Beale Street and P. Wee’s Saloon ca. 1900. Memphis Public Libraries, Memphis and Shelby County Rooms
Farther down Beale Street, P. Wee’s Saloon, owned by Italian immigrant Viglio Maffi (“Peewee”), was “a winter home for hoboes who came there to spend cold winter nights beside his red hot stove.”6 Some of those “hoboes” were itinerant blues musicians, for in Peewee’s club “piano and guitar players liked to gather” and they played the blues while gamblers played card games like seven-up. P. Wee’s was one of the first places W. C. Handy heard the blues.7 So many musicians gathered at P. Wee’s that Handy later recalled, “You couldn’t step [in the instrument storeroom] for the bull fiddles. The room was always that full with instruments.”8 Guitar players strolled up and down the street, and blind musicians took their posts on their favorite street corners to entertain passersby with spirituals, blues, and pop tunes.
Among the many Beale Street musicians that Robert would have almost certainly seen or heard were Frank Stokes of the Beale Street Sheiks, for jug bands like the Sheiks were prominent attractions in Memphis.9
Will Shade and Furry Lewis were also among the musicians who played there, and the guitarist Jim Jackson was so popular on Beale Street that by 1919 he was performing inside the famed, and exclusively white, Peabody Hotel. Gus Cannon, along with Noah Lewis and Ashley Thompson, formed Cannon’s Jug Stompers and played both at Memphis parties and on the streets. Anyone living near Beale Street was treated to a daily dose of these performers’ music. The sounds of music were all around Robert—even in his Court Street home. Robert’s own stepbrother Charles Melvin Leroy taught him a few elements of guitar and piano.
Charles M. L. D. Spencer and wife (date unknown). © Delta Haze Corporation
The practice of hoodoo and rootwork also thrived in the black community in Memphis. Practitioners, conjurers, and the stores that catered to them were plentiful. Hoodoo had its roots in traditional practices from Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and other locations that sent slaves to North America, and those practices had been syncretized. For some, hoodoo was seen as cultural resistance: a way for poor Blacks to create an agency that white culture, society, and politics denied them.10 For Robert, hoodoo was an enticing part of Memphis culture that he would use in his song lyrics as an adult.
As early as the 1860s, reports from Memphis concerned obi or obeah men, a reference to the practitioners of folk magic, sorcery, and religion among West African slaves. The Memphis Daily Appeal described them as “always native Africans” who used all manner of materials—“feathers of various colors, blood, dog’s and cat’s teeth, clay from graves, egg-shells, beads, and broken bits of glass”—to achieve their results.11 There was no lack of access to hoodoo supplies in Memphis while Robert was growing up. The Pantaze Drug Store chain (several were located on Beale Street) carried a number of hoodoo-related supplies. At the famous A. Schwab dry goods store on Beale Street, a short walk from the Spencer house, one could, and still can, buy all the hoodoo and conjuring supplies one needed.
A. Schwab’s Drug Store on Beale Street, est. 1876. Memphis Public Libraries, Memphis and Shelby County Rooms
Also nearby was East Beale Street—an eerie, gloomy, swampish location—the home of Memphis’s hoodoo practitioners, conjurers who sat before boiling pots mixing strange concoctions. They could make you anything you needed to cure a disease or drive away evil spirits. They specialized, however, in making red flannel mojo bags that could either protect their wearer against his or her enemy or bring good luck. These packets contained snakeroot, devil’s shoestring, High John the Conqueror root, and other traditional fixings. Foot-traffic magic and other forms of hoodoo were also widely known throughout Memphis’s black community well into the 1930s and beyond.
That riverport city, a fast-paced, urban society that still held onto its folk traditions, provided Robert with experiences a child previously living on a plantation could hardly have imagined. A southern urban center, Memphis was also regularly visited by the Ringling Brothers Circus, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and entertainers like the Marx Brothers, George M. Cohan, magician Harry Houdini, and other exemplars of mainstream popular culture. Robert could not avoid being exposed to their presence and the excitement these entertainers created. Even without the money to attend the circus, he must have surely stood on the streets with hundreds of other children and watched the grand parade of animals and clowns as the shows entered the town.
Entertainment advertisements from the Memphis Commercial Appeal, 1918. Memphis Public Libraries, Memphis and Shelby County Rooms
Throughout Robert’s time in Memphis the Spencers—Robert was now using Spencer as his last name, having fully adopted the family as his own—continued to live at 898 Court Avenue, well within walking distance of not just Beale Street, but Court Square (one of Memphis’s main parks). Robert’s stimuli, however, were not limited to folk culture, music, and entertainment, for he had to enter school around 1916. His boyhood friend from the Robinsonville, Mississippi, area, R. L. Windum, said that Robert told him he attended school in Memphis.12 Actually, there was no way Robert could not go to school while living in Memphis, for in those years the city was the battleground of the grand champion of black education: Julia Hooks.
Hooks was a black musician, educator, and social worker who had received her degree from Berea College in Kentucky, the first southern college to be integrated. She moved to Memphis before the turn of the century and became active in various musical enterprises and churches, playing organ and directing choirs and choral groups. She also taught music, and her students appeared annually at Zion Hall in the Beale Street Baptist Church. Hooks also served as a teacher and principal in the city schools. Later, she became an officer of the juvenile court while her husband, Charles, took on chores as the city’s truant officer. After Charles was killed in 1917, however, she began patrolling the streets of Memphis herself, seeking out errant black children who were not in school. Her two sons, Henry and Robert, became photographers and opened the famed Hooks Brothers Photographers studio on Beale Street. Years later Robert had his now-famous portrait taken by them.
Map of original location of Spencer household and current view. Bruce Conforth
The Shelby County school board archives verified that, living where he did, Robert would have almost certainly been enrolled in the Carnes Avenue Colored School, originally a two-room wooden building for black students at 942 Peach Avenue in Memphis. It was only five blocks away from his home.13
Robert’s older half sister Carrie remembered walking with him to school, holding his hand as they traveled the few blocks to get their education. Attending any school at all, but especially an urban one, distinguished Robert from other blues musicians of his era. Robert Johnson’s ability to read and write was atypical.14 Most of Robert’s musical contemporaries were largely functionally illiterate simply because they were black plantation children.
A 1919 report, The Public School System of Memphis, Tennessee (based on a study done in 1917), noted that even in schools for black children (Carnes School was specifically mentioned) the subjects taught included reading, language, industrial arts (although in the poorer schools this may have been limited to scissors and construction paper), arithmetic, music, geography, and physical exercise. The report also revealed that “the Negro schools excel the standards for each grade and exceed the white schools in the third, fourth, and fifth grades.”15 It seems clear that Robert’s new family intended him to be more than just a field laborer. Charles Spencer was, after all, a skilled carpenter, and therefore Robert should at least learn a good trade. For this reason, when his eye problem became apparent, Carrie, some ten years his senior, helped him secure a pair of glasses.
From 1913 until 1919, Robert lived with the Spencer household—a household that held many advantages for the young boy.16 Memphis was full of exciting attractions that his Delta contemporaries would never see or experience. The urbanity and sophistication of the city became young R
obert’s norm. But Robert’s foundational stay in Memphis came to an end when Julia reentered his life. In October 1916, she had married a sharecropper, Will “Dusty” Willis, and, after spending two years roaming from farm to farm, they eventually settled on a plantation in Arkansas. In 1919 Robert and Carrie were walking on Front Street when they saw Julia. As Robert looked on in surprise, Carrie cried out “That’s Mama!” Julia had come to Memphis to take the young Robert back to Arkansas to help on the farm. Robert was uprooted once again.
After being abandoned by his mother with a group of strangers in a strange though exciting town, he was now, against his will, being taken from the only family he knew and forced to go with an unfamiliar woman to a place far different from what he had grown used to. Away from the city, circuses, music, and school, he was expected to acclimate to the new environment of plantations with endless cotton fields.
But the new region Julia was taking him to did have something unique to offer: a different type of music from that found in urban Memphis. The guitar-focused music known as cotton-field blues was played on every plantation at weekend jukes. This new sound appealed to Robert in ways he couldn’t have expected. It was raw and full of feeling, probably like the emotions he might have been experiencing. He embraced it like a boll weevil did a growing cotton ball. Perhaps everything about his move away from Memphis wasn’t that bad. The new friends he would make in the deep Delta would help him find his way through this period in his life and into the new music that surrounded him.
4
BACK TO THE DELTA
Robert Johnson stared at the endless plantation fields that lay opposite the levees shielding them from the Mississippi River. Cotton was everywhere. Gone was the life that he had known. Now there was nothing but dirt—dirt roads, dirt farms, and earthworks—as far as his eyes could see. There were no schools for Negro children. This place, Lucas Township, was vast and empty. An intelligent, citified nine-year-old had been uprooted and placed in an alien environment: the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta.
The farm where Robert was taken was on Horseshoe Lake in Crittenden County, Arkansas. It is some thirty miles southwest of Memphis, directly across the Mississippi River from Penton, Lake Cormorant, Clack, Commerce, and Robinsonville—Mississippi locations that later served as major landmarks in Robert’s life. Horseshoe Lake boasted a number of plantations, and it was on one of those that Julia’s new husband had decided to try his luck. Several of these plantations became legendary, among them the plantation owned by J.O.E Beck. Beck cleared the land of trees and drained the swampland, creating a huge plantation system that stretched from Hughes in St. Francis County to Lee County in the west.1 It would later become better known as Sadie Beck’s Plantation when folklorist Alan Lomax recorded there in 1942.
The Snowden plantation on the northwestern side of the lake contained one thousand acres with a commissary, Baugh Store, which had the first frozen food lockers in the area.2 Rodgers plantation occupied the islands in and the land below Horseshoe Lake. Since the January 23, 1920, US Census indicates that Willis (22), Julia (45), and Robert (erroneously listed as 7 years old) were living in the middle of the region, Rodgers plantation is the most likely candidate for their residence.3
Willis was known to the community as a slow-witted man, and they nicknamed him “Dusty” for his habit of walking rapidly down the dirty country roads, kicking up a cloud of dust wherever he went. Dusty could neither read nor write, but Robert, on the other hand, could do both, which created a cultural gap between the young boy and his stepfather.
1924 Lucas Township Map. Black squares are sharecroppers’ homes; thick lines between those homes and the river are levees. Bruce Conforth
Robert’s new home was typical of a sharecropper’s building: rough and bare, nothing like the apartment living he’d experienced in Memphis. A sharecropper’s shack was usually only a two-or three-room unpainted house of unplaned lumber with either roll or tin roofing. When the insides were actually papered, newspapers or magazine pages were used for wallpaper, exactly like the house in which he was born in Hazlehurt. The only exception to the spartan decoration of plantation buildings was the house that held Saturday jukes. These were usually painted green for easy identification.
Whether he wanted to or not, Robert was forced to learn about living on a plantation. He traded his schoolbooks for a hoe and gunnysack and discovered that his days were determined by what plantation owners called a “furnish day” system instead of a school year. March 1 of each year was furnish day: each sharecropper was furnished with one dollar per month for every acre they farmed. But it was not cash money; it was in the form of plantation scrip that could only be traded at the plantation commissary. In this system, sharecroppers resembled indentured servants more than independent farmers. Plantation owners saw to it that a sharecropper rarely, if ever, ended the year on the positive side of the financial ledger.
Crittenden County sharecropper’s shack, 1920s. Margaret Elizabeth Woolfolk collection
Robert hated farming. He told his friends that he missed the streets of the city and all it had to offer. While the rest of his new friends were content to follow a sharecropper’s life, Robert told everyone he didn’t want that life, and instead wanted to attend school and learn about the world around him. Sharecropping cotton was hard labor. After his new stepfather would prepare the fields by mule-drawn plow, Robert then had to help him plant the cotton seeds. As the plants grew, chopping cotton—removing the weeds that grew between the plants with handheld hoes, picks, shovels, and rakes—made his hands blister and ache. But the worst job, the picking of cotton, began in late August or early September.
Each picker carried a long white sack: twelve-foot sacks were standard for an adult male. As a child, Robert was only expected to haul a six-or eight-foot sack, but it was still backbreaking labor, and the sharp leaves of the cotton boll would hurt his hands as he pulled the white prize from its shell. After he filled his bag he’d haul it to a waiting cotton wagon, have it weighed and dumped, and then start all over again. A good adult picker could fill four or five large sacks a day—roughly 350 pounds of cotton. Robert was lucky to pick around one hundred pounds, and even on the hottest days he had to wear a long-sleeve shirt and hat for protection from the sun. In Memphis he had gone to school from morning until afternoon. On his stepfather’s farm he worked “from can to can’t”: from daybreak, when he can see, to nightfall, when he can’t. All of this to help his new family earn no more than $200 of “plantation money.”4
Existing Abbay and Leatherman commissary/office. Bruce Conforth
Robert, Julia, and Dusty did not stay long on the Arkansas plantation, however. Shortly after the 1920 census they moved across the Mississippi River to the Abbay and Leatherman plantation in Commerce. There they settled in a shack along the levee near a section named Polk Place.5 Their move was probably precipitated by the drastic dip in cotton prices from 38.5 cents per pound to 9.5 cents per pound.6 Like other sharecroppers who only stayed one season on a farm, Willis hoped that a move to a larger, more affluent plantation in Mississippi would offer him a better living. Once again Robert’s life changed.
In 1832 Richard and Anthony Abbay purchased land on both sides of the Mississippi River from the Chickasaw Indian tribe. Their land on the Mississippi side of the river would be used to create the Abbay and Leatherman plantation, one of the most prosperous in the Delta. There seems little doubt that Dusty Willis would have known about the better conditions it offered and it was onto this new farm that he moved Julia and young Robert. And, because of its proximity to the town of Robinsonville, the new plantation afforded Robert some familiar experiences. The first was that he was once again exposed to musicians: songsters, singers of older folk songs, and the new breed of Delta blues players. Robinsonville was a stronghold for the latter, and Robert could not help but hear them and become entranced with their music and lifestyle.
Famous for its extremely fertile soil, and infamous for its desol
ation and frequent flooding by the Mississippi River (in spite of attempts to build protective levees), the Delta in which young Robert found himself was divided into two different areas—the south and north regions. The south Delta began at Yazoo City and Vicksburg and extended above Greenwood and Greenville to Clarksdale. The area above that, Coahoma County toward Memphis, was termed the north Delta by those who lived there. Railroads helped further divide this region. The Columbus and Greenville Railroad (C&G, or the “Southern”) ran from Columbus in the eastern part of the state to Greenville on the Mississippi River. Another historical railroad, the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley (YMV), commonly called the “Dog,” used two routes to run from Yazoo City, where the Delta began, to Clarksdale. One route came through Moorhead and the other branch went through Indianola, past Parchman Penitentiary, to Tutwiler, where the two branches once again met. W. C. Handy, the “Father of the Blues,” wrote that he had first heard a bottleneck guitarist playing at a depot there in the early 1900s, which inspired him to begin writing blues for sheet music and recordings. It has been conjectured by scholars writing about Handy that the guitarist he heard might have been Henry Sloan, mentor to Charley Patton and a resident of the Dockery plantation.
The long layover from early December until spring planting began again allowed for musicians to drift in and out of the area making easy money by playing for dances and parties. David “Honeyboy” Edwards said that the “off-time” gave musicians an opportunity to “sit around and play. Mississippi and Arkansas had the largest group of musicians. They didn’t have nothin’ to do but sit around and play and drink that old moonshine whiskey. They didn’t work in no cotton fields.”7 The music and lifestyles of these musicians suited Robert just fine. The proximity to Robinsonville also permitted Robert to renew another routine he had begun in Memphis: attending school. The 1924 Tunica County school records document Robert Spencer attending classes at the Indian Creek school in Commerce.8
Up Jumped the Devil Page 4