Bone Music Read Free Page A

smiled at Johnson, and he tried to make it friendly, but that wasn’t any use: Williamson dreaded Robert Johnson, and both men knew it.
    “I been hearing about you, Sonny Boy,” Johnson said, all coy and patronizing, like a nice white planter coddling his boys. “I hear you know your licks.”
    Then he laughed just a little and so quietly, like they both knew it didn’t matter worth a damn whether Williamson could play or not, because there was a talent in the room, very near a Hoodoo Doctor made whole alive, and that was Robert Johnson in the flesh.
    Williamson laughed long enough to be polite, but he thought Johnson was out of his mind. Johnson had the gift, all right — but he was alive. No one ever lived to be a Hoodoo Doctor, and everybody who ever tried ended up in hell — or someplace worse.
    When Johnson was done laughing at him, Williamson leaned forward across the table to look him in the eye. “I know that tune,” Williamson said, whispering. “But I wouldn’t ever sing it.”
    The song he meant was Judgment Day, and they both knew it. It was a lying boast: Williamson didn’t really know Judgment Day. Three times in the summer of 1937 he’d heard whispers of the melody inside his head, but he’d never imagined the whole, and would not yet conceive it for a lifetime.
    “I bet you do,” Johnson said, derisively. “You know it all, don’t you, Sonny Boy?” He laughed again, this time mocking Williamson openly.
    Williamson scowled and swore. “You know I do,” he said. “Day going to come you wished you had a little respect.”
    Robert Johnson pushed his chair away from the table. “My ass,” he said. He grabbed his guitar and started toward the stage.
    Before he got out of reach Williamson grabbed his arm and pulled him back toward the table. It wasn’t hard; Johnson (for all his bluster) was a scrawny man where Williamson was muscle-bound and stocky.
    “This is my set,” Williamson said. “Don’t you need to rest your chops?” He stood, put his free arm on Johnson’s back, and eased him into a chair. Lifted his guitar by the handle on the case, and stepped up to the stage.
    There wasn’t a day in his life where Sonny Boy Williamson could hold a candle to Robert Johnson, but God knows he tried to lift the light that evening. He played “Honest Woman Blues” and “Jackweed” like he’d never played them in his life. As he sang three verses of Judgment Day came to him, and he sang around them, moving the melody of “Jackweed” sideways and away until the tune metamorphosed toward the chords whispered in his ear, and though the words he sang were words from “Jackweed,” everyone who heard Sonny Boy Williamson sing that night saw the Eye of the World weeping in his dreams.
    When “Jackweed” was over the applause was thunderous, and even Robert Johnson — still watching angrily from the owner’s table — regarded him with a measure of respect.
    But Williamson faltered in his third number, when he heckled Robert Johnson with three mocking verses of Johnson’s own “Hellhound on My Trail.” Williamson should have known better, even in 1938: using the music for ridicule makes a mockery of the gift. Someone snickered halfway through the second verse of “Hellhound”; before he could sing another line the spell that bound the room to “Jackweed” was broken. Johnson sneered at him, and gestured; Williamson knew he was defeated. He played the third verse to a close, climbed down from the stage, and rejoined Johnson at the owner’s table.
    When he got there Johnson was whispering in the owner-lady’s ear. She was smiling, glowing satisfied triumphant like she was his and he was hers, like she owned him and she liked it.
    That man is going to get himself in some awful kind of trouble, Williamson thought as Johnson kissed the owner-lady too long too deep too intimate right there in the open where her fuming husband had to watch. He thought about Johnson sneering at him,