Bone Music Read Free

matter how he felt, he never said a word. Maybe the man was too used-up inside to care, or maybe he had a long fuse.
    Or maybe the man who owned the Greenville bar spent those weeks giving Johnson rope enough to hang himself.
    On what was to be Johnson’s last night in Greenville — Saturday, August 13, 1938 — Sonny Boy Williamson joined him on the club’s lineup. Williamson got to Greenville two hours after sundown, took a room in the local boardinghouse, stowed his gear, and headed to the bar. He got there near the end of the first set, just a moment after Johnson began to sing his “Terraplane Blues.”
    Williamson had been hearing about Johnson for years, but till that moment he’d neither seen nor heard the man.
    What he saw and heard when he entered the bar astounded him. First he saw the owner — a small, dark, nasty-looking man who’d come to Memphis in July to book them both — saw the owner glowering at Johnson from behind the bar.
    And then he saw Johnson, standing on a stage at the far end of the room, playing his guitar.
    The room from here to there was thick with hoodoo, and the hoodoo man was Robert Johnson. His music was in the smoky half-lit air, and the air held the crowd the way the river holds the land; everyone who heard him knew him, and they owned him as he owned them. Drifts of smoke writhed and twisted through the air, following the hoodoo currents swirling through every heart and ear; Johnson howled and the mirrors brayed back to him, echoing his song.
    Sonny Boy Williamson was only a journeyman bluesman in 1938, but even then he had the sight and the talent to see Johnson was a hoodoo man. He worked his way to the front of the room, where he stood watching from the shadows left of stage.
    Johnson saw him watching.
    He knew who Williamson was, and he reveled in the awe he saw in Williamson’s eyes; he played to it just as he’d played all week to the desire in the heart of the owner’s lady.
    Halfway through “Terraplane” he began to improvise, bending the long mournful howls that punctuate the lyrics until they dominated the song, metamorphosing the blues into an animal cry in the half-lit darkness of the bar.
    Three wolves howled to answer him from the hills above Greenville. Someone gasped; when Williamson turned toward the gasp he saw the owner’s lady staring at Johnson with eyes full of desire, fear, and awe.
    She shivered as Johnson’s song rose to harmonize with the howling of the wolves.
    Williamson took it all in uneasily. Johnson was getting himself in deep — deeper than anybody but a Hoodoo Doctor ever ought to go. And no matter what kind of talent Johnson had, he wasn’t any Hoodoo Doctor.
    Of course he wasn’t any Hoodoo Doctor! Robert Johnson was alive.
    When the set was over Johnson went to the owner-lady’s table and ordered a bottle of whiskey. Williamson looked up just in time to see the owner gaping at the sight of Robert Johnson sitting down beside his wife. The owner’s face was a mask of rage, and Williamson knew what was in that man’s heart. He didn’t need no hoodoo to see it, either: the owner man was mad enough to kill, and maybe he meant to do it.
    “Williamson!” Johnson shouted, knocking back the last dregs of an old glass of whiskey. “Sonny Boy Williamson!”
    He waved Williamson to the table, pushed a chair toward him.
    Williamson hesitated for a moment. Johnson was a gloater; he had the kind of vanity that makes some men lord it over everyone they find. Williamson had already seen enough to know Johnson was about to run a line of shit on him. He didn’t want to sit for it — but when he thought a moment he knew there was no way to avoid it short of walking out of the room, away from the bar, getting back in his beat-up car, and driving away from Greenville.
    Williamson wasn’t ready for that. He needed the money he’d make in Greenville — needed it bad. So he left the shadows beside the stage to join Johnson and the owner-lady. He