The specter of a legal battle loomed, and CBS ultimately shelved the completed project.
“It got to be a running joke,” says former Columbia A&R person Jim Fishel, who picked up the dormant project in 1976. “We used to go to a product meeting every week, the various departments. We’d get to Robert Johnson and they’d look at me. We’d start to laugh and they’d table the discussion and it would go on to the next meeting. I had the same cover [as that released in 1990] on my wall in my office back in 1977. It was done, just sitting and waiting. It had catalog numbers and everything.”
McCormick’s letter to Columbia frustrated LaVere. “It was a bluff,” he says. “[McCormick] would have never sued CBS because he didn’t have a leg to stand on. I mean, I have all the documents I need to file for song copyrights, photo copyrights. And Mack never did have that. Whatever he claimed as purchasing rights is invalid because it wasn’t a legal contract.”
He acknowledges that McCormick beat him across the finish line, but he says that his contract makes him the winner. LaVere says his is binding, even though McCormick’s predates his.
In fact, LaVere’s fundamental premise—that Carrie Thompson was the “sole-surviving heir”—might be flawed. Johnson’s mother was definitely alive when he died, so according to Mississippi intestate law, she precedes the sister as an heir. Thompson’s claim is no stronger than that of any of her nine siblings, or her nieces or nephews. Further, Johnson’s children or a widow would precede the mother, so if McCormick has in fact found either, Carrie Thompson could not sign away her rights because she never inherited any.
(An attorney for Thompson’s heir contends that the contract between LaVere and Thompson may be null and void. “Based on factors relating to Mr. LaVere’s alleged non performance,” says Jay Fialkov, “efforts were made in the early eighties by representatives of the estate of Robert Johnson to rescind that agreement.”)
LaVere admits that if McCormick has found heirs, his case would be damaged. “He says he’s found a large extended family of Robert Johnson’s, but he has never identified anybody. He’s only just made that claim.”
McCormick has made that claim and many others. In the slim field of Johnson scholarship, he is well respected. “[He] doggedly pursued the most tenuous leads and … has gone a long way toward filling the enormous void of knowledge surrounding Johnson’s life,” writes music historian and author Peter Guralnick in his Searching for Robert Johnson. McCormick was the source for—and in large part the subject of—that book.
While in Mississippi in 1970 riding a “rolling store”—a truck that serviced farm workers—McCormick’s inquiries into Robert Johnson’s history produced the response, “You must mean Robert Spencer.” That same year, in Dumas, Arkansas, he logged the first two eyewitness accounts of Johnson’s murder.
“Finding the facts of his death—the end of the story,” McCormick wrote in a 1988 article in the Smithsonian’s American Visions magazine, “brought with it a fresh compulsion to learn the rest of it … I decided to write a book on Robert Johnson under the working title, Biography of a Phantom. It evolved as a detective story.” That the dead man went by several names makes it that much more suited to the genre. Learning of the death, the gumshoe—McCormick—attempts to uncover the circumstances, which leads to an investigation of the man’s life. But this detective has yet to turn over his evidence—after forty-two years of research McCormick’s book is still not published.
In the 1970s, McCormick told Guralnick that the book was in the hands of an academic press and a trade press and he simply had to choose between them. Since then, he has said he could not publish until after the murderer’s death. In the 1988 article, McCormick claimed his sources feared repercussions if they revealed their information. “They finally spoke when I offered a signed document stating that what they told me would not be published until after their own deaths.”
More than forty years since McCormick began making inquiries into Johnson, and more than twenty years since those first substantial clues, McCormick’s reputation as the preeminent Johnson authority remains based on trickles of information shared with only a few journalists. His scholarship remains locked up in his files.
The aura of mystery that clings to McCormick befits a Johnson scholar. Much like the power Johnson has gained from the unanswered questions that surround him, McCormick’s seclusion has become his strength. Should he release his information—whatever information he has—McCormick becomes a bona fide authority, but at the expense of his mystique. After so many years of essential silence, McCormick’s secrecy seems intimately tied to the force that he found in Johnson. In his attempt to master the Robert Johnson myth, the myth may have mastered McCormick.
In 1976, Guralnick visited McCormick while working on a story about Johnson for Rolling Stone. It was one of the few times that McCormick divulged any of his research, and in that article, he referred to LaVere’s information as “pirated.” By putting family members and other sources in touch with one another, McCormick made the work easier for future researchers.
“I had no doubt that he had found the sisters first,” says Guralnick, “considerably before Steve LaVere, and that he had made an agreement with them which precluded LaVere from selling the photographs to Columbia. I have no doubt of that today. But what seemed to me to happen after my story came out was that Mack used the story as ammunition. He argued even more vigorously that Columbia had no right to use the photograph without his permission, which they probably didn’t—and essentially that was what tied up the album’s release for fifteen years.”
Neither man made any major moves for the next decade. In 1982, Guralnick published his “Searching for Robert Johnson,” initially as an extended essay in Living Blues and in 1989 as a book. LaVere wanted Columbia to interpret that article as the fulfillment of McCormick’s contract with Thompson to publish her information first, despite the fact that the photographs were not used and McCormick was not the author. Columbia did not agree.
Greed wasn’t likely LaVere’s original motivation. When he proposed the Complete Recordings package in 1973, neither the blues audience nor Robert Johnson’s popularity was very large. Johnson wasn’t making anybody rich. In the beginning, LaVere was, probably, just a fan—an energetic, obsessive, hustling blues lover. But as Johnson became a bigger part of his life, LaVere began blurring the line between fan and artist. By putting his copyright on the songs and photographs, LaVere owns the Johnson that survived. In his arrangement, Johnson’s relations must come to him for their money, as if he were the artist returning from a gig, his pockets jingling.
The sun came up on LaVere’s fortunes the summer day in 1990 that he got a call from Columbia executive Larry Cohn. “He said, ‘We want to release the package just the way you envisioned it.’ And I said well halle-fucking-luyah, it’s about time.
“Since the CBS record has come out,” continues LaVere, “it has been very advantageous for [me], because we can now say that CBS recognizes that my publishing company is the legitimate copyright owner. With one big dog like that in our corner, we have a chance at going after some of the other big dogs.”
The dogs could be set loose on anybody who covers a Robert Johnson song and does not pay LaVere. Such acts include Cream, Led Zeppelin, Johnny Shines, Cowboy Junkies, Bonnie Raitt, the Kronos Quartet, and John Hammond Jr. Johnson has even been sampled on at least one rap record. When the Rolling Stones covered “Love in Vain,” they attributed the song to “Woody Payne.” Though obviously not the author, the invention was an attempt to avoid becoming embroiled in copyright disputes. “We have to go after them,” says LaVere, whose company has begun receiving royalties, but he won’t say from whom. “All sales from this point forward should be contributing to my publishing company.”
In 1986, LaVere was approached by Rolling Stone about publishing, for the first time, one of his Johnson pictures. “So much time had gone by since Mack and Peter Guralnick initially published that research,” s
ays LaVere, “I figured well, why not.” When the photo came out and there was no complaint from McCormick, the marketing of the pictures began: calendars, postcards, posters, magazines.
In his attempt to control how the public sees Johnson, LaVere has vigorously pursued payments for the publishing of the photographs. Thus, he has billed Musician magazine, which used a photograph and put an illustration of Johnson on their cover. “There’s nothing in their article that is a direct promotion of the LP,” says LaVere about the cover story. “The emphasis of that article is the influence of Robert Johnson upon the musicians of today.” Cartoonist R. Crumb drew an image of Johnson for 78 Quarterly that also ran on the cover of Rock & Roll Disc, an independent, small-press magazine. “Our article was completely a review of the boxed set,” says Tom Graves, publisher of RRD. “LaVere has sent us confrontational letters with a threatening tone. He implied a suit and told us to contact his lawyer.”
R. Crumb received an unsolicited contract for his use of Johnson’s image. “LaVere was telling me if I did anything else with this drawing,” says Crumb, “I would immediately have to pay him five thousand dollars. He wanted to keep the original drawing I did as part of the deal so he would have exclusive proprietary rights to that. I never gave him any.”
CBS professes ignorance of LaVere’s actions. According to Columbia spokesman Robert Altshuler, “What LaVere does is entirely between LaVere and who he does it to.”
It was bound to happen. As the royalties mounted, so would the claimants. On a June 1991 day in the tiny Leflore County courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi, infighting began among Johnson’s relatives. “The court listened to testimony,” says attorney Jay Fialkov, who earlier this year represented Annye Anderson, a retired schoolteacher and half sister of Carrie Thompson. “The judge became aware of allegations which suggested a potential dispute concerning who the heirs of Robert Johnson were. It was impossible in one brief hearing to get a full sense of everything that has happened so far concerning the estate and everything that needs to be done. And for that reason, he appointed his chancery clerk as the temporary administrator of the estate.”
Craig Brewer is the Greenwood attorney representing the temporary administrator. He has spoken with LaVere’s attorney and happily reports that “LaVere was coproducer of the Complete Recordings and may have been a corecipient of the Grammy … He apparently has a wealth of information about Robert Johnson. LaVere’s willing to pay money into the estate, they just don’t know who the rightful heirs are.”
LaVere further established his benevolence by presenting a sum of money to the court. “[The funds] were tendered on the basis that they represent royalties owed and collected to date by Stephen LaVere,” Brewer explains. When asked if the check from LaVere was (as the Columbia source indicated) in the “chunky” six-figure range, Brewer was dumbfounded. LaVere’s check to the court: $46,968.39. Brewer said, “It would almost appear that somebody slipped a decimal.”
If Brewer considers LaVere a potential source of information, Anderson tends to view him more skeptically. She is contemplating a suit against him.
LaVere explains that mere details delayed his payment to his contractual partners. “There’s [been] a matter between me and the heirs that needs to be settled,” he says. The “matter” is a third photograph of Johnson, once in McCormick’s possession and described in Guralnick’s book. “If [Thompson’s heirs] have it, I want it,” says LaVere, claiming it was mentioned specifically in his agreement with Thompson. “And if they don’t have it, then tell me so. But I haven’t received any correspondence from the lawyer at all.”
“It’s just jive, he’s just making up a story to justify his grief,” responds a lawyer associated with Thompson. “There is no holdup.”
The last fair deal has yet to go down. While Thompson’s heirs attempt to establish their rights and prepare their case against LaVere, and while those heirs known by McCormick remain a mystery, this writer turned up at least one heir-claimant who knew nothing of either historian when he copyrighted twenty-eight of Johnson’s twenty-nine titles in 1973. (The title he overlooked, “Dead Shrimp Blues,” was later claimed by LaVere.) Though that is the same year that the Columbia dispute began, Ken Johnson, who says he is the bluesman’s grandson, apparently acted independently of both researchers when establishing his Queens, New York–based Horoscope Music Company with the United States Copyright Office.
Ken Johnson may not be entirely reliable. To other people he has claimed Robert Johnson was not his grandfather but his father. Also, he has said Robert Johnson was still alive but horribly disfigured and an embarrassment to the family. Further, four months after its release, he was unaware that Columbia had issued The Complete Recordings.
Columbia spokesman Bob Altshuler again: “This company always pays royalties to the person who the royalties are due. Other than that, we don’t discuss our royalty payments on any artist.”
“CBS is generally off the hook,” says CBS project coordinator Gary Pacheco. “Steve LaVere, through documents he presented us, assumed responsibility. The agreements give CBS indemnification. We’ve done a number of things that have proven we have nothing but the most altruistic goals here.” The label’s good deeds, according to Pacheco: They “get this guy’s music heard,” an act of charity also known as “selling records.” And they gave $17,000 to the fund that erected Johnson’s memorial stone.
The owning of the myth. Like the hamster that eats its children to protect them, McCormick will not reveal the identities of the heirs he says he’s found. He not only wants to preserve their knowledge for his book, he also wants to protect them from exploitation. But if he is protecting them, he is also depriving them; their information and photographs have been worthless since they met McCormick. His protection parallels LaVere’s proprietary notions.
McCormick is reportedly working on a film in Mexico now, while he awaits the death of Johnson’s acquaintances. (If anyone knows the whereabouts of a man named Tush Hog or his two daughters, last heard of near St. Louis, conveying the information to McCormick might expedite publication.) Biography of a Phantom has no publishing date.
Though Johnson may make LaVere a millionaire, it took the recent Greenwood court hearing for him to even make a token compensation. Ironically, LaVere’s selfishness has had a public benefit—the rerelease of the music. McCormick’s archives remain his alone, while LaVere makes his bread basket available to the public for an offering.
While talking to him on the phone one day, I asked LaVere something I’d been wondering for a while: How did he choose the name of his publishing company, the name of the concern which collects Robert Johnson’s royalties. Considering his role as paymaster to Johnson’s heirs, the name LaVere picked, King of Spades, has some unsettling connotations.
He responded immediately, as if he’d already posed the question to himself. “In all of Johnson’s words I could find only one reference to him in the third person, and that’s in ‘Little Queen of Spades.’ ‘You are the little Queen of Spades and I am the King.’ So I thought, well, King of Spades. Makes sense to me.”
This article focused attention on the Johnson case and prompted new reporting from the Washington Post and international magazines. But it was light with no heat, no change in the shady dealings between the music business and blues musicians. Many artists, especially from the first half of the twentieth century, had neither the knowledge nor the wherewithal to protect themselves and their families from corporate exploitation. They signed the deal, pocketed small change, and the corporations made the money.
In 1998, seven years after this piece was published, Mississippi courts determined that Robert Johnson’s heir was Claud Johnson, a son not born of Johnson’s wives. Claud was in his seventies and working as a gravel-truck driver in Crystal Springs, Mississippi. His wife ran a BBQ stand. If the blues had been falling like rain, the weather changed: Claud Johnson received a hefty payment from the escrow account. When he moved his family to a nice
r house, he kept his gravel truck, a reminder of his life’s hard work. He died in 2015.
Court battles continue, but the publishing money flows steadily to the Johnsons of Crystal Springs. The Mississippi Supreme Court, in 2014, secured their ongoing income from photograph licensing.
Now here’s the twist: By creating the publishing company, Steve LaVere created payments that Sony would have to disburse, of which he’d pocket an uncomfortable amount, and then the remainder would wend its way to a family who otherwise would have known no wealth. The corporation keeps less, and one dispossessed family is enriched—collateral benefits of LaVere’s work. Later, LaVere sold his King of Spades publishing and it has since changed hands again, its value increasing. LaVere cashed out. The Johnsons of Crystal Springs continue to cash in.
And as for Carrie Thompson, she got the blues. She preserved the photos all those years, shared blood and company with Robert Johnson, empowered LaVere as the presumed heir—until she tried to rescind the contract, or became uncooperative, or was somehow replaced by the Johnsons of Crystal Springs—and all she and her heirs got was LaVere’s hundred bucks.
Mack McCormick died in November 2015. His books have yet to be published. Perhaps it was all that potential for proprietary research in blues heaven, but five weeks later Steve LaVere followed Mack’s trail.
JUNIOR KIMBROUGH
I’d heard of Junior Kimbrough from the High Water releases that were coming out under Dr. David Evans’s auspices at the University of Memphis. I’d seen him perform too, at the Center for Southern Folklore’s Memphis Music & Heritage Festivals. The key, however, was I knew never to decline a party invitation.
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