Up Jumped the Devil

by Bruce Conforth

  Reverend Booker Miller, a former Greenwood-based bluesman, explained: “Them old folks did believe the devil would get you for playin’ the blues and livin’ like that.”14 Deacon Richard Johnson, pastor of the Payne Baptist Church in Quito, Mississippi, echoed Miller’s insights: “My father used to tell me about singers who made pacts with the devil by selling their souls. That’s what they used to say about Robert Johnson. I think he wrote a song about that. It kind of reminds me of that old story about the Devil’s Son-in-Law [Peetie Wheatstraw]. That crazy old boy thought the devil had a nice daughter.”15 Henry Townsend, the Saint Louis blues musician who knew and traveled with Robert, reflected on the power of belief in the devil in southern folklore: “That word, devil, you’d be surprised how effective it is.”16 The blues and its association with the devil’s music created great division in black families in the South. One blues writer points out that “grandparents and parents warned that singing reels and blues guaranteed a quick road to hell.”17

  Robert had run face-to-face with these beliefs. To assume that he was not aware that he had been implicated by those around him in the deaths of two wives as a part of his association with the devil’s music would be to ignore common sense. Blues guitarist Jimmy Rogers confirmed that he too had been given such a warning: “My grandmother, she raised me, and she was a Christian-type, church-type woman, and man, they’s really against music, blues, period.”18 A very similar story was related by guitarist John Cephas: “They used to say [the blues] was the devil’s music, and even today my mother’s still living now and she always asks me that I should give some time to the church and stop singing blues. She still says that, you know.”19

  The early history of the blues is replete with people either using an association with the devil as a marketing tool or mentioning him in their lyrics. As early as 1924 blues singer Clara Smith sang “Done Sold My Soul to the Devil”:

  I done sold my soul, sold it to the devil, and my heart done turned to stone,

  I’ve got a lot of gold, got it from the devil, but he won’t let me alone.

  He trails me like a bloodhound, he’s slicker than a snake,

  He follows right behind me, every crook and turn I make.

  I done sold my soul, sold it to the devil, and my heart done turned to stone.20

  In Smith’s song her deal was rewarded with gold riches, but in exchange the devil turned her heart to stone. The bloodhound that trails her is unquestionably similar to Robert Johnson’s wail, “I got hellhounds on my trail.”

  Peg Leg Howell, an Atlanta bluesman, sang, “I cannot shun the devil, he stay right by my side” in his 1928 recording “Low Down Rounder Blues.”21 Bessie Smith’s 1929 “Blue Spirit Blues” declared, “Evil spirits, all around my bed / The devil came and grabbed my hand / Took me way down to that red hot land.”22 In 1931 Texas/ Oklahoma bluesman J. T. “Funny Paper” Smith sang: “You know this must be the devil I’m serving, I know it can’t be Jesus Christ.”23 Also in the 1930s, pianist and guitarist Peetie Wheatstraw billed himself both as “the High Sheriff from Hell” and “the Devil’s Son-in-Law.”

  African American conjure doctor wearing nutmeg and red flannel. Newbell Niles Puckett Memorial Gift, Cleveland Public Library, Fine Arts and Special Collections Department

  Without a doubt, the folk belief in a personalized devil, hoodoo, and the power of the crossroads existed well before Robert Johnson. But also, without a doubt, the Robert Johnson who returned to the Delta was a changed man. Musically, he was a better guitarist and lyricist, who now played original songs. Personally, he had become a heavy drinking, womanizing, blaspheming individual who preferred being a loner. Regardless of which side of Robert’s transformation people saw, he was now a man ready to make his living by playing the devil’s music. And regardless of House’s words of warning, Robert was embarking on a new phase of his career that would ultimately lead to a degree of fame—and then death.

  After returning to Clarksdale, Robert started to make plans for using his new talents. Ike Zimmerman, seeing the success of his young mentor, returned to his family and job in Beauregard. Robert began to use all his new skills to perform at as many jukes and parties, and to attract as many women, as he could.

  One of the small jukes he frequented was Elizabeth Moore’s place in Friars Point. “He come in and played for me,” she recalled, not remembering how much she paid him. “It was just a few dollars,” she said. And whenever Robert told her that he would someday make records and become famous she would just laugh him off. She had no idea she was hosting a legend-to-be. He was just another juke house friend that she loved to party with and to listen to play “them thair old mud line blues.” She preferred Robert’s music over that of his mentors House and Brown, whom she also had heard numerous times at jukes. “Now this here Robert Johnson was over Son,” she believed.24

  Running a juke was not an easy task, and it was dangerous. Hernando bluesman Joe Callicott, who recorded in 1930, recalled an incident in which “one man was shot dead and the other was cut up so bad, and left for dead, he shoulda been dead” at a house party in a nearby town. “You had to watch where you went and whom you played for,” Callicott warned. He and his friend Garfield Akers (aka Garfield Partee), who had recorded together in 1929, always sat facing each other when they played. “I could watch his back and he could watch mine. That way nobody could slip up on you from behind and try to kill you.”25 Booker Miller always carried a .38 pistol in his belt and said he would “have killed anyone” who tried to harm Charley Patton while he was playing at jukes with him from 1930 to 1934. Elizabeth’s common-law husband, Willie, said the doormen in jukes in cities like Memphis always collected weapons at the door (“knives and guns”) to hold down violence. But a country juke was different. It was up to the host to provide protection, liquor, and food for the musician.

  Pete Franklin, a former juker who grew up in the Alabama Black Belt, recalled a typical Saturday night in the late 1930s at a juke in Marengo County, Alabama. “It’d start about five o’clock and you’d go there and stay all night. You paid twenty-five cents to get in, twenty-five cents for a half pint of moonshine, and twenty-five cents for a fish sandwich. As long as you had some money you could stay all night, ’til the sun come up on Sunday morning. They’d have one or two guys who played so you could dance.”26 As dangerous as these jukes could be, Robert relished performing in such places. They represented the life he loved: music, drinking, and women. The only things Robert wanted more than that lifestyle were Virgie and his son, Claud.

  In May 1932 Robert returned to Copiah County to attempt a reconciliation with the mother of his child, but once again he was turned away. Virgie’s parents and grandparents were very religious and opposed Robert’s very presence on their property: first because he had impregnated their daughter, and second because his music was “the work of the devil.”27 Finally, in August, Robert tried, for the last time, to take Virgie and their son, Claud, to Memphis, but Virgie again refused to go. Robert gave her twenty or thirty dollars to help with Claud. That was the last time he would see them: “When Claud was five months old,” Virgie later related, Robert “came by my mother’s and again when he was eight months, he came by my mother’s. Then he asked me to go with him to Tennessee. The last time he came he asked me to go to Tennessee with him. But I refused. So he left and I never saw him again.”28

  Although deeply disappointed that he had yet again been denied because of his music, Robert had other relatives living near Virgie in whose homes he could find solace. Both the Majors and Dodds families were large, and Robert had relatives on both sides of the family spread throughout Mississippi, some of whom he had never even met. One of these was his aunt Clara Majors Rice, Julia’s youngest sister, who lived in Hazlehurst. Robert probably didn’t know her when he had first visited Hazlehurst to look for his father, but his mother might have told him about her when he returned to Robinsonville. Neither the Zimmermans nor Eula Williams remembered her, so it’s unli
kely that Robert had met her before this point. When they finally did meet, Robert told his aunt Clara that he had become a musician because he “didn’t want to work for fifty cents a day” sharecropping.29

  From that point on, every time Robert was near Hazlehurst he would stop at Clara’s house. Her son Howard remembered Robert displaying a variety of musical abilities. He would arrive with his guitar “strapped across his back in an old bed ticking—striped bed ticking. I don’t think they make them anymore. Blue and white striped bed ticking. He carried it in a bag. And when he left, he just had it strapped across his shoulders.”30 But the guitar was not all Robert would bring. His blue ticking bag was full of clothes that needed washing. “He would come and visit. And if he had clothes he would need washing [Clara] would wash them. And she would cook and feed him. And he would stay a day or two, and probably move on.”31 The music he played during his visits made him a hero to his younger relatives. Just as he entertained his Baby Sis and her friends in Memphis, Robert was happy to entertain the children here as well. Perhaps it was his way of making up for the two children of his own he had lost. “Well, we would go out to the woods and things and he played guitar,” his cousin would remember, “and we’d have one more, air organ, which you had to pump on. He could play that. He could also play the piano. So he played music and sang. And he was just, you know, our idol. A kid’s idol.”32

  Even though he could get his clothes washed in Hazlehurst and entertain his relatives there, Robert chose to make the much larger town of Hattiesburg his new home. Hattiesburg had more piano players than guitarists who worked its streets and jukes, and with his superior guitar skills Robert would have no real competition. Ninety miles southeast of Jackson and Hazlehurst on Highway 49, Hattiesburg had a population of more than ten thousand. Robert could make a better living playing music in a town that size than in the small community of Hazlehurst. Two railroads—the Norfolk and Southern, and the Gulfport Ship Island—ran through the town. If Robert wanted, he could use either to get to Gulfport to the south or Jackson to the north. It was a perfect place for a budding blues musician.

  Soon Robert was railroading from Hattiesburg to Jackson, where he met another young bluesman, Johnnie Temple, who lived on South Jefferson Street and who grew up listening to musicians at his stepfather’s house. Bluesman Tommy Johnson, who lived in Crystal Springs (between Jackson and Hazlehurst), and Temple’s stepfather, Lucien “Slim” Duckett, had been playing together many years. It may have been through this association that Robert learned of Tommy Johnson’s alleged deal at the crossroads and decided that this myth fit his own life. “He came in here one Friday afternoon on a freight train and I run into him. He said his name was R. L. That’s what’s he told me. Said he was from Hattiesburg.” Temple had no reason to doubt the young musician, and right after their meeting Robert began a weekly routine: on Friday afternoons he would ride a freight train from Hattiesburg to Jackson. Then the two of them would “go out in West Jackson and play on Friday nights and he’d catch a freight train out of here on Saturday mornings. He was going up there to Sunflower County [another hundred miles north of Jackson]. He’d come back through here on Monday afternoons and go on back to Hattiesburg. He did that for a couple of months. I never saw him after I left for Chicago.”33

  Hattiesburg, Mississippi, ca. 1926. Bruce Conforth

  Robert stayed in Hattiesburg until at least the end of 1933 or early 1934, according to Temple. Some blues historians have posited that it was Temple who taught Johnson the stomping bass that Temple first recorded on Lead Pencil Blues in May 1935. But Temple freely admitted that R. L. taught him the pattern.“Now I tell you, as far as that beat there [the boogie bass pattern], R. L., the boy that I was telling you about, [was] the first one I ever heard use it, and I was the one carried it to Chicago. And I’m the one that made that beat popular. It was similar to a piano boogie bass. But R. L., the boy that learned me, yes sir, I learned that from R. L. in ’32 or ’33. I was the first person to carry that stompin’ bass to Chicago,” he boasted. “I learned it from that boy R. L.”34 That particular boogie shuffle became one of the most important riffs in blues music. While Temple did beat Robert to the studio by a year, he honestly admitted that he learned the bass pattern from him at least two years earlier. In return, Temple showed Robert the open E minor tuning that he had learned from Skip James. Robert appropriated the tuning only one time on record, for “Hellhound on My Trail.” Temple’s recording of “Lead Pencil Blues” must have bothered Robert when he heard it, for with it he lost his chance to be the first to record his new dynamic guitar sound. This could help explain why he later became so secretive about his playing.

  Johnnie Temple. Gayle Dean Wardlow

  By now Robert had settled into a regular traveling itinerary. On Saturdays he would take the train from Jackson up to Sunflower County. The Yazoo and Mississippi Valley line took him straight into Moorehead—where the Southern cross the Dog—which was also near Indianola, Holly Ridge, Itta Bena, and other small towns with jukes. Robert would return to Hattiesburg and repeat the same route week after week.

  But the curious behavior that Eula Mae Williams had noted in Robert while he was still in Hazlehurst soon returned: he would once again show up someplace, stay there for a short time, and, without saying goodbye, just disappear. After playing with Temple for several months, Robert once again vanished. This time he went back to the Delta. His ramblin’ days were just beginning.

  10

  TRAVELING RIVERSIDE BLUES

  Robert was now constantly on the move. No one place could hold him after he had finished his playing and loving whatever woman he could seduce. His ramblings took him up and down the length of Mississippi, and on one such ramble he again ran into Eula Mae Williams. She was working in a small café that her sister owned in the Delta town of Shelby. Unbeknownst to Williams, Robert had been been hired to play a brief engagement there. “He come in the café my sister had. He knowed who I was and he was kinda surprised to see me. He said, ‘Hello, girl,’ and I said hi back to him.”1

  Eula Mae inquired if he was planning to go back to Hazlehurst to see Virgie and Claud and he pointedly told her no. Robert knew that Virgie had married a man named Smith and went on to tell Eula Mae that he was “too busy” with his music.2 As much as he wanted to carry Virgie and Claud away with him, Robert couldn’t stand to be let down one more time. He stayed in Shelby only long enough to play that job, not even looking for a woman to spend the night with, and left as quickly as he had come.

  Soon after, he left for Arkansas, particularly Helena, where blues music was all the rage. Either late in 1933 or early in 1934, Robert landed regular gigs playing at the Hole in the Wall juke. The Helena of the 1930s was a good-sized town with all the amenities of a more urban environment: its own hospital, a thriving downtown, and a bus service. In the main blues center of Arkansas, Robert met and played with Sonny Boy Williamson II, Robert Nighthawk, Elmore James, Hacksaw Harney, Calvin Frazier, and many others who came through the riverfront town.

  Helena was a perfect home base for Robert, because from there he could also easily travel to jobs at the Blue Goose juke off Eighth Street in West Memphis and another juke in Marianna, Arkansas, twenty miles northeast. In Helena he teamed up with a guitarist, Wash Hamp, who backed him up as Willie Brown had done for Son House. Willie Moore heard about their music together: “[Robert] and another boy called … that Hamp boy from Helena. Wash Hamp. He was from Helena, you know. He just second on him. Him and Robert played together.”3

  In addition to the Hole in the Wall there were enough jukes and clubs to keep the blues going seven nights a week. Helena’s downtown streets—Elm, Phillips, Walnut, and part of Cherry—were filled with venues where bluesmen played all night long to packed houses. Even the sidewalks were a popular performance site for many musicians.

  Most of the jukes paid the local white police for protection through shares of their revenue. People went to the jukes to play cards, gambl
e, drink, and carouse: they were rough and dangerous places. Johnny Shines, who would soon meet Robert, recalled that the clientele could get so out of control that certain restraints were required: “Beer was served in cups; whiskey you had to drink out of a bottle. You didn’t have no glasses to drink the whiskey out of, so you drank it from the bottle or you used your beer cup, and they were tin cans usually. See, they couldn’t use mugs in there because people would commit mayhem, tear people’s head up with those mugs. Rough places they were.”4 The bluesmen knew that there was good money to be made in Helena’s jukes, and they competed heavily for it. To get a job in one of these jukes a musician had to be both talented and lucky, and Robert was both.

  If a juke owner had heard of a musician, he’d generally seek him out and make him an offer, perhaps a dollar and a half a night plus tips. It was the tips that could make or break a gig because if the crowd didn’t like you, or if you couldn’t play their requests, you ended up only with the dollar and a half the owner had offered. If, on the other hand, you could play the latest tunes from the radio and records and fill the crowd’s requests then you could literally be showered in money. Johnny Shines recalled that “sometimes people just throw you money anyway, just come up and chuck it into your guitar, anything.”5 Robert had a great ear for the latest tunes. He was now performing popular blues, a few originals (many based on previous recordings by other artists), and pop standards like “My Blue Heaven” and “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” He knew all too well that without being able to play the most recent hits of the day, no matter how good his other songs were, he wasn’t going to make decent money. People didn’t yet want to hear Robert Johnson, they wanted to hear what they heard on the radio, and Robert was particulary adept at reproducing these songs.