Escaping the Delta Read Free Page B

twenty years after Robert Johnson made his recordings. Those early writers met many of the old musicians, drank with them, and wandered streets in neighborhoods that had hardly changed since the music’s golden age. They could turn on their radios and hear Elmore James, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed or Lightnin’ Hopkins being played on black pop stations alongside Sam Cooke, James Brown, and the Drifters. The continuum of blues was inescapable, since it was still part of the African-American popular music mainstream. Lonnie Johnson, one of the biggest stars of the 1920s, had survived to cut “Tomorrow Night,” a Nat “King” Cole–flavored R&B ballad. Big Joe Turner, a boogie-woogie shouter and disciple of Bessie Smith, had jump-started the rock revolution with “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” New versions of songs like “See See Rider” and “Stagolee” were number-one hits. By the mid-1960s, one could go to a coffeehouse in Boston, New York, or Washington and see Mississippi John Hurt or Skip James.
    The early writers were thus dealing not only with records but with people, and the degree to which they could impose their personal reactions on what they were hearing was more limited. They had a different background and perspective than the writers of my own generation, who came to the music after the folk-blues revival had arrived along with the Rolling Stones, Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton, and Canned Heat, and record stores had a blues section filled with reissue albums like the 1961 Columbia LP that presented Robert Johnson to the world and crowned him in its title, King of the Delta Blues Singers .
    To us later fans, Johnson was a kind of god, and few of us questioned that title’s legitimacy. His stature increased still further as his songs were covered and reworked by blues and rock players, and then with the astonishing sales of the two-CD set of his complete recordings in the 1990s. Today, he is regularly cited as the definitive figure in early blues, a musical giant whose influence was analogous to Louis Armstrong’s or Charlie Parker’s in jazz, to Jimmie Rodgers’s or Hank Williams’s in country music, to Ray Charles’s, Bob Dylan’s, Aretha Franklin’s, or Jimi Hendrix’s.
    Many people will consider it shocking, or even blasphemous, to suggest that Johnson was nothing of the kind, that as far as blues history goes he was essentially a nonentity. Nonetheless, if by “blues” one means the black popular music that flourished from the jazz era to the dawn of soul and disco, that is about right. While all the other artists listed above were massively popular within their worlds, affecting admirers and detractors alike and redefining the terms of their genres, Johnson was unknown to the vast majority of the blues audience and ignored by all but a handful of his musical peers until the “blues revival” hit in the 1960s.
    I am struck by how much the general perception of Johnson’s place in blues history has changed since the first extended piece was written about him in 1959, as part of Samuel Charters’s groundbreaking volume The Country Blues . Charters began as follows:
    The young Negro audience for whom the blues has been a natural emotional expression has never concerned itself with artistic pretensions. By their standards, Robert Johnson was sullen and brooding, and his records sold very poorly. It is artificial to consider him by the standards of a sophisticated audience that during his short life was not even aware of him, but by these standards he is one of the superbly creative blues singers. 4
    Charters had far more limited resources than we have today, in terms of biographical details and listenable copies of period recordings, but he touched on the central paradox of Robert Johnson’s reputation, and by extension on the disjuncture between the black and the white blues