Up Jumped the Devil

by Bruce Conforth

  Robert was making decent money for a black blues and pop musician, but for him the most intriguing aspect of Helena was a local woman named Estella Coleman, the mother of Robert Lockwood, the only person with whom Robert would share his guitar-playing techniques. Robert was used to seducing women with his music, but according to Lockwood, he basically invited himself to move in with Estella and her family. “Robert followed [my mother] home, and she couldn’t get rid of him. I don’t know if that’s the first time he met her, but I never knew anything about no Robert Johnson till he followed her home. I don’t think she knew anything about him till that day. She couldn’t get rid of him.”6A very light skinned, thin woman, Estella was treated like a queen. She wasn’t just another juke-joint pickup for Robert but someone for whom he had real feelings. When he wasn’t playing his guitar he doted on her, spending his money on the family and buying her little gifts. Robert fused himself to her family, which must have been a whirlwind courtship for Estella, for she had been through a series of failed relationships.

  The 1920 US Census showed that Robert Lockwood and Estella Lockwood originally lived in Big Creek, Arkansas, and along with their four-year-old son, Robert Jr., were two boarders: Milton Staines and Lonzo Williams.7 Robert Sr. and Estella divorced shortly after that census was taken, however, and Estella married Staines.

  The April 1930 US census contains several surprises about Estella, who was by then living in a building on Hospital Alley in Helena. It mentions her son, Robert, but also includes a daughter, Omega Washington, age seventeen, who had been absent from previous census records, and Milton is conspicuously missing. There are also two different lodgers: Joe Coleman, and Cinderella Mattley, who was accompanied by a cousin and daughter.8 It is unknown what happened to Milton, but on July 1, Estella and Joe Coleman married. Apparently the two had known each other from Big Creek, and when Coleman moved to Helena, the two reunited. Coleman was a private chauffeur and made a decent living without having to do manual labor. Estella and Joe remained together for at least three years, and only then did Robert Johnson become intimate with the family.

  1920 Big Creek Arkansas census record for Lockwood family. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census

  All records indicate that Robert Lockwood was born in 1915 or 1916, yet at various times he claimed to have met Robert Johnson as a boy, as early as when he was only eleven years old. At other times Lockwood asserted that he was thirteen when he met Robert.9 But these ages correspond to dates that don’t fit with what is known about Johnson. Lockwood was eleven years old in 1926 or 1927, and at that time the sixteen-or seventeen-year-old Johnson was still living with his mother, Julia, on the Abbay and Leatherman plantation. When Lockwood was thirteen years old, in 1928 or 1929, Robert Johnson was courting and marrying his first wife, Virginia. Further, Lockwood claimed that the first song he learned from Robert was “Sweet Home Chicago,” but that song was based on Kokomo Arnold’s “Old Original Kokomo Blues,” which was recorded in Chicago in September 1934. Arnold was firmly a part of the Chicago scene and had no reason to travel to the Delta, and Robert had not yet traveled to Chicago, so it is unlikely that Johnson heard a live performance of “Old Original Kokomo Blues” but rather adapted “Sweet Home Chicago” after Arnold’s record was released. We also know that Robert had been in Hattiesburg and Jackson with Johnnie Temple until at least 1933 and that he did not move to Helena until after Callie Craft’s death. Although Robert may have been in Helena for several months before meeting Estella, he did not become a part of that family or meet and begin to teach Lockwood guitar until very late 1934.

  Before Lockwood even met Robert, however, he had already started playing music on the piano and organ. “I was eight years old when I was introduced to play the piano, and I played the piano until I got twelve years old. My grandfather was a preacher, and we had an old organ in the house, you know. So when he used to leave, my grandma would let me play the blues. I had a couple of cousins who could play a few tunes on the piano and that was my beginning.”10

  Lockwood was also very familiar with the blues before Robert entered his life. His family had a whole supply of blues records: Blind Blake, Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, Texas Alexander, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. But one particular artist was his favorite. “I was crazy about Leroy Carr. He had such laid-back stuff. Scrapper [Blackwell] and Leroy was workin’ together.”11 Although he liked the blues, the guitar didn’t particularly interest the young man. He was annoyed by what he deemed the musical limitations of the instrument. Robert Johnson’s playing, however, changed not only his opinion of the guitar but also ultimately his life. “I really never did have a desire to play the guitar until Robert Johnson came along. All the guitar players at that time—it was always two of ’em, one playin’ chords and the other playin’ melody and I just didn’t like that. Robert showed up playin’ it all by himself. That was really a thrill to me. I always wanted to play something that I wouldn’t really have to have no help, you know. I didn’t think that could be done. And then when I seen him doin’ it, I decided that’s what I wanted to do, you know, so I kept worryin’ him until he finally started teachin’ me.”12

  Robert was a surprisingly patient teacher. He even helped Lockwood make his first guitar, remembering what it was like when his half sister Carrie helped him make one back in 1926. “He mentioned makin’ me a guitar one time, and I said okay. And I helped him. We took the little thin vinyl part—the finishin’ part of the wood that they puts on furniture—we took that off the Victrola, and that’s what we used to make the guitar. We also used an old cheese box—what cheese used to come in a long time ago. Robert carved the neck out of some wood, and planed it out with a planer and put frets in it. I helped him do that. It stayed together about six, seven months. We didn’t have the kinda glue that you have to put things together, you know? It stayed together pretty good.”13

  1930 Helena Arkansas census record for Estella Staines, Robert Lockwood Jr., and boarders. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census

  Location of Coleman and Lockwood house in downtown Helena. Bruce Conforth

  Lockwood practiced on that homemade guitar with an enthusiasm that must have reminded Robert of his own youthful infatuation with the instrument, and when Lockwood’s aunt gave him a real guitar, Robert’s memories must have flooded back about his own first store-bought guitar. “When it [the homemade guitar] tore up my auntie bought me one,” Lockwood remembered. “Then everybody was in trouble.”14

  Robert appears to have felt more of a kinship with the younger musician who was just starting out than he did with any of the contemporaries with whom he was in competition. Everything that Lockwood recalled about those times were almost mirror images of the experiences that Robert had gone through in learning to play. The only difference was that no one was beating Lockwood for favoring guitar over field work.

  With that store-bought guitar, Lockwood admitted that he was “learning fast.” “At first he would tell me where to put my fingers, but he didn’t have to after the first three months. If I asked him something, he’d sit down and show me. He’d set the guitar down, and I’d ease in and pick it up. I’d go get it. He wouldn’t hear me when I pick it up…. Well it wasn’t hard to learn—I learned real fast. I learned so fast I excited both him and my mother. He showed me something one time and when he look around I be playin’ the shit out of it.”15 Lockwood also remembered, “I played all night and I played it all day and my mother had to take a stick of stove wood and chase me outta the house. I played it all night and all day. When I wasn’t asleep I was playing the guitar. That’s how come I learned so fast. ’Cause I slept with the guitar.”16

  In time, Lockwood became so associated with Robert’s music that many people believed he was called Robert Junior solely because of their relationship. But being called Junior for that reason annoyed him: he had been known as Junior from birth, named for his father.

  For the first time since his wife Virginia died, Robert made at least a
temporary commitment to someone. But ultimately not even Estella and her son could stop Robert’s rambling and carousing. Lockwood soon grew competent enough to accompany Robert and second him wherever he performed. In very late 1935 those ramblings took them to one of his traditional playing locations, Tutwiler, Mississippi, where, in a rather bizarre bit of bad luck, Robert got run over by a truck. After less than a year together, that accident caused their musical and personal relationship to come to an end. “I went to Mississippi with Robert that time he got hurt by a truck,” Lockwood recalled, “and we stayed in Tutwiler. I was part of the cause of Robert getting hit, because I was not fixing to go in that direction. I was fixing to go back home. And he turned around, and backing up, turning around, he slipped off the fender of the truck and fell under it. I stayed around for three or four days until he got well, but I just decided I wouldn’t be with him no more.”17 Robert wasn’t badly hurt, but the incident was enough to help him decide that he preferred to stay on the road by himself: to ramble where and how he wanted to.

  Tutwiler train depot. Mississippi Department of Archives and History

  When they returned to Helena, Lockwood found a new playing partner, Sonny Boy Williamson II (Aleck “Rice” Miller). “The first time I met Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert brought him to my mother’s house. They would run across each other and stuff like this. So he come home with Robert one night. He and Sonny Boy come back and begged Mama to let me go to Mississippi with [Sonny Boy]. And she sure didn’t want me to go. Sonny Boy had heard me play at home. He made it sound so good, so she finally said okay. I left with Sonny Boy in 1936.”18

  With Lockwood off playing with Williamson, and Robert’s urge to ramble growing every day, he left Estella and started preparing himself to reach his ultimate goal. He wanted to make records, but he had to find someone to make that happen.

  A white man in Jackson, Mississippi, would provide that opportunity.

  11

  I’M BOOKED AND BOUND TO GO

  In the fall of 1935 music store owner H. C. Speir was contacted by Art Satherly, recording director for Vocalion/ARC, to search for talent for a session to be held that October in Jackson. Satherly planned to record in Dallas with Don Law, his Texas sales manager for the Brunswick owned companies, and then stop in Jackson on his return trip. Speir had been a valuable asset in finding excellent talent for previous companies. Satherly had begun working for Paramount in the early 1920s, rose to direct the QRS piano roll company’s short-lived record label, and joined ARC in 1930 and then Brunswick. In the ARC mergers of the early 1930s, Brunswick was combined with the Vocalion labels and all race and old-time music recordings were placed under Satherly’s control. This meant that if Robert was to have a chance to record, Speir and Satherly would be his main contacts.

  The two men scoured both New Orleans and Handy Park in Memphis searching for talent and made a quick stop in Helena on the return trip, where they found a piano playing bluesman. They recorded him and some others at the weeklong session on Farish Street at the Crystal Palace, a second floor dance hall. In Memphis they located two previously recorded singers and arranged for them to be part of a session. Both were veterans of recording sessions and one, country bluesman Robert (Tim) Wilkins, had at least five records issued from 1928 to 1932. The other, Minnie Wallace, was a cabaret band singer who had been featured with some of the Memphis Jug Band personnel on her Victor recordings.1 The most dynamic recordings from the session, however, were by guitarist Isaiah Nettles from neaby Utica in Hinds County. Speir remembered finding him near a depot in the small community of Rockport near Taylorsville in south Mississippi. “I found him takin’ up nickels and dimes at the depot there in Rockport,” Speir recalled. “When I went into a town looking for talent, I always checked out the train station first.” Nettles’s rendition of a Blind Lemon Jefferson song that he titled “It’s Cold in China” had an up-tempo Mississippi dance rhythm and his high-pitched moaning prompted Satherly to issue his lone record as by the “Mississippi Moaner” with his real name listed below that pseudonym.

  Although Robert Johnson was doing all he knew to become a recording artist, both Speir and Satherly somehow missed him on this talent search. Undoubtedly, Robert knew of Speir’s importance in getting bluesmen on records. His association with Johnnie Temple in 1934 would have provided that information, as would a number of Temple’s mentors, including his stepfather, Slim Duckett, whom Speir had helped record in 1930. Speir did not remember Robert auditioning for him before 1936—if he had, the only way Speir would have rejected him would have been for a lack of four original songs. An original repertoire was extremely important to Speir. Four original songs enabled companies to release a first record and have a backup for a second issue if a hit occurred. If that happened they could then arrange for a follow-up session. Companies did not record songs they already had in their catalogs or want a new artist covering a previous hit. Robert’s version of “My Blue Heaven” might have been terrific, but it wouldn’t have gotten him a contract: the white crooner Gene Austin had already had a multimillion-selling hit with the song in 1928. From a young black guitarist from Mississippi, record companies would only be interested in what they considered Robert’s blues songs, which would fit into the race record catalogs. Record companies considered ten thousand copies sold to be a hit, and they worked on a one-in-ten recording ratio: “They always told me it took one hit to pay for the other nine, they put it,” Speir noted. “They were always looking for something different. He [the bluesman] had to have something different from the others that didn’t sell for them.” Speir did believe that the lyrics were important, but also that a song had to have some drive or rhythm to complement the words.

  H. C. Speir, 1920s. Gayle Dean Wardlow

  H. C. Speir 1935 newspaper ad for musical talent. Gayle Dean Wardlow

  After the 1935 session Speir arranged a follow-up deal with ARC for a July 1936 session in the Hotel Hattiesburg. Satherly sent his national sales director, W. R. “Bill” Calaway, who had used Speir in 1934 to locate Charley Patton and bring him to New York to record for Vocalion. In addition to Patton, Speir had also been responsible for the recordings of legendary Mississippi icons such as Son House, Willie Brown, Skip James, Ishmon Bracey, Tommy Johnson, Bo (Chatmon) Carter, and the Louisiana Delta bluesman Blind Joe Reynolds. He even advertised in newspapers in an attempt to find talent.

  Hotel Hattiesburg. McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi

  In the end, Calaway never paid Speir for that July session, which had produced more than seventy race titles by the talent Speir provided. Speir was disgusted: “I really lost my shirt on that deal. Calaway never paid me a dime. I made up my mind to never work with him again.” He also vowed never to work for Satherly either.

  Robert, hearing about the Hattiesburg sessions after the fact, appeared at Speir’s Music Store in the early fall of 1936 to audition for him. He must have presented quite a stereotypical image, for Speir remembered him as just another one out of countless musicians who came from as far away as Georgia and Texas to audition for a record deal. If earlier descriptions of Robert remained accurate, he arrived at Speir’s store with guitar slung over his shoulder, perhaps even carrying his striped bed-ticking bag of belongings. But whatever he looked like, his playing and singing were enough to impress Speir, who liked the way he “threw his voice up like Ishmon [Bracey] and Tommy [Johnson] did.” After his audition, during which Speir made a test recording of “Kind Hearted Woman Blues,” Robert made use of Speir’s equipment to make another personal record like the one he had made at a Memphis opera house that he played for his friends in Robinsonville. Robert paid Speir five dollars for a metal-based one-sided aluminum disc that would eventually wear out from numerous plays on a windup Victrola that used a steel-tipped needle.

  Speir’s store at 111 North Farish Street was unique for the area, for he had purchased a recording machine in 1925, thereby providing the only private recording opportuni
ty between Memphis and New Orleans. Speir was the only person in his area who could make demos of his talent and private recordings at a reasonable price. “Seems like I remember that boy makin’ a record for himself,” he recalled. But in dealing with so many itinerant musicians, Speir developed a way of protecting his interests through an informal, self-written contract that stated:

  For and in consideration of $1.00 receipt of which is hereby acknowledged and other good and valued consideration, I hereby assign and convey to H.C. Speir, manager of the Speir Phonograph Company, Jackson, Mississippi, Hinds County, what ever commercial value and musical talents I might possess, for a period of one year, with an option of renewal and additional year. In other words, I appoint H.C. Speir sole manager in securing the best value for my musical talents, and leaving this entirely up to him.

  I, or we, have read the above agreement, and state that in the presence of these witnesses, that I, or we, are sound mentally, and do understand the above agreement.2

  Speir’s Music Store, 111 Farish Street, Jackson, Mississippi. H. C. Speir is on the right. Gayle Dean Wardlow

  Thirty years after Robert’s audition, Speir could not remember whether he signed that contract or not, but he did remember that Robert had at least four original songs.

  Normally, Speir would have telegrammed Satherly in New York or Law in Dallas. Law had begun recording Texas talent in 1934 in both San Antonio and in a makeshift studio at the Burrus Flower Mill between Dallas and Fort Worth. But because of his bitterness over his treatment by Calaway, he didn’t. Instead he told an excited Robert that he would contact Vocalion salesman Ernie Oertle from New Orleans, and that Oertle would find him if the company was interested. Speir did have some reservervations about Robert’s possible success. Recent trends in race recordings were beginning to feature more city-oriented bluesmen such as Big Bill Broonzy, Bumble Bee Slim, Washboard Sam, Memphis Minnie, and Peetie Wheatstraw. These were not just solo artists, but musicians who used sidemen playing piano, drums, bass, and sometimes even horns on their Chicago recordings. “When they got in the mid-thirties, they started recording the piano blues with other instruments, and they didn’t have no real interest in them old guitar blues,” Speir said. “It just wasn’t selling like it had.” If Speir had paid attention only to the change in musical styles, Robert might never have been recorded. But Speir also realized that the emerging jukebox market might be the perfect vehicle for Robert’s songs.