneaththe surface of our civilization." (Banks)V. The Death of Robert Johnson.On Robert's last weekend, he and David 'Honeyboy' Edwards were booked to play at a dance in Three Forks, 15 miles from Greenwood, Mississippi. According to Edwards' account of the event, Robert was apparently showing too much interest in somebody's wife or girlfriend. That was Friday, August 12th, 1938. The next night, the jealous husband had his friends give Robert some poisoned whiskey. Another eyewitness, Sonny Boy Williamson II, claims that Robert was rather obvious in his display of affection for some particular lady patron, who was, indeed, the wife of their employer. Sonny Boy claims that a pint of whiskey with a brokenseal was sent up to Robert, which he knocked out of his hand. Robert warned him not to do it again. When another bottle was sent up to Robert, he drank it, while Sonny Boy stood by helplessly and watched (Scott Ainslie points out a flaw in this story: during prohibition, bottled and sealed whiskey was not widely available). Edwards, who showed up after the poisoning, says that around 1:00, Robert became sick while he was playing, but the people wanted him to keep playing. By 2:00, he was so ill they had to take him to town. Robert survived for several days before he finally contracted pneumonia, for which there was no cure in 1938. He diedon Tuesday, August 16th, 1938. The legend claims, rather dubiously, that he barked like a dog before he died.No one was ever prosecuted for the poisoning of Robert Johnson. In a 1946 recording produced by Alan Lomax, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Memphis Slim give some of their spoken recollections of what life was like for southern blacks in the early part of this century in the lumber and levee camps, the prison farms, and the plantations on which, Broonzy observed, "aNegro didn't mean no more to a white man than a mule." Guitarist Vernon Reid makes the interesting, if chilling proposition that perhaps the hounds Robert Johnson was trying to stay ahead of were not entirely metaphorical. The Lomax recordings may also help to explain why no one ever seems to have been arrested for Robert Johnson's murder. "If you were a good worker, you could killanybody down there," Memphis Slim remembers, "so long as he's colored. [Just] don't kill a good worker."VI. Robert Johnson's guitar work.Robert Johnson's musical appeal lies in the tension between his voice and his highly sophisticated guitar work which enabled him to boast to Johnny Shines that he could play anything a pianist could, including boogie-woogie bass lines. "His guitar seemed totalk--repeat and say words with him like no one else in the world could," Shines once said, and there is an excellent example of Robert using his guitar as a second, contrapuntal voice, in "Come on in My Kitchen," a seduction blues in which sex is equated with shelter, both for the singer and for the woman he's trying to lure in from the rain. Shines says further of Robert's guitar work, "Robert came along with the walking bass, the boogie bass, and using diminished chords that were not built in one form. He'd do rundowns and turnbacks, going down to the sixth and seventh. He'd do repeats. None of this was being done . . . I guess the guitarplayers before Robert come along just picked up what their daddies had done." Robert also made some inventive changes on the lyrics as he worked on the melodic and rhythmic aspects of his music. Heknew that the people were listening to him, so he gave them something to think about.VII. Analysis of Robert Johnson's importance to blues music.Robert Johnson was definitely an innovator. In speaking of his musical achievement, in studying him as a folk phenomenon, we must understand that his music is unique. His importance as a blues player only became apparent years later, through the growth and popularity of urban blues and rock 'n' roll. In an issue of LivingBlues devoted to the Robert Johnson's role in the evolution of the blues, Ron Weinstock claimed that "the frequency with which rock artists have recorded Johnson songs . . . lacks relevance to [his] status in blues history . . . It doesn't mean Johnson was a significant influence on blues performers." Certainly, RobertJohnson's popularity is just coincidental . . . Or is it?In the 1940s, the search for information about Robert Johnson, conducted by the early blues historians going door to door asking black Mississippians what they knew about him, led to the discovery of Muddy Waters, who was still working as a field hand on a plantation when he first recorded for the Library of Congress. The search also led to the rediscovery of Son House.Allegedly, Robert Johnson's reputation rests mainly on his appeal to British rockers and white American intellectuals. The CD re- release of Johnson's complete recordings sold in excess of 325,000 copies between its release in August, 1990 and April, 1991--enough for it to be certified gold. In contrast, Johnson's "Terraplane Blues," recorded in 1936 and his only hit during his lifetime, sold just 4,000 copies upon its initial release and was distributed only in the South.VIII.The social environment of Robert Johnson's music.Robert Johnson stood, both metaphorically and otherwise, at a crossroads: between the oral tradition and the phonograph record, between the folk tradition and that of the individual artist, between the prewar and post-war black experience in the South and the black diaspora in the twenties and thirties to Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Robert Johnson was: "perfectly situated to make himself into the means by which the forms and techniques of a highly sophisticated folk art could be transformed. He was the figure in his art who took the crucial step away from the impersonality and the anonymity of inherited forms and traditions and, without violating those forms and traditions, personalized them, employing them self-consciously to affirm his difference from the rest; and for that moment his listener, too, can stand at the crossroads, at the point where the distinction between the personal and the historical is erased." (Banks)Like most blues, especially Mississippi Delta blues, Robert Johnson's music originated in the American cauldron of race and class. It was the expression of a solitary man, alternately revelling in and bewailing his existence. It was folk music expertly played and sung, but it was also the intimate song of an individual, sung with genius. It is the autobiographical nature of the songs, their intense personal passion, reflecting chaos and loneliness, executed so vibrantly that continues to capture the imagination of listeners today. Despite his influences or influence, Robert Johnson's music is unique, and the mystery that continues to surround him only reinforces his hold on our imaginations.WORKS CITEDAinslie, Scott and Dave Whitehill. Robert Johnson: At The Crossroads-the Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Publishing Corp., 1992.Banks, Russell. "The devil and Robert Johnson: the blues and the 1990s." The New Republic, April 29, 1991 v204 n17 p27(5)Davis, Francis. "Blues walking like a man: the complicated legacy of Robert Johnson." The Atlantic, April 1991 v267 n4 p92(5)Guitar Player, Sept. 93, p.90.Shapiro, Harry. Eric Clapton: Lost in the Blues. N.Y.: Da Capo Press, 1992. ~ Robert Matthew Baker