Up Jumped the Devil

by Bruce Conforth

  Robert’s insolence made his relationship with Dusty more unbearable, increasing the frequency of beatings he would receive. Each argument between the two men always ended the same: Dusty would insist that Robert get into the fields and work, and Robert would grab his guitar and leave. Their fights were intense enough that Elizabeth Moore could hear Dusty’s rantings: “I told you to work! How come you didn’t do that like I told you? You got to help me work!” She could also hear Robert’s response: “I don’t wanna work. I’m tryin’ to learn how to make my livin’ without pickin’ cotton. I got this here old guitar music on my mind and that’s what I wanna learn more.”13 And indeed, at some point around this time, according to Mack McCormick and Steve LaVere, Robert did learn more from Ernest “Whiskey Red” Brown, a friend of Willie Brown and Charley Patton.

  By 1928, only two years after he had built a diddley bow on the side of his shack and only one year after acquiring his first guitar, Robert was playing professionally at local small parties and dances. Before long he was going to Tunica, a few miles below Robinsonville and the county seat, to play at the local roadhouses and then on to another location, and finally back to Robinsonville.14 Nat Richardson, whose father owned a juke where Robert would perform, recalled that “people from all around” would come to the juke to hear Robert play, “people even outta Memphis.”15

  According to Delta musician Hayes McMullan, who lived on a plantation near Sumner, at first people held house parties, or “frolics,” where no alcohol was served. The homeowner often sold food. When alcohol was added and the parties became a place to drink and dance, the term “juke” became widely used. Playing in a juke was quite profitable by Delta standards. The musician got paid as much as five dollars, plus free food and whiskey. That was more money than Dusty made on his farm, and that fact only alienated him from Robert even more. During the off winter months the pay was less, but as long as people liked to frolic after long workweeks in the fields, they always sought relief. Guitarists such as Robert provided the perfect entertainment. In addition to the money was a benefit that Robert found especially interesting: the attention he received from young women. Robert was becoming quite a womanizer.

  Wink Clark affirmed that by the late 1920s, a teenaged Robert was already traveling to Lake Cormorant, Pritchard, Banks, and occasionally into Arkansas to play music.16 By this time Robert offered his audience a variety of musical talents: harmonica, Jew’s harp, piano, pump organ, and guitar. As he got better and better on the guitar, Clark saw him less and less. “He began to get profession and he would go out and stay out. He used to try to get me to go—come and go, stay all night long with his lady…. Take him anywhere around Robinsonville, Tunica, Banks, Prichard—they wanna have a big picnic or a big party Saturday night, Sunday, they would get Robert.”17

  Hayes McMullen. Gayle Dean Wardlow

  Willie Moore, a musician turned “juke house gambler” who had toured with Handy’s Orchestra from Memphis, teamed with Robert in the late 1920s as a “complimenting guitar.” Moore’s memories are important: they attest not only to Robert’s musical abilities but to how early they developed. Moore swore that Robert was already a somewhat accomplished musician when the two met. “It was before high water [the 1927 Mississippi flood] that I met Robert. He wasn’t twenty years old.”18

  They first performed together on a Saturday afternoon, when sharecroppers came to buy groceries for the week and socialize in Robinsonville, a typical plantation town. Robert was playing guitar on the town’s only paved street. Moore saw him for the first time “at the Chinaman’s store—little Chinaman used to follow us all the time. He [Robert] was there and he seen me with a guitar. I was goin’ to play for a dance, and he asked me, he said, ‘Can you, what, you play lead or just play that?’ I said, ‘Well, I tell you one thing, I hardly play lead, I play by myself.’ He said, ‘God knows I need one [an accompanist] so bad.’ He said, ‘I got a boy but he can’t make B flat. He can’t make a B flat, but he lays his fingers down, but he don’t know how to put that introduction in there.’ I said, ‘He musta learned on his own. I learned in school; I can make a B flat so slick.’ He said, ‘Well, look, you got time to go around here.’ We went around there and got to rehearsing there on the street, right there by the Chinaman’s store and the folk couldn’t get by, we hadda quit that. [We had] two guitars. I had mine and he went and got his.”19

  Robert and Willie stood for hours outside of the Chinese-owned grocery store until they made enough money to buy drinks and food. Such stores were common in the Delta. Robinsonville, where they played, had a population of only a little over three hundred but featured three such groceries.20 Just after the Civil War, Mississippi planters began recruiting Chinese workers as a possible replacement for the freed black laborers. It was quickly obvious to the new arrivals, however, that plantation work was not a way to obtain economic success, so many opened grocery stores. Their small stores carried meat, cornmeal, molasses, and other simple basics—exactly the items poor black farmers working on plantations needed.21

  Robert was performing a combination of folk songs and standards that had filtered into black communities: songs that he had heard other local musicians playing. He had yet to begin composing his own songs. According to Moore, his earliest pieces included “Captain George,” “Make Me a Pallet,” and “President McKinley.” “‘Captain George, did your money come? Captain George, did your money come?’ And he would say, ‘Reason I ask you, I wanna borrow me some.’ That’s the first song I ever heard Robert sing. Next thing he played about was ‘Make Me Down,’ but he never would say, ‘Make me down a pallet.’ He’d say, ‘Flung me down [a pallet] on your floor, and make it so your man would never know.’”22

  Robert used a bottleneck slide while singing about McKinley’s assassination in Buffalo, New York, in 1901. The song included a standard verse employed by such earlier musicians as Blind Lemon Jefferson: “Rubber-tire buggy and a decorated hat. They carried McKinley to the cemetery, but they didn’t bring him back.” Many of Robert’s earliest pieces were peppered with verses drawn from earlier blues or oral tradition, because that’s what he learned. But one of Robert’s songs struck Moore as particularly special. It seemed to address the whole idea of rambling, a concept that Robert would personally embrace. “I played with him lots of times but you know, he had a song he sang all the time, ‘Black Gal Why Don’t Ya Comb Your Hair,’ but the most he played was, ‘He walked all the way from East Saint Louis with a lousy dime.’”23

  Robert’s other pieces included “You Can Mistreat Me Here but You Can’t When I Go Home” (perhaps an early version that later became “Dust My Broom”), “East St. Louis Blues,” and a bottleneck version of “Casey Jones” that he renamed “A Thousand and Five on the Road Again.” He began to develop a small reputation as a guitarist of modest but entertaining skills. His notoriety and playing, while usually drawing the kind of attention he did want—money, drink, and women (and not necessarily in that order)—would sometimes draw attention he didn’t want: trouble with people even beyond his stepfather. On one occasion Willie Moore and Robert were both jailed because they named the sheriff of Robinsonville in a song.

  “Mr. Woolfolk was the high sheriff. [We were singing,] ‘Mr. Crump don’t like it, Mr. Smith ain’t gonna have us here.’ We was in Robinsonville [and] come out with a song, you see. I didn’t know it; Robert, I don’t reckon he heard it neither. They had a whole racket about Mr. Smith don’t like it and Mr. Woolfolk ain’t gonna have it here. He put us right in that jail, I’m tellin’ you. We didn’t stay in there long, stayed in there about two hours, man got us out, you know.”24

  In or out of trouble, Robert was focused on pushing his music forward. He wanted to be known and make an impression, and he wanted to be wanted. To appear more modern and flashy, he bought a wooden-bodied guitar with an imitation resonator to provide more volume. True resonator guitars had just started being manufactured, and many companies, such as Regal, began releasing imit
ation resonators: plain wooden guitars with a fake metal resonator plate on the top of the body. Robert swore to all who would listen that the metal plate (which actually did nothing) increased the volume of the instrument, and that with this new guitar he was leaving the old folks behind. “We asked him many times, ‘Why do you have it on there?’” Willie Moore related. “He say, ‘Well, that makes my guitar sound louder, see. This here’s put on there to make it sound louder. He didn’t have no electric to it.”25 Robert wasn’t the only guitarist to try to impress people with such a piece of musical chicanery. Years later, a very young B. B. King fashioned a fake resonator plate out of an old piece of tin and attached it to the top of his guitar. Like Robert’s, the plate did nothing, but it looked special and unique.26

  Robert and Willie Moore became regular musical partners for a brief period. Whenever he needed to find Moore to go juking, Robert used the country form of “gettin’ up together” to find him. “Like, if he need me to meet him, he’d get in a buggy, or get on a mule or a horse, or something or another, or get a car and come get me and we’d play.”27 Moore lived on the nearby Black plantation, just south of where Robert’s stepfather sharecropped. But Moore never went to Robert’s house; he knew Dusty disapproved of Robert playing music instead of working on the farm.

  As his talents grew, Robert wanted to appear more professional, and on one of his trips to Memphis he made a five dollar vanity record to impress his friends. “He told us about it then—where he say he got the first one of his records demonstrated,” Elizabeth Moore recalled fondly. “He say a little opera house. He just had that little stuff [song] demonstrated for hisself, and he just go to carryin’ it ’round among the colored people where he’d be.”28 The record got the exact response Robert wanted. “He would show it to the people, sit down and play it for the folks. You know, people say, ‘Oh, child, that do sound nice.’ ‘Boy, you did that? That do sound nice.’” Robert had the encouragement he needed. “They say, ‘Boy, you keep on.’ You know, makin’ ’em. And he just kept on.”29

  The life and music Robert sought could be found in the Robinsonville area, which was quickly becoming a main center for the blues in the northern Delta. The liquor flowed as freely as the music, and Wink Clark believed this was a good reason why Robert began to spend more and more time playing in that town. “I think most of what it was, it was a lot of corn whiskey was cooked around Robinsonville. And most of the people, you know, just like they is now, followed whiskey.”30 Robert didn’t just follow whiskey, however, and his drinking habit continued to grow.

  But he was still looking for something that seemed to elude him. He still split his life between Memphis and the Delta. He had used several different names. Although he had two stepfathers, he still had never met his biological father. Robert Johnson had already been through many life changes. So he began searching for his own identity: who was he and what would he do with his life?

  Folklorist Mack McCormick called him a phantom. In reality he was more of a chameleon, finding ways to become whoever he needed to be, whenever it fit, as long as he could play his music. But he faced more heartbreak and disappointment in the months to follow. The changes ahead would alter his life forever.

  6

  MARRIAGE, DEATH, AND THE BLUES

  Let’s imagine a summer scene in the black community of New Africa.

  A short young man struggles behind his horse and plow. He is trying to tend a small field but is clearly not used to the tools he is using. His neighbors watch his struggles with some amusement, but he also looks oddly familiar. They have seen him before, but not behind a plow. He was playing guitar in a local juke only a few weeks ago. He’s that young musician they like so much: Robert Johnson. Robert is working on a farm! And while Robert toils in the field, his young wife works in their shack: mending, cooking, and taking care of other domestic chores. Robert’s surprised neighbors thought he was from Robinsonville and was a sworn musician. What is he doing here with a plow in his musician’s hands? Robert is, after all, a local favorite, playing guitar in the local jukes and parties, giving any crowd a good time with his music. And he enjoys that life: the music, the drinking, the women. But something has changed.

  Robert had been, in fact, having the time of his life playing guitar and reaping the attention it brought him. He played all over the upper Delta region, anywhere he could easily get to from Robinsonville. Two of the places within walking distance of that town were the small cotton-farming communities of Clack and Penton, in Desoto County, Mississippi. Those two hamlets, near the Mississippi River on old Highway 61, were near several cotton plantations, and included house after house of sharecroppers. Their one grocery store served a dual purpose: to provide food and be a major meeting place for Saturday night jukers. By late 1928 this was a regular place for Robert to perform.

  Robert’s presence at that Clack grocery store would change his life in ways that his music never could, for it was there that Robert was attracted to a fourteen-year-old named Virginia Travis. She was living nearby with her kin, and Robert was almost immediately smitten by the girl’s beauty and sweetness. He used his best songs to court her, and before long the two were a couple. Only a few months later—on Sunday, February 17, 1929—they were married in Penton. Like on his mother’s February wedding to Charles Dodds some forty years earlier, the weather that day was clear but cool, with highs in the upper fifties and the promise of spring soon to come. The wedding was held at the Penton home of Virginia’s sharecropping grandmother Lula Thomas. In that small, tight-knit community, their wedding was a noteworthy affair, and Robert even provided some of the music for the party that followed the ceremony.

  Clack Grocery Store. Gayle Dean Wardlow

  Because Virginia was so young, both bride and groom lied on their marriage license. Robert claimed to be twenty-one years old, living in “Leathers,” the Abbay and Leatherman plantation, a future address as Robinsonville, and his occupation as a farmer. Virginia listed her age as eighteen. Born in Lamont, Mississippi, she was one of several children of Jessie Travis and Lula Samuel.1 Signing as a witness for Robert was Dave Phillips, and for Virginia, Johnson Smith. The Reverand W. H. Hurley officiated their ceremony. Hurley was a local preacher with a congregation in a small nearby church that had an accompanying cemetery.2

  Something profound had indeed happened in Robert’s life: he was in love, and although it went against his natural inclinations, he uncharacteristically agreed to put his musical ambitions aside to become a sharecropper to support his young wife. It took love for Robert to accept, at least temporarily, the field work that Dusty Willis had so long wanted him to do.

  The couple probably started married life living with Robert’s half sister Bessie and her husband, Granville Hines, on the Klein/Kline plantation just east of Robinsonville in Penton. Unfortunately, in October the Great Depression began, and farm prices would plummet as much as 60 percent.3 This economic disaster came just as the Delta region was beginning to recover from the devastation of the Great Mississippi flood of 1927 that covered more than twenty-seven thousand square miles, displaced more than two hundred thousand black residents, and killed more than five hundred.

  Robert and Virginia’s marriage license and certificate of marriage. Tunica County Clerk’s Office, Tunica, Mississippi

  If Robert and Virginia ever did live on the Klein/Kline plantation, however, they soon moved elsewhere. The April 12, 1930, US Census records for Bolivar County, Mississippi, lists eighteen-year-old Robert Johnson and his fifteen-year-old wife, Virginia, living in Beat 3, District 24, some seventy miles from Penton. The same record also lists Granville and Bessie Hines as their neighbors.4 A year after Robert and Virginia married, therefore, they were living with kin in or near the all-black New Africa community in Bolivar County.5

  New Africa was an all-black community. By 1900, two-thirds of the owners there were black farmers. It made a hospitable environment for a young black couple whose male partner had hated farmwork an
d preferred playing music.

  According to research conducted by Steve LaVere, their life together was one of happiness and love, and sometime in the late summer of 1929 Virginia became pregnant with their first child. Robert became a proud and protective husband. Once, while the two couples were out riding in Granville’s car, they hit a rough patch in the dirt road causing the car to bounce wildly and Robert to shout out, “Man, be careful! My wife’s percolatin’!”6

  The following year, with the birth of their child growing near, Virginia sought the comfort and protection of her family’s home. Her decision to go to the safety of a family home, traveling the many miles north to Clack and Penton, left Robert behind to work on their farm while she gave birth. But with Virginia gone, the lure of his guitar and playing in jukes was too strong for Robert to hold out against any longer.

  Attempts to find any evidence of where Jessie or Mattie Travis, Virginia’s father and mother lived, have been fruitless—no records for either name have been discovered. Virginia, however, didn’t go to her parents’ home but rather back to the home of her grandmother. Another census record, this one from Monday, April 7, 1930, lists Virginia as staying on a cotton plantation in Clack with her grandmother Lula Thomas and five of Thomas’s other grandchildren.7