“He sold his soul to the devil to get to play like that.” – Mississippi bluesman Son House on Robert Johnson

It’s Robert Johnson’s birthday.

“[Robert] Johnson has created a mood so delicate and bleak one feels he cannot possible get out of his song alive.” – Greil Marcus

Recently, I was walking through Times Square and suddenly Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound” came on the iPod shuffle and … the music as a soundtrack changed the scene in front of me so much it was downright eerie. The song changed my perception of reality. The song made Times Square seem as doomed as Atlantis. Robert Johnson is impossible to listen to casually.

Back in 1986 Ralph Macchio appeared in a movie called Crossroads, inspired by the Robert Johnson legend, directed by the great Walter Hill (hey, I wrote about Walter Hill’s use of costumes in his films, including Crossroads!) This movie was probably my unofficial introduction to Robert Johnson. Listen, it doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as you get there.

The original story about Robert Johnson goes: he was hanging around blues clubs, young and eager and ambitious, but he couldn’t really play the guitar. Then, practically overnight, he became a genius. Son House, another Mississippi bluesman who knew Robert Johnson and had a huge influence on Johnson’s playing, was the one who theorized (probably as a joke) that Robert Johnson had met up with the devil at a crossroads one night and sold his soul. It was the only plausible explanation.

Much of Johnson’s story is lost in the obscurity of his time, when so much went unrecorded, when birth records and death records were spotty (especially for African-Americans). Robert Johnson lived a short life, but it was peripatetic: there are those who report seeing him play in this or that far-flung town, or heard him on the radio in the Pacific Northwest – a region he supposedly never visited … many of these rumors cannot be substantiated. This is all part of his legend. Robert Johnson was everywhere and nowhere.

And then he was gone. He did not leave much recorded music behind, and had no commercial success while he was alive (and back then, the idea of “commercial success” was different than it is now). His scratchy recordings only saw the light of day for a wide audience in 1961 when they were released in a box set. We are lucky to have what we do. It is partly from the wellspring of terror and dread and sin and lust – expressed by Robert Johnson – that modern American culture was born. Music like Johnson’s poured into and influenced the conservative stylings of country music – which formalized the message (hello, Louvin Brothers) and it also poured into and influenced the wailing piety of the gospel tradition – which set the message free … You put it all together – gospel, country, and rhythm & blues – and you get rock ‘n’ roll.

Robert Johnson hailed from the rich cultural landscape of the Delta. The wellspring of so much of American culture. Maybe THE wellspring. The Delta is one big Crossroads.

Greil Marcus wrote a chapter on Robert Johnson for Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. The Mississippi Delta blues is a vast subject of interconnectedness, and the rare recordings we have from the 1920s and 1930s still show the power of the music. Marcus wrote:

[Johnson] sang about the price he had to pay for the promises he tried, and failed, to keep; I think the power of his music comes in part from Johnson’s ability to shape the loneliness and chaos of his betrayal, or ours. Listening to Johnson’s songs, one almost feels at home in that desolate America; one feels able to take some strength from it, right along with the promises we could not give up if we wanted to.

More:

Johnson’s vision was a world without salvation, redemption, or rest; it was a vision he resisted, laughed at, to which he gave himself over, but most of all it was a vision he pursued. He walked his road like a failed, orphaned Puritan, looking for women and a good night, but never convinced, whether he found such things or not, that they were really what he wanted, and so framing his tales with old echoes of sin and damnation. There were demons in his songs – blues that walked like a man, the devil, or the two in league with each other – and Johnson was often on good terms with them; his greatest fear seems to have been that his desires were so extreme that he could satisfy them only by becoming a kind of demon himself.

Listen.

Marcus observes:

When acceptance and celebration mean the same thing, or when the two words must fill the same space in the mind at once, we can begin to grasp the tension and the passion of Robert Johnson’s music – because when one accepts one’s life by celebrating it, one also asks for something more. In Johnson’s blues the singer’s acceptance is profound, because he knows, and makes us see, that his celebration is also a revolt, and that the revolt will fail, because his images cannot deny the struggles they are meant to master.

This literal and emotional brand of faith helped create the music that would change American culture (and the world) forever. The music came out of poverty, disenfranchisement, racial inequality, and so did the religion (Pentecostal, Baptist, and others). There was none of the upper-class emphasis on the importance of appearing holy, which you find in the Anglican church and others. Dirt-poor people – both black and white – had similar cultural releases in the era and this was what maverick record-producer Sam Phillips sensed, and tried to capture in his early years at Sun Records. With the advent of radio, white people heard black music all the time, and black people listened to the strictly-white Grand Ole Opry broadcast, and someone like Ray Charles fell in love with Hank Williams, and someone like Elvis fell in love with Arthur Crudup. The world may have been racially segregated by law, but the AIR, and the air WAVES, were not.

In Robert Johnson’s music, you can hear the fragile birth of the revolution that was to come.

His songs vibrate with terror. Sometimes it is the singing of the song that keeps the terror at bay; other times, the terror emerges from the dead-center, it IS the song, and there is no escaping it.

Robert Johnson died on August 16, 1938 in Greenwood, Mississippi, under still-mysterious circumstances. Maybe he was killed by a jealous husband (Johnson was a ladies’ man). But the cause of death is still unknown. It was thought he might have been poisoned. There are also rumors he died of syphilis. There were other rumors, though, darker ones, that the Devil had come to collect. (This is the rumor Supernatural ran with in its episode “Crossroad Blues.”)

Robert Johnson’s songs feed into his legend. He sings about the Devil. He sings about Hell Hounds chasing him. He sings about hanging out at the crossroads. In the song “Hellhounds on my Trail”, you get a sense of increasing panic: best be moving on now, something’s coming up behind you.

I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving
Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail
Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail
And the day keeps on remindin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my trail
Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail

If today was Christmas eve, if today was Christmas eve
And tomorrow was Christmas day
If today was Christmas eve and tomorrow was Christmas day
All I would need is my little sweet rider
Just to pass the time away, to pass the time away

You sprinkled hot foot powder, mmm, around my door
All around my door
You sprinkled hot foot powder, all around your daddy’s door
It keeps me with ramblin’ mind rider
Every old place I go, every old place I go

I can tell the wind is risin’, the leaves tremblin’ on the tree
Tremblin’ on the tree
I can tell the wind is risin’, leaves tremblin’ on the tree
All I need is my little sweet woman
And to keep my company, hey, hey, hey, hey, my company

“Blues falling down like hail”?? ACCURATE.

When you consider the history of dogs chasing down escaped slaves – and how frightening a country night could be in 1938 Mississippi if you were a black man … there’s real terror coursing through it. And not just terror, though. There’s a blunt practicality going on too, part of the appeal of the blues. He’s telling it like it is.

In “Crossroad Blues” there are verses about a sweet woman, and how he doesn’t have one and wishes he did … but the gist of the song is much darker:

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above, “Have mercy now. Save poor Bob, if you please.”
Standin’ at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride
I tried to flag a ride
Ain’t nobody seem to know me, babe
Everybody pass me by
I’m at the crossroads, baby, the sun goin’ down,
Standin’ at the crossroads, baby, the sun goin’ down
You can run, you can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown
You can run, you can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown
Lord I’m standin’ at the crossroad,
I’m sinkin’ down

Robert Johnson’s music can never be background music. If you played “Crossroad Blues” in an elevator, or as “muzak” in a supermarket, people would run screaming, or stand stock-still, pinned to the spot.

It is not just expression. It is confrontation.

 
 
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