Johnson’s recordings captured a spirit, a desperate, maniacal, even existential spirit, but so have other recordings. Leroy Carr, Kokomo Arnold, Tommy Johnson, and people whose names we don’t even know have weeds instead of memorial stones on their graves. But Johnson has the myth.
When he first played around Robinsonville, Mississippi, his skill was so poor that other musicians made fun of him. After traveling for a year or so, he returned and talked his way into playing a party while the great Son House took a break. “He was so good! When he finished, all our mouths were standing open,” recalled the late House. “I said, ‘Well ain’t that fast! He’s gone now!’ ” Many people were suspicious of his sudden improvement. Whether Johnson himself told others or whether it was whispered about him when he was not around, the possibility was generally accepted that he had sold his soul to the devil.
His fatal poisoning at age twenty-seven in 1938 also stokes the myth—the murderer and the means remained unknown for decades. His mystery was so great, it was not until the midseventies that researchers knew what he looked like; no photograph had ever been found. Johnson’s racked, cryptic voice, and the drama of his guitar playing have influenced countless musicians (When Keith Richards first heard Johnson, he asked, “Who’s the other guy playing with him?”).
Only in the last year have fans been able to hold the myth in their hands. Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, a boxed set released in August 1990, has triggered extraordinary interest in the mysterious bluesman. More than six hundred thousand sets have been sold worldwide; the box reached as high as eighty on Billboard’s pop charts, generating an initial royalty payment described by a source at Columbia as a “chunky six-figure check.” (Using a standard formula for royalties, that would be approximately $420,000.) With the next payment in September, Johnson’s combined royalties could amount to well over a million dollars. Johnson won a Best Historical Album Grammy in 1990, but in 1991 he is a contemporary pop phenomenon. He’s been on the cover of numerous magazines, been featured as the lead story on Entertainment Tonight, and been the subject of talk around Hollywood. Robert Johnson is a growth industry. For somebody.
To date, Robert Johnson’s family has received no money from The Complete Recordings, no money from cover versions of his songs, no money from the publishing of the singer’s photograph.
Decades back, when a folklorist for the Smithsonian Institution named Mack McCormick chanced upon information concerning Robert Johnson’s death, the mysteries of the bluesman’s life began to open up.
“In 1971,” says McCormick, an authority on Texas blues who had been pursuing Johnson since 1948, “an ex-wife and Johnson’s children were located.” The following year, he found Carrie Spencer Thompson and Bessie Hines, two of Johnson’s half sisters. Among their documents were the first two photographs of Johnson ever discovered by researchers: a studio picture of Johnson and a nephew and a dime store booth shot. McCormick signed agreements with both sisters granting him first publication rights for the pictures and for biographical information to be used in a book already under way.
Soon after meeting the sisters, McCormick contacted Columbia Records’ John Hammond. In the course of the legendary talent scout’s career, Hammond had worked with Don Law, the producer of Johnson’s two recording sessions; he was also a passionate Johnson fan, and a key source for McCormick. By the time they corresponded in 1972, McCormick was giving the strong impression the book, Biography of a Phantom, was imminent.
But in the summer of 1973, blues entrepreneur Stephen C. LaVere also found Carrie Thompson. (Bessie Hines had died.) LaVere asked Thompson about Johnson memorabilia, and she presented him with a photograph different from the two she had given McCormick. LaVere remembers: “She told me, ‘You know it’s really strange that I didn’t have this picture when Mr. McCormick was here.’ And we both took that as a sign of Providence that the good Lord just didn’t want Mack McCormick to have that photograph.” LaVere went to Thompson’s attorney and had a new agreement drawn up, assigning him ownership of her photographs and, as long as God was on his side, ownership of Johnson’s copyrights. Thompson died in the early 1980s.
“As the last known surviving heir,” says LaVere, “Carrie Thompson was the holder, the common law copyright owner, of all Johnson’s compositions. My arrangement is a full and complete transfer of all right, title, and interest to me. I am now the copyright owner … Now that she is gone I have an obligation to pay her heirs, and when I’m gone, my heirs have to pay her heirs. And it goes on, as long as money is collected, money will be paid.”
Money is being collected, but money is not being paid.
Like the Mississippi River that constantly eats away at its banks, the Robert Johnson myth consumes fans, critics, and scholars. Eventually, everything at the edge of the river falls in. Everything becomes mud. “It’s almost part of the Robert Johnson myth that as you become involved with it you decide you own it,” states Jim Dickinson. A producer and musician who has worked with people as diverse as the Rolling Stones, Sleepy John Estes, and Sly and Robbie, he is a longtime Mississippi resident. “It comes with the territory.”
When screenwriter and filmmaker Alan Greenberg was beginning his screenplay for Love in Vain, a fictional account of Johnson’s life, McCormick invited him to peruse his research files. “The summer of ’77 I was in the Delta,” Greenberg recalls. “By the time I got to Houston, I had been skipping meals and nursing the gas pedal just to get there. I get to his house, he invites me in, everything is very nice, he gives me a drink, which got me very drunk just from the first sip because I was starving, and when I got to the point of saying, ‘Okay, where do we begin with all the research stuff,’ he said, ‘For $35,000 and six and a half percent of the profits of your film, I’ll show it to you.’ ”
A record collector tells of a time he was riding on a California highway with LaVere in the midseventies. “I had a tape of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s live album, and I asked him if he had heard it. And he went nuts when he heard Johnson’s ‘Crossroads.’ He said, ‘Pull off at the first place you can where there’s a phone.’ And this is like nine o’clock at night, out in the middle of nowhere near San Diego. It would have been midnight on a Saturday night in New York. He called some people back in New York and started screaming how he was going to sue ’em and all this kind of stuff, wanted a cease and desist order immediately on the record and wanted them to pay him royalties.”
Both LaVere and McCormick were fans of the blues before Robert Johnson came into their lives. But when these two men, from distinctly different backgrounds, found Johnson, they found a calling.
Robert Burton “Mack” McCormick, the first Robert Johnson authority, lives in Houston. The son of X-ray technicians, he has worked on a chicken farm in Alabama, been employed by the National Park Service, and shilled for a Las Vegas casino. By the 1960s, McCormick was writing about jazz for DownBeat and producing records for people like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Robert Shaw. In 1965, he took a group of Texas prison inmates to the Newport Jazz Festival. He has worked in various capacities with the Smithsonian Institution.
“He’s an excellent field-worker, an excellent writer, and an excellent idea person,” says Ralph Rinzler, assistant secretary emeritus at the Smithsonian, and the man who brought McCormick to the Institution. “He’s meticulous and determined in his pursuit of information.” Among his other achievements is an enlightening ten thousand–word essay that accompanies the 1974 album Henry Thomas—“Ragtime Texas.” Other writing projects, however, have not fared as well. He collaborated with author Paul Oliver on what was to have been a definitive history of Texas blues, though it has yet to be published. McCormick is also a playwright; one of his scripts was produced in England.
A very private person, Mack McCormick rarely grants interviews. After two weeks of receiving phone messages and a Federal Express package from this writer, McCormick’s “brother” finally responded. Claiming to be a lawyer, the “brother” provided much informat
ion about the search for Johnson’s family, including firsthand observations; apparently, he often accompanied Mack on research trips. The “brother” asked not to be quoted. McCormick’s quotes come from articles and press releases.
Stephen C. LaVere, the son of a Los Angeles piano player who worked with Jack Teagarden, is a longtime record collector who started out working in record stores. He narrates his background, like he describes his current work, in a smooth and patient voice, his tone conveying an ordered world with everything in its place. “I produced a number of records for the Liberty combine—Imperial, Blue Note, World Pacific, those labels,” he recalls over the phone from his Los Angeles home. Sunnyland Slim, Shakey Jake, and the Muddy Waters Blues Band are some of the performers he recorded. “I was very close friends with Bob Hite and Henry Vestine of Canned Heat. We had a brainstorm one day and came up with the Legendary Masters Series, which was a very successful series for Imperial, reissuing a lot of early blues.”
LaVere went south in 1969 to work at the Memphis Country Blues Festival. “I became acquainted with Furry Lewis, Bukka White, Piano Red, Sleepy John Estes, and all those people, and it was just mind-staggering. I couldn’t believe the wealth of blues talent that was just laying there going to rot, getting one festival a year and a gig here and a gig there. I was there until May of 1975 working with the old cats.”
A job with Sun Records, then recently acquired by music industry entrepreneur Shelby Singleton, led LaVere to independent research. He turned up new information about bluesman Joe Hill Louis and rediscovered Harmonica Frank Floyd and Jimmy DeBerry, as well as a few other neglected musicians.
His former employer at Sun, Shelby’s brother John Singleton, has not forgotten LaVere. “He kept some of our tapes, which rather perturbed us,” recalls Singleton, who now runs the label. “I think it’s well known in the industry that several of our things showed up on bootleg albums not too many years after that. We’ve really had nothing to do with him since.” (Among tapes said to have come into his possession are Howlin’ Wolf sessions and a famed Jerry Lee Lewis conversation about the devil. LaVere says about the accusation: “No, that’s not true.”)
“One of my oldest and closest friends” is how LaVere refers to photographer Ernest Withers, who has documented Memphis’s African-American culture for five decades. In the 1960s, according to Withers, LaVere took an extensive collection of photographs and negatives from his studio without permission. Recently, a Memphis museum obtained photocopies of LaVere’s collection of Withers’s material. “When I saw that stack of pictures, I realized: Here’s a man who robbed me. There’s collections of dead folk, church people, people he don’t know. All he knows is Elvis Presley and Bobby Bland,” says Withers. “Here’s my wife with Count Basie,” he continues, holding a photocopy of the image. “Do you think I’d give him that?” And though Withers vehemently states, “I have never signed a contract with him,” LaVere wrote in Living Blues magazine: “The shot of Howlin’ Wolf [in the boxed set booklet] is my copyrighted photograph by Ernest C. Withers.”
Withers is contemplating legal action. “It was a verbal agreement,” says LaVere. “He said just take ’em with you and if you make any money off ’em, share it with me.”
“LaVere used to run this little shop on Cooper,” recalls Jim Dickinson, “a curio shop, used records and that kind of shit, and Nazi stuff. I mean for real Nazi shit.” The store was called the South Cooper Street Curio Shop; after LaVere left Memphis, the building was destroyed in a fire that may have been set by striking firemen. “That’s where I first saw the pictures of Robert Johnson. And he had dogs that he kept there all night because he was paranoid someone was going to steal from him what he had stolen. He was here for a good many years, all through the seventies. Used to drive an old Buick.”
(“Oh yeah,” says LaVere, “we sold all kinds of stuff, anything that would sell.”)
“Outside behind the old Home of the Blues,” continues Dickinson, referring to another Memphis record store, “they used to throw away the old 78s, and I’ve seen LaVere and [folk guitarist / folklorist] John Fahey stand behind Home of the Blues and if there were three of a certain thing, they’d take one each and they’d break the third one. I saw that personally.” The rarer the records, the higher the value to collectors.
LaVere returned to California, where he “spent seven or eight years in the insurance business.” By selling policies door-to-door, a record collector can gain entrance to peoples’ homes—and to their music collections. The residents can unload some clutter and get a little spending money; the collector can find, literally, lost treasures.
Documentarian and musician Randall Lyon was active in Memphis’s country blues renaissance. He too met LaVere. “At the time, white people didn’t like us playing black music, and black people didn’t like us invading their communities.
“When people started realizing money could be made on this music, this guy came along who smelled a buck, he lived in Los Angeles and all, and he really creamed us. We were just a bunch of naive redneck hippies.
“We were so involved with getting people to trust us that we didn’t even see [LaVere] sneaking up on us. And finally, when all our records and all our paraphernalia was gone, we realized what he’d done.”
Since 1983, LaVere has been a dealer in rare records and has established a small photo archive. “You have to do what you think is right, try to make a living for yourself in this world,” he says. “There’s lots of ways to do it, and you have to be inventive, you have to be creative if you want to do what you want to do. I don’t want to sell insurance, I want to deal in the music business.”
Now that he had Carrie Thompson’s agreement in hand, in 1973 LaVere approached Columbia Records with an idea: to package together all of Robert Johnson’s recordings. John Hammond immediately hired him as coproducer of The Complete Recordings, a version of which jazz and blues producer Frank Driggs was already compiling.
The first time Robert Johnson’s music was available in anything but old 78s was when Driggs packaged King of the Delta Blues Singers for Columbia in 1961. Featuring sixteen of Johnson’s twenty-nine titles, this album helped create a new generation of fans. King of the Delta Blues Singers, Volume 2, released in 1970, had the remaining titles. Both sold better than Johnson sold in his entire lifetime, and both continue to sell. By 1973, demand was such that Columbia was packaging them together.
On the back of the second volume, Columbia printed a minor statement worth major bucks: “The selections are in the public domain.” For all the years that Columbia sold Johnson, they never paid song royalties, thinking that nobody owned the copyrights.
Whoever owned them would be entitled to payment every time one of Johnson’s songs was heard on the radio, played on a stage, or covered by another performer. Record labels often make a practice of obtaining the copyrights, or a percentage, so that they are paying themselves. The more of the copyright they own the less they have to pay the artist. Since before the thirties, many a blues musician was offered a hot meal and a few dollars in cold, hard cash for their signature on a copyright agreement.
LaVere says his 1973 offer to Carrie Thompson included two copies of her half brother’s recordings, and a fifty-fifty royalty split.
A song’s copyright has a certain lifetime, and when it expires, it goes into public domain. So when Columbia labeled Robert Johnson public domain, they were guessing; Johnson’s contract had never been located. The label in effect made a public announcement that they didn’t own his songs and they didn’t owe anybody royalties.
He could not be sure, but Columbia producer Larry Cohn claims in the May / June 1991 issue of Living Blues that Johnson signed a contract giving him a flat fee up front and no royalties, as was “the standard procedure for that time period.” Such procedure produced broke musicians and rich executives, and the system has yet to be overhauled.
(McCormick claims to have found a contract signed by the Chuck Wagon Gang, who recorded in
San Antonio the same day for the same label as Johnson. That agreement assigned them a royalty, he says; however, the Chuck Wagon Gang’s archives in Nashville claim no knowledge of this document.)
Though it appears he did not own them, Hammond (a friend of LaVere’s father) nonetheless signed away the copyrights to LaVere in 1973. “LaVere got a deal such as nobody I’ve ever heard of getting in the history of the business,” recalls producer Frank Driggs. “I have no axe to grind with him, but it boggles the mind.”
Driggs cites a CBS contract made by Hammond with blues singer Ethel Waters in the 1960s as the precedent for LaVere’s contract. She was still alive when Columbia was releasing a three-record compilation of her material. “Hammond called Waters and said, ‘We’re going to make up for the fact that Columbia didn’t treat you right,’ ” recalls Driggs. “He always did it on the basis of conscience. She was not entitled by contract to royalties on some of those songs, so we made an overall arrangement whereby she got royalties on everything.”
“I not only also represented the copyrights, both musical and photographic, but Johnson as an artist as well,” LaVere recently recalled in Living Blues. “Consequently, CBS had to be very forthcoming to satisfy me.” Whether they had to, CBS assigned the money owed the heirs to a third party; putting the royalties in escrow would have been easy enough, but Columbia took LaVere’s word that he would pay Johnson’s family.
The Complete Recordings was compiled and mastered by LaVere, and awaiting release in 1974.
In satisfying LaVere, CBS necessarily dissatisfied McCormick, who learned about the deal in a 1974 phone call from, of all people, LaVere. McCormick contacted Hammond, who claimed not to know him. (Hammond’s associates have noted that he had suffered a stroke and his memory was affected.)
McCormick pursued his case, writing Columbia’s chief legal counselor to question the validity of LaVere’s contract: “Please be advised that by agreements signed July 8, 1972 with Mrs. Carrie Thompson … I purchased rights for exclusive first publication of all documents, photographs, memorabilia, and other material from their family collections and / or personal reminiscences … I respectfully suggest you examine whether you do in fact have proper title.”
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