That school record also noted he was still using the last name Spencer—his first stepfather’s adopted name. Julia had not yet told him about his biological father, Noah Johnson, and Robert signed the school attendance record as his own guardian—Robt. Spencer. His classmates all had parents or guardians sign on their behalf. Compared to people like Son House or Charley Patton, Robert received a considerable amount of schooling, and continued a unique habit he established in Memphis: keeping a notebook of his ideas and lyrics.
Memories of Robert’s education varied widely. Johnny Shines, who didn’t meet Robert until he was an adult in 1937, believed that Robert had little schooling. “Robert didn’t have no education at all as far as I could tell. I never saw him read or write, not even his name. He was a natural genius, but he was definitely ‘anti-education.’”9 Shines was surprised when he saw Johnson’s signature many years later and confessed, “Robert had beautiful handwriting. His writing looked like a woman’s writing.”10 People like R. L. Windum, with whom Robert attended school in Commerce, had a much different understanding of Robert’s education. “I become acquainted with Robert Johnson when we were boys. And we were going to school at that St. Peter’s school. We were about fourteen years old or something like that, and going to school.”11
As credible as Windum’s recollection was, however, previous researchers have been confused about what, or where, St. Peter’s school was. No actual school in Commerce was ever identified by that name. To make matters more confusing, there was a St. Peter’s school in Memphis, and some researchers maintained that this was the one Robert attended. But St. Peter’s in Memphis didn’t accept black students, and it is now known that he attended the Carnes Avenue School in the city. The location of the school Windum mentioned has previously been a mystery, but further recollections from his boyhood friends helped solve it. According to Windum, Robert’s family lived in a shack on Polk Place, near a fishing lake.12 Israel “Wink” Clark added credence to Windum’s account by asserting that he and Robert first met via school, church, and fishing. “His mother and my mother would fish together. That started us and we would—had to go up to the lake for them because they would skin our heads about staying with them fishing.”13 Archival maps show Polk Place at the eastern end of the Abbay and Leatherman plantation, and a small one-room church, St. Peters Church, also sat on Polk Road. Next to the church was a small tributary, Indian Creek. Both locations are less than a mile away from Fish Lake. Indian Creek School was obviously named because of its location next to that stream. Wink Clark provided the first real clue in identifying the one-room school by noting it was actually the “small wood-frame church.”14 The location and identity of St. Peter’s school was ultimately verified by Dr. Richard Taylor, director of the Tunica County Historical Museum.15
Robert was used to getting a very complete education in Memphis, and Indian Creek School was nothing like the Carnes School he had attended. Its main function was to teach its students the most basic reading and writing skills that would be needed by sharecroppers or other laborers—Robert had already acquired more education than most of his classmates would ever get. Regardless, Robert took advantage of whatever opportunities were provided to further develop his educational and intellectual habits, in the process becoming a voracious reader. His later musical friend and “stepson,” Robert Lockwood, spoke warmly about how much Robert loved to read. “I have to say that he done quite a bit of studying in his life. He did a lot of reading and stuff like that. Just about anything you could read, he read it.”16
Polk Place today. St. Peter’s Church/Indian Creek School was on the immediate right, and the Willis home was in the background on the left. Fish Lake is below the water tower. Bruce Conforth
Fish Lake, where Robert fished with his boyhood friends. Bruce Conforth
Going back to school introduced Robert to new friends like Windum and Clark, and they would spend their days like many other Delta youth: fishing and playing together. “Everything would go smooth,” Clark recalled. “We’d just run around, fish, play around. My mother and his mother were great friends, and that’s how come we grew up together, we got to be teenage boys. And all up and down this river here we’d fish, and his mother lived [on the plantation] back there near the levee, and that’s where me and him got many a spanking, right there.”17
Whatever Clark was spanked for, Robert’s punishments were usually caused by his reluctance to work in the fields. He hated farmwork now more than ever, and his way of avoiding it was to frequently run away to his family in Memphis. He was now old enough to travel on his own—and close enough to Old Highway 61 that he began leaving Dusty Willis and fieldwork and returning to the Spencers. R. L. Windum said that Robert would often be gone from the Delta for long periods of time precisely because he was visiting the Spencer family.18
Robert at this time still considered Charles Dodds Spencer in Memphis his father, especially since Julia had yet to tell him about his biological father, Noah Johnson. Robert saw Charles as a much better role model than Dusty Willis. Even the latter’s nickname went against Robert’s better instincts. Why would he want to be a dusty field worker? Robert wanted to be something special, and Charles Spencer understood that. And so Robert continued to use Charles’s last name, at least for a while longer. “I always knowed him by Spencer,” Windum stated. “That’s how I knowed [him]. I didn’t know nothing about that Johnson till his music come up. I just knowed his mother, and his sister and his brother. And his mother, she was named Julia.”19 Willie Mason had similar memories: “We used to call him Robert Spencer and then Robert Johnson, I don’t know where that Spencer come from, the name Robert Johnson Spencer or what, but folks used to call him Robert Spencer a lot.”20
Once Julia informed Robert that his biological father was from Hazlehurst, the confused boy suddenly had two last names. “He called himself Spencer and Johnson,” Clark explained. “Robert Spencer and Robert Johnson, both of them. [Robert’s mother] had about three different husbands. So I wouldn’t know [who his father was], but when I knowed him as Robert Johnson.”21
Elizabeth Moore was one of their neighbors on the Leatherman plantation and recalled Robert using a variety of names during the time she knew him. “He had three names. Sometimes they used to call him ‘Dusty’ [after his stepfather—Robert made it known that he hated this] but most of the times looks like they enjoyed callin’ him ‘Sax.’ I don’t know why people called him that but he had three names when I first moved around Robinsonville and that’s when I got acquainted with him. I learned him as Robert Johnson, see, his name, but I’d hear from somebody else, like people come in here to get you on a Saturday night, to play. ‘Where Robert Sax is?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know him. There’s a guitar player here but his name is Robert Johnson.’ ‘Well that’s him! That’s him!’ Or I’d hear from somebody else: ‘Where Robert Johnson is?’”22 The use of nicknames such as “Dusty,” “Sax,” or “Son” were prevalent in rural areas of the South in both black and white cultures. It was also considered rude, or even threatening, to challenge someone’s nickname. Many times musicians didn’t even know the last name of their playing partners. They never asked.
But Elizabeth’s recollection reveals far more than just confusion over Robert’s name, because she talks about people looking for Robert to play guitar at their parties. This contradicts conventional wisdom based almost exclusively on Son House’s recollection that when House first met Robert, the “boy” couldn’t play guitar. Both Elizabeth and Willie Moore repeatedly asserted that Robert was not just playing guitar but performing publicly by 1928, when he was only seventeen. If their information is correct, Robert had taken the first steps to become a professional musician years before previously believed. Robert was not just a kid living on a plantation in Robinsonville. He was already on his way to developing his own musical style.
5
MUSICAL ROOTS AND IDENTITY
In 1926 Robert Johnson became a musician. He was fif
teen years old, living on the second plantation of his young life, and dividing his time between Memphis and his Delta home. His trips to see his Memphis family made him ever more sure that he had no interest in farming; his major interest was music. By his early teenage years Robert had already become an accomplished harmonica and Jew’s harp player, and he could play some guitar and piano (both learned from his older stepbrother Charles in Memphis). Now his half sister Carrie moved from Memphis to join his Delta family, bringing her son, Louis, to become his neighbor on Polk Place near Robinsonville. Although most of Robert’s friends were still primarily interested in playing games and going fishing, he discovered that he and R. L. Windum had a musical interest in common: they both played harmonica. “We used to blow harp together,” Windum recalled. “When we would be together we would blow harp just like the boys that was in those times to get around.”1 A harmonica was cheap, pocket-sized, and easy to carry. It could play both single notes and chords, imitate a train whistle or steam engine, and its percussive nature allowed it to provide a driving rhythm for juking. And Robert was good at it too. But his main musical interest was the guitar.
Young boy playing a diddley bow on the side of a shack. Library of Congress – Johnson
Dusty Willis, on the other hand, was only interested in Robert working on his land. The idea of Robert playing guitar instead of farming was out of the question. In spite of his stepfather’s opposition, though, Robert, like many blues musicians before and after him, resorted to building his own stringed instrument.
Wink Clark remembered Robert’s earliest musical attempts: “He had him one built on his wall, outta three strands of wire. And that’s the way he started, on the three strands of wire and three bottles. He’d drive in three nails upside the wall. And he’d have one string tied from this nail down to this nail … then he’d put him a bottle under it and put him one up [at the top] and push ’em up tight and it’s just like tuning a guitar. And he could play what he was singing but I never could get no sense out of it [laughs].”2 The instrument Clark described was a diddley bow: a simple string instrument sometimes constructed on a building or sometimes as a stand-alone instrument. It could have been built on a plank of wood, a rake handle, or whatever piece of lumber was available.
Music consumed Robert’s life. Willie Mason said if Robert couldn’t play his diddley bow, or later his guitar, he’d play his harmonica, even when he was out in the fields. Wink Clark corroborates: “We was working on the farm together and the boss man told him to leave once ’cause everybody in the field chopping cotton, and [Robert] ran inside the house and had some wire, some hay-bale wire tied around his mouth with his harp.”3 Robert had fashioned his own homemade harmonica holder that allowed him to play the instrument even when he was working. Invariably his playing would slow down his work, and his farm production would suffer, repeatedly causing Robert to get beatings from Dusty. But not everyone in Robert’s Delta family was opposed to his music or his ambitions. Carrie—who had cared for Robert when they both lived in Memphis, bought him glasses when he needed them, and walked him to school every day—was once again there to help her younger half brother.
Now living with Wink Clark’s brother Leamon, Carrie saw that Robert was no farmer and that his interests lay in music.4 She knew what Memphis and its culture meant to him. She had been living at the Spencer home when he would run away to seek refuge in his childhood environs. As she was there for him then, so would she be the rest of his life, and if Robert wanted to play guitar she would help him do so. Although neither she nor Robert could afford to buy even a cheaply manufactured instrument, Carrie helped him move up from the diddley bow on the side of his shack to the next best thing: a homemade cigar-box guitar. They pieced one together using bailing wire from the farm, a scrap of wood for a neck, and a cigar box from Wink Clark’s father. While Robert was practicing on that instrument, both he and Carrie began saving whatever change they could accumulate to reach their goal: a store-bought guitar. In early 1927 they were able to walk into a general store and purchase their prize: an old wooden guitar that was missing two strings.5
Robert played those four strings constantly, driving everyone within earshot crazy from his practicing, until he was finally able to acquire a dime to buy the two missing strings. Having a real guitar not only began to improve Robert’s playing, it also helped him grow up and leave behind the things his other friends still found interesting. Wink Clark spoke about how that change manifested itself. “We’d go out on the levee, side of the road somewhere, and we’d shoot marbles, [but] he’d play guitar.”6 For the rest of his life Robert and a guitar would be inseparable.
Wink Clark’s father, who had been helpful in assembling the cigar-box guitar, next assisted in making Memphis more accessible to Robert when he purchased a Model T Ford. Robert, now sixteen, and Carrie began getting rides from Clark to make regular visits to Charles Spencer, his wife Mollie, and their two new daughters. Instead of hitching a ride as best he could, now Robert was driven the short thirty-two mile trip every few weeks. And as they always had, these trips to the city only served to intensify the differences between him and his country friends as he changed from a boy into a man.
For Robert, one of the most life-changing lessons was learning how to drink. “Did he [drink]?” Clark queried. “You ought to ask, how much did he try to drink? He tried to drink up all that corn whiskey was made, but he never would get too drunk to play his guitar, but he sure drank it. He drank a lots. He drank all night. Just about like you see these women sipping on these Coca-Colas. That’s just the way he would do a bottle of whiskey.”7 As he matured, Robert grew as a musician too. His musical growth had been given a huge boost only a year earlier when one of his first mentors, a guitarist who had been playing for ten years, moved to Robinsonville. His name was Willie Brown.
Carrie Dodds Spencer Harris. © Delta Haze Corporation
Brown was known as a highly talented guitarist and even mentored Memphis Minnie while living near Lake Cormorant, Mississippi. As gifted as he was, however, he was best known for playing second guitar accompaniment behind Charley Patton and Son House. Brown was probably born near Perthshire, Mississippi, around 1897, and had played music from Dockery’s plantation near Cleveland all the way up to Tunica. Prior to arriving in Robinsonville he lived on Arthur Peerman’s plantation, just northeast of Cleveland. Willie Moore, who met Brown in 1916, explained Brown’s friendship with Patton. “He [Brown] told me that he had some fella he used to play with down the road; he told me, ’twas a fella stayed down here in Hollendale. And he said, ‘Man, you oughta hear him play!’ Said, ‘Me and him plays together!’ He’s talkin’ about Charley Patton!”8 Brown learned well, for he easily matched Patton in both musicianship and histrionics, something that was called “clowning” on the guitar. “He stomp his foot, barefooted. He say, ‘Give me that Pony!’” Moore explained. “Slap that guitar, boy, back there, say, ‘Set it over yonder!’ He just played his own style all the time.”9 Brown’s own style included playing the guitar behind his head. And his repertoire was diverse enough that he could play for either a black or white audience, including pop tunes like “You Great Big Beautiful Doll” or “What Makes You Do Me Like You Do Do Do?” His jobs with Son House or Patton usually consisted of one-night stands throughout the area’s jukes and house parties. Robert Johnson began to sneak out to see Brown play at these jobs, and the two became fast friends. Brown gave the younger player at least some guitar tips, as Elizabeth Moore confirmed. “[Robert] didn’t have to talk about [Willie Brown], he knowed him. He could talk about him because he played with him. He [Robert] could play pretty good. I imagine there’s some things he learned from Willie Brown, but he could play pretty good. [He went around with] both of them [Willie Brown and Son House].”10
Photo alleged to be of Willie Moore, Willie Brown, and either Fiddlin’ Joe Martin or Billy Dickson. Found near Pritchard, MS, and identified by local connections and comparisons with other photos. Randy
Meadows collection
Robert quickly realized that he could avoid field work, attract more attention from young women, and pick up some spending money by playing his guitar. But to do that successfully he had to get better, and so he became a musical sponge: soaking up playing tips from everyone who would give him some of their time, no matter how talented they were. “He’d come out here to me and my husband’s home near Robinsonville,” Elizabeth Moore said. “We lived out on the same plantation, out from Robinsonville. So my husband could pick one old tune, you know, and he’d come there to get that tune all the time. Lord, I’d get sick of them playing that old song, ‘I’m Gonna Sit Down and Tell My Mama.’” Eventually, she protested her husband’s commitment to the young journeyman. “I’d say, ‘Fella, why don’t you put that old guitar [he had his own] down?’ ‘Miss Harvey [her married name at that time],’ he’d say, ‘don’t say that.’ He wanted to learn how to make them notes. I’d say, ‘Well, you all worrying me.’ I’d go to bed and leave ’em sittin’ up there on the porch and he’d be plunkin’ on his old guitar. Plunka, plunka, plunka. My husband couldn’t play but that one old tune he done learned up in the hills [before he moved to the Delta]. He was primarily a piano player.”11
Willie and Elizabeth Moore. Gayle Dean Wardlow
After learning basic skills, Robert did what young musicians have always done: he sought approval. In his case, it would come from older sharecroppers who basically had only live music for entertainment. Robert traveled from house to house, and whenever he could find someone willing to listen, he would give them an impromptu concert. Almost always he was met with a kind reponse: “You just go right on, child. You just keep on, child.” By now, Robert had completely turned his back on anything but music. Dusty Willis still expected him to help on the farm, but Robert would have no part of it. “He quit farmin.’ His mama and them was farmin’ out there on the place where we all was, all of us makin’ crops, you know,” Elizabeth Moore recollected. “Well, he got to the place where he didn’t wanna chop no cotton.”12
Up Jumped the Devil Page 5