The NY TIMES posts a historically significant tidbit on their online page each day. Predictably, today's tidbit notes the August 16th, 1977 death of Elvis Presley.
But another great musician died on August 16th, in the hot summer of 1938, and his story is far more compelling than that of Elvis, combining both eerieness and pathos.
That musician was the legendary Delta bluesman Robert Johnson.
An aura of mystery surrounds Robert Johnson. We have so little hard evidence about his brief life that most of what we know about him comes from what seems startlingly like myth. He haunts the blues as Mozart haunts classical music, Ol' Hank haunts country music, and Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin haunt rock. And his story completely outdoes all of theirs in pure spooky intensity.
What facts we do have are these: he was born, most probably, on May 8, 1911 at Hazlehurst, Mississippi, the son of a married woman separated from her husband and her lover. He was raised, variously, by his mother, her estranged husband, and her second husband--a desperately unsettled childhood during which he used a variety of surnames. The next definite information we have shows that he married, in February 1929, finally using the surname of his biological father, and was henceforth known as Robert Johnson. He was seventeen; his bride, sixteen-year-old Virginia Travis, would die in childbirth before the end of the year. Although Johnson would remarry in 1931, his second marriage is one of the whispers that form a background to his life.
A childhood friend recalled that as a schoolboy Johnson had been a good harmonica and jew's-harp player (that last a peculiar rhythm instrument, the name of which is apparently a corruption of "jaw's-harp", which sounds rather like a twanged rubber band and is called a "juice harp" by many southerners). In 1930, however, Johnson met the Delta bluesman Son House and became fascinated with learning blues guitar and singing blues; however, in those early days, it's said, his guitar technique left much to be desired. He left the area and returned sometime later with a dazzling improvement in his guitar playing that gave rise to the most persistent of all the legends that cling to him: that he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his prowess on guitar.
Although the legend, according to the web, was first recorded in the 1960s, told by Son House himself, to explain Johnson's great leap in technique, it probably has origins in Johnson's own lifetime. A young boy named McKinley Morganfield remembered in his later years a time when he saw Robert Johnson at a distance and wanted to go meet him, but was prevented from doing so by his grandmother, who said Johnson was a bad man who had sold his soul. (McKinley Morganfield is a blues legend himself--he grew up to be the incomparable Muddy Waters.)
In the black community, it was not uncommon for bluesmen to be suspected of having sold their souls. Among white dance fiddlers, there was a similar suspicion. Both had a ritual; the white fiddlers' ritual was complicated and involved a lot of bizarre elements, while the one attributed to the bluesmen has a breathtaking simplicity. The would-be bluesman would go to a crossroads at midnight, carrying his guitar, and wait. Out of the darkness would come a muscular black man, who would take the guitar and tune it, return it, and walk back into the dark. The whole ritual was performed in silence, but it was understood that, with the completion of the tuning, the devil now owned the bluesman's soul.
Johnson himself would seem to have made capital of his reputation, if his songs are any evidence. Although many of them are on standard blues themes of loss, love, and sex, several of the more famous include strikingly spectral images of death and the devil. He left a recorded repertoire of only twenty-nine individual songs, with several recorded in one or more versions. All these songs were recorded in two sessions, one in November 1936 in San Antonio, the other the following year in Dallas.
From "Crossroad Blues", recorded in the 1936 session:
I went down to the crossroads
fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above for mercy now
Save poor Bob if you please. . .
From "Hellhound on My Trail" from the 1937 session:
. . .the days keep on worryin' me
there's a hellhound on my trail. . .
And from "Me and the Devil", also from the 1937 sessions:
You may bury my body oooohhh
down by the highway side
so my old evil spirit
can catch a Greyhound bus and ride. . .
In the last year of his life Johnson did some traveling, but in August of 1938 he was back in Mississippi, singing in "juke joints." It was in one of these, his friend and fellow bluesman Honeyboy Edwards would recall, that Johnson drank from a bottle of whiskey which had been laced with strychnine, supposedly given to him either by a jealous husband whose wife he had been romancing or alternatively by a jealous lover. Strychnine poisoning is quite possibly the ugliest of all deaths; violent cramping, convulsions, internal bleeding, and intolerable pain. No doctor tended him; in the rural South of the 1930s, his life--and death--were no big deal. He died three days after drinking the poisoned whiskey. He was only twenty-seven.
Some of course said that the devil had simply come to claim his own.
It's the legend, not the man himself, who continues to inspire awe, film, literature and music. From a short story about a character called Blind Joe Death who sold his soul to the devil to the 1986 film CROSSROADS, with a score by Ry Cooder, to his influence on musicians from Eric Clapton to Robert Plant, to the character of Tommy Johnson in the 2000 movie O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?, and of course untold numbers of bluesmen, Robert Johnson lives--a shadowy figure with a terrifying backstory, a gruesome death, and a tiny output of songs that haunt the ear forever, once heard. To that I too can attest, despite being not much more than a dilettante.
I cannot locate the source of Muddy Waters's recollection; I recall reading it in a magazine article, but for the life of me cannot remember which magazine or when. Nor can I recall the name of the author of the story, or indeed the story's title, about Blind Joe Death, although the story is creepy to the extreme.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson_(musician)
Check this site for more information about his life and recordings, and the following for lyrics:
http://www.deltahaze.com/johnson/lyrics.html
The A&E Channel series CITY CONFIDENTIAL also told the story of Johnson's death in a third season episode titled "Greenwood: The Devil and the Delta Blues." Much of the story is set in Greenwood, Mississippi, where Johnson lived in the last months of his life.
May he rest in the peace he had little of in life.
