What happened to Noah Johnson remains a mystery. Even today, although records exist for individuals with the same name in other locations, he is not listed in any Copiah County records after 1910. Quite possibly, not long after he and Julia separated, he left the area to begin another family in a place where he had no history, where he could make a fresh start. Whether Robert’s birth father is one of the other Noah Johnsons that appear in later census records from Bolivar, Madison, or Pike counties in Mississippi, or whether he died without leaving a trace, will probably remain unanswered. Whatever the truth may be, Robert had traveled almost 250 miles from Robinsonville to Hazlehurst in search of a father he couldn’t find. He wasn’t just searching for his father, however, he was searching for his own identity. He was nineteen years old, a widower, and a good musician. Or so he thought.
Unable to find his father, Robert resorted to what he knew best—playing guitar to earn nickels and dimes. He played at whatever opportunity he could find, and even played for one of the road gangs on the highway. During the early months of 1930 a road crew began constructing the road bed for Highway 51 to be paved. The construction work brought many new people to Martinsville, Hazlehurst, and the surrounding towns. As one local resident, Eula Mae Williams, said, “You know, strange people would be coming in and up.”1 Robert Johnson was one of them.
To almost everyone in that little town he seemed to be just another moderately talented guitarist who happened to be passing through. In “passing through,” he chanced upon the small community of Its, just south of Hazlehurst, another of the many small Mississippi towns that no longer exists: the only remnant is an abandoned general store. A small, circular dirt drive enters and exits in front of the building and back onto the main road. Local residents said this building was also known as a juke. Hearing the music and seeing the crowd, Robert couldn’t help but go in to see who was playing and what was going on.
The man who was playing guitar was better than anyone Robert had ever heard. He had to know this man—Ike Zimmerman, one of the road crew members. Loretha Zimmerman, one of Ike’s three daughters, recalled Ike and Robert’s first meeting. “My understanding [is] that Robert came back [to Hazlehurst] to find his daddy. He found my daddy instead.”2
Loretha Zimmerman. Bruce Conforth
But who was Ike Zimmerman?
Henry Townsend said, “I’m not sure … I wouldn’t want to declare on that because the name sounds but that don’t mean anything. Zimmerman might mean somebody else’s name.”3
Willie Mason never heard of him: “No. I never did hear tell of him.” Wink Clark claimed Johnson never mentioned him: “No, he never did tell me about him.” And Johnny Shines was even more puzzled: “Who?”4
Isaiah “Ike” Zimmerman was born April 27, 1898, in the small Alabama village of Grady. Once full of sharecroppers, Grady, like so many other Delta towns, is now virtually nonexistent. Ike’s great-grandparents moved to Alabama from Virginia before the Civil War. The 1870 census records showed they were farmers in the post–Civil War era. Ruth Sellers Zimmerman, Ike’s wife, came from Montgomery, Alabama, just north of Grady. They were married in the late teens or early 1920s.
Ike and Ruth had seven children, one boy and six girls, and they raised them in a shotgun house in the small town of Beauregard, Mississippi. A shotgun house is a narrow, rectangular building, no more than about twelve feet wide, with rooms arranged one behind the other. The allignment of the rooms and doors at each end of the house was responsible for the saying that “you could shoot a shotgun in the front door and have it come out the back without hitting anything.” In shape it was not that different than the saddlebag house in which Robert was born. The main difference was that the shotgun house had more rooms.
Physically, Ike was short like Robert, but “a strong man, a good man, who wanted everything to go smoothly.” His daughter said Ike was a good-natured, generous man and always provided well for his family. “He was really kind and I can’t ever remember him raising his voice at me, ’cept for one time when I got married. He didn’t want me to do that. But when I was a kid growing up I had long hair and he combed it, would plait it, and all that stuff. ’Cause my mother would tell him he put too many pigtails, they be just flopping on my face. She told him, she’d have a hard time taking it back down. But they [my parents] got along good. I never, never did hear him misuse us any way. We didn’t never lack for nothing!”
Ike played guitar for as long as his daughter could remember, but his own musical origins are uncertain. Neither Loretha nor grandson James had any idea how or where he learned his guitar skills. His brother Harmon owned a guitar and could play a few simple songs, but clearly he was not Ike’s mentor: “[Harmon] could not play but he could hit a chord or two. He played something, saying, ‘Chicken, chicken, you can’t fly too high for me.’ But that’s all he could do, do that. And Ike just started on those two chords and he just went on. Just learned hisself. When I came into this world he was carrying a guitar with him. I tried to find somebody who could beat my daddy. B. B. King, he couldn’t touch my daddy. I don’t know, my daddy he acted like he had electric fingers.”
Because Ike earned more money on his highway job than a sharecropper’s average pay, he was able to buy a good guitar. Most sharecroppers could only afford cheaper mail-order instruments: Stellas, Regals, etc. Loretha remembered that Ike bought a more expensive Gibson guitar. Musically his repertoire ranged from blues to pop tunes, but at home he only played the blues.
“He was playing blues,” Loretha remembered, “’cause I remember him playing a song about ‘going.’ He was going on the road, you know, it concerned, it had the road in it….There was one traveling, going away somewhere, he was going, and that was one of the songs … Since I been grown he was a spiritual [person], but when I was growing up it was the same music like he taught Robert. That’s what he was playing [the blues]. [He made up a] lot of them. I think that Daddy made that one up: ‘Going, going away and baby don’t you wanna go. But going, going away and baby don’t you want to go.’ Daddy made that up.”
1920s catalog ad for Supertone Guitars. Bruce Conforth
Ishmon Bracey. Promo photo used in Victor Record Catalog
In his later years, Ike abandoned the blues and devoted himself to the church and gospel songs, like many other bluesmen did. Perhaps it was their way to atone for having played the devil’s music. Son House, both a preacher and bluesman, in later life was not allowed to play the blues in his house.5 Ishmon Bracey, Rube Lacey, and Robert Wilkins were blues musicians who also shifted from the devil’s music to religious spirituals in their older age. “[Ike] played blues then,” his daughter remembered, “but he ended up playing church songs later. When I heard him play church songs it was after Robert.”
Zimmerman alternated between fingerpicking and playing bottleneck slide—his slide was homemade from a bone. He was also a skilled harp player like the young Robert Johnson. And Ike understood how to work an audience. He was a showman like Charley Patton, playing behind his head and performing other guitar gymnastics.6
Last known photo of Ike Zimmerman playing guitar. Loretha Zimmerman
Also like Patton, Ike used his musical and showmanship skills for more than making money. “Well he did [play guitar to chase women]! He did! My daddy was a womanizer,” Loretha admitted. “He really was.” Robert didn’t need any encouragement to seek out women in his life, but watching Ike use his musical talents to impress women could have only given the young apprentice more encouragement to use his guitar as a tool of seduction.
Ike’s generosity was apparent when he invited Robert to live with his family. “He [Robert], far as I know, like I told you, he fitted in our family, and he had to be nice, because my daddy was a strong man and he would’ve had … he’d make everything go smoothly, and so he wouldn’t have taken up no time with someone who wasn’t a good person.” Robert and Ike were such a good team that to Ike’s daughter he seemed to be part of the family. “He was j
ust like a family member. I was thinking he was! I really was! Robert lived with Mama and Daddy there. For a long time I thought he was related. I really did! For a long time, look like one of the family just be there with us, and he just fitted in.”
To have found a mentor and family after fruitlessly searching for his father must have been very reassuring to Robert. Although he was in their home like kinfolks, Loretha didn’t remember how many months Robert actually stayed: “I couldn’t even think about how long it was because like I said he lived there.” In actuality Robert lived there for less than a year, but in that time he left happy memories for the little girl. “I can remember my daddy when, oh well, I had to be five, and I can remember him wrapping me up in a sheet, and he would put the guitar over [me] and he would be in that chair, and see I remember Robert because he was in that other chair. See when he was holding me on his lap there was Daddy, and there was Robert. And my feets was down there on the floor. I don’t know, why did he hold me? And they was going at that guitar like some … it sounded just so good, just like they was competing. He was teaching him then.” When she’d wake up in the morning Ike and Robert would be right there as her mother cooked breakfast and served the family until Ike had to leave for work. As soon as Ike returned the two men would start playing guitar again, but until that time Robert had the day to explore his new surroundings and make himself known to the community, especially the women.
Eula Mae Williams, another local Martinsville resident, remembered meeting Robert shortly after he came to the area. His first appearance was striking to her. “He came in here from somewhere. Didn’t say where he come from. [The first time I saw him,] he come walkin’ slowly across that field towards the house. He come up to the porch, stopped and asked to come on up, and he introduced hisself as ‘R. L.’ He wudn’t no big man. He wudn’t no more than five-eight. He didn’t weigh more than a 140 pounds. Seems like he had one big eye and one smaller eye.”7 But Robert impressed her for another reason. “I never saw him, not once, without that guitar. He had this here [leather strap] across his chest on his guitar. He always had that old guitar with him.” Later, she and her sister would always say when they saw him: “Here comes that guitar man.”8
Eula Mae Williams. Gayle Dean Wardlow
Robert also carried several smaller instruments with him and he was quite adept at entertaining with them all. He’d play a piano if he had access to one. “He had this little funny thing in his mouth [Jew’s harp] that he played with this here finger. He made himself acquainted with me and my folks and after he sat a while, he went on off. R. L., that’s what we called him. He never said he was named no Robert. He always called himself R. L.” But it was his guitar playing that Robert took seriously, and he knew the ways he could use it to impress the ladies. “He had a guitar swinging on his neck…. He put his hands on it and it would sing just like—[he] could make it sing songs and such.”9
Eula Mae soon discovered that Robert was playing house parties near Martinsville, close to where the Zimmermans lived. “There was a little quarter like. Eight or ten houses around in a circle. It just would be one special house that on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday that they would move all the furniture out of this room. And they would sell fish and hot dogs and different things, and he and Ike would play the music. That would pull the crowd from all the other houses, and from different places they would come.” Eula Mae walked to those parties with her girlfriend Virgie Jane Smith and Virgie’s uncle Clark Williams. As a friend of the family, she also heard Robert play at the Zimmerman house and confirmed that Ike was “the one who taught him a lot about music,” and that Robert “mostly stayed with” the Zimmerman family.10
Whether Robert was just being shy about his family background, embarrassed that he could not find his father, or was just trying to create a new identity, he would spend the next few years introducing himself as R. L. to everyone he met. Back in the Delta he had been Robert Spencer, Robert Johnson, Robert Sax, and was even referred to, to his displeasure, as “Little Dusty.” Now he just wanted to be R. L. “[He] had a nickname because I’m thinking he was, his name was Robert Lee,” Loretha Zimmerman remembered, “[but] we never called him Robert.”
Ike and Robert may have played at home to entertain his family, but the place the older guitarist loved to play, the only place he said you could really learn to play the blues, was in a cemetery at night. Southern black belief in hoodoo, especially in rural regions so close to New Orleans, was particularly accepted since “two-headed doctors” or “conjure” men or women were often the only medical and psychological resources available. Ike subscribed to those beliefs, and he often claimed that he learned to play the blues while sitting on gravestones at midnight.11 Such an idea certainly fed into the stories connecting blues musicians to the devil or the supernatural. Ike’s daughter did, in fact, verify that her father practiced guitar in a graveyard. Ike even used the local cemetery to instruct R. L. But at the same time that she validated the cemetery story, she also disparaged the crossroads myth. “They would leave and go to that cemetery. It’s got them old tombstones, you know some of them new, it was some of them old ones. He’d sit back there with him. He wasn’t at no crossroads. [It] was just a path. There wasn’t no crossroads. They went ’cross the road [laughs]. ’Cause you gotta go across [the] road and go to that cemetery. They went over there and sat on the tombstones. Exactly. And that’s where they was. Sitting there playing.”
Some current Copiah County residents believed that Ike played in Hazlehurst graveyard, but that was incorrect. The cemetery in which Ike and R. L. practiced was, as Loretha indicated, in Beauregard. “Now I just got through reading the [newspaper] my granddaughter brought me and told me this man had been in Hazlehurst looking around saying that Robert Johnson was his idol and they was taking, snapping pictures. They put that in the paper. And he went to the cemetery in Hazlehurst and I saw that, I read that, and I got tickled, I laughed. He went to the wrong cemetery. He said he done been to the cemetery in Hazlehurst where Robert learned to play. And they mentioned my daddy but I knew that wasn’t the [right] cemetery.”
Although Loretha initially scoffed at any notion of the supernatural, within the Zimmerman home and family the idea was not out of the question. “My daddy ain’t no devil,” Loretha said laughingly. But her son James, Ike’s grandson, was less willing to disparage the idea of darker forces being at work in the blues: “I don’t know, that crossroad thing, [a newsman] said that, uh, Robert sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. And Aunt Kimberly [Loretha’s sister] said, ‘Well, you know Daddy walked around here talking that stuff.’”12 Protective of her father, Loretha quickly shushed her son, but she still allowed for the possibility that there was something more to the story than just practice: “I don’t care what Kimberly say. Daddy, he would, Daddy would always scare people and say he’d go pickin’ the guitar and the haints would come out at the graveyard.” Did Ike just want to scare people away “talking that stuff” or was he a believer? According to Loretha, Ike liked playing in the cemetery because it was quiet, and he knew no one would disturb his playing. But in explaining his rationale her recollections hinted at deeper reasons. “He’d come back and tell [us] he played for the, he said the haints. He said I been up there playing for the haints.” And according to grandson James, it was always at midnight: “The thing I could never figure out, I mean I knew he went to the graveyard, ever since I was a little kid; that was the story he used to tell us, that we grew up with. That was what our granddaddy did. It was always at twelve o’clock.”13 Loretha once again agreed but held on to her belief that it was more natural than supernatural: “When everybody was asleep. I think because it was quiet and nobody around to walk and interfere. He wasn’t never scared, but he wasn’t meeting the devil neither.”
Soon R. L. progressed enough in his lessons that Ike began taking him on his regular playing route, locations where people had money to spend: lumber camps with sawmills (probably the Piney Woods
section of Copiah County), fish frys, and jukes. The two guitarists walked all over the rural roads that took them to their next job. “They used to go everywhere in those little towns. And they did a lot of walking. They did lots of walking. They really did,” Loretha remembered with a laugh. “Back then you know they didn’t make a whole bunch of money. It was cheap, but they made money.” R. L. also ventured out without Ike by his side. “He would go away and come back,” Loretha noted.
R. L. made at least one trip from Hazelhurst to see his Memphis family, who were still living together on Hernando Street. It was always a good time when Robert was back in town. Carrie might hold a house party for him to play at, or he’d spend time entertaining Charley and Mollie’s little children and their friends. His Baby Sis, Annye Spencer, remembered how he used to entertain them: “He would sit at the window. [There would be] too many children to come into the house. But he would sit at the window and play. And the steps would be lined with children. Because when he came I would gather all the children and he would play his songs for us.”14
Gravestones where Ike Zimmerman and Robert Johnson played guitar. Bruce Conforth
True in his devotion to his Memphis family, Robert journeyed back in early March 1931 to help them move from their Hernando Street apartment to 285 East Georgia, where they lived until Charles Spencer died on November 28, 1940, at age seventy-three and his wife, Mollie, passed on March 12, 1942, at age forty-seven. He would use this as his contact address for the rest of his life. If someone needed to reach him they could do it by sending either a note or a telegram to this address, or by physically inquiring at the home. Carrie lived only a mile away at 1219 Texas Street. By mid-March, after helping with their move, Robert returned to Hazlehurst to play every Saturday on the steps of the Copiah County courthouse, where Eula Mae Williams would see him when she went to town with her relatives. “He never had nobody else play with him on the streets. He had this little old hat he laid there on the ground so people could drop a penny in it. But he didn’t carry no crowd with him. People just walk up and listen and stop, but they didn’t come here when he played up there.”15
Up Jumped the Devil Page 8