When Robert Johnson Sings (July/August 1991 | Volume: 42, Issue: 4)

When Robert Johnson Sings

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Authors: Shelby Foote

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July/August 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 4

Robert Johnson has had an all but spectral aspect for his admirers down the years. He came seemingly out of nowhere and went back into nowhere within the span of less than a decade, which began with a rumored Faustian compact with the Devil and ended in agony from strychnine-laced whiskey slipped to him by the husband of a woman he had been seeing on the side. His legacy—apart, that is, from a couple of posed photographs that do little to resolve the mystery, except that one shows the delicate, long-fingered hands of a born guitarist, and the testimony of acquaintances, most of whom disagree about his nature—consists of those 29 songs recorded under comparatively primitive conditions in San Antonio and Dallas, in late 1936 and mid-1937, over a total of five days. They were enough—enough, even, to put him up there with Bessie Smith, who recorded 159. These two, Bessie and Robert, are by common consent the top of the heap in the field of the blues, and they died within a year and sixty miles of each other in the Mississippi Delta, where Johnson was raised and learned his art.

Not counting the recurrent cries of delight and screams of pain, when he would break into falsetto, each had a range of about one octave. A severe limitation, you would think. But that octave served its purpose for them both, packed as it was with emotion, which comes across with naked force, rhythmic phrasing, which drives the meaning home, and boundless humor, the saving grace even for the blues, which Johnson in one of his songs calls “a aching old hard disease,” adding: “You ain’t never had ‘em, I hope you never will.”

Recognition came slow for him for a number of reasons, including the very words he sang. Outlanders—New Yorkers or San Franciscans, say—had to get over a language barrier nearly as difficult as Carmen would be for a listener with less than a year of high school French. A doney , for instance, is a woman of worse than doubtful morals, and a nation sack is a cloth pouch worn on a string around the neck for holding mojos and small change. Nor was the difficulty only with unfamiliar words; familiar ones sometimes had unsuspected meanings. Lonesome , for example—and thereby hangs a tale.

Don Law, who was in charge of all five of the Texas recording sessions, met Johnson in San Antonio when he showed up for the first of them. He got him a room in a Jim Crow rooming house, gave him forty-five cents for breakfast next morning, then left for dinner with friends at the Gunter Hotel, where tomorrow’s session would be held. Midway through the meal he was called to the telephone. It was Johnson, who sounded urgent, and Law asked him, “What’s the matter?”

“I’m lonesome.”

“You’re lonesome? What do