In a letter from Law to Driggs in 1961, Law reiterated that the only time Robert turned his back was when he was asked to perform in front of Andres Berlanga and Francisco Montalvo (who also recorded on Thanksgiving). “He reluctantly complied [to play for them] but sat on a chair in a corner facing the wall.”14 Law, like Driggs, believed this was because Robert was shy. Others, however, such as guitarist Ry Cooder, believed the myth that Robert recorded into a corner to purposely “corner-load”: playing into the corner so the sound of his guitar would be enhanced by bouncing off the plaster walls.15 This is wishful thinking: Robert’s guitar sounds the same on all his takes, even on the Dallas recordings where there were no corners into which he could turn. Attempts to attribute his sound to some unique circumstances are simply wrong. They are as mythic as the notion that he sold his soul to attain his guitar-playing skills.
Cover design for the 1970 Columbia release Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2. Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment
And Robert Johnson was certainly not shy: he was a seasoned street performer who played before any crowd he could gather, as well as at jukes, parties, and picnics. The very concept of corner-loading is improbable since the places Robert played wouldn’t have been conducive to him finding any corners to develop such an odd technique: listeners surrounded him, and plantation jukes were flimsy structures. Moreover, he wouldn’t have been a very entertaining performer if he faced the wall. Further, Law never actually mentioned Robert facing the corner during a recording. It was only when Robert was asked to demonstrate his music for a group of other musicians that he turned his back on them. He wasn’t turning into the corner because he was shy or to produce a loaded sound, he was protecting his techniques. He had learned his lesson when Johnnie Temple had used his boogie bass pattern in “Lead Pencil Blues” a year earlier, beating Johnson to the studio. He did not want that to happen again. Johnny Shines addressed that very fact: “It wasn’t that he was shy. He just didn’t want you watching what he was doing. See Robert was very particular about nobody learning his style of music. If you watched him he’d turn his back.”16 Robert Lockwood stated that Robert “wouldn’t sit and face another guitar player and let him see what he was doin’.”17
Robert’s dream had been realized. But he hadn’t had to go to New York City to make records as he often proclaimed he would. He only had to go to Texas.
12
KIND HEARTED WOMEN
Recording sessions in 1936 were laborious affairs for both the artists and engineers. Magnetic tape was still years away, and if you made a mistake during a recording there was no way to fix it: you had to start all over again. There was no way to cut or splice in a new section on a disc. In addition, several complete takes of each song needed to be recorded. The first take timed the song before an actual master was recorded. An alternate take, or an insurance take, was made to protect against the possibility of breakage. And perhaps even another take was required if the producer decided that the song should be slower or faster. All together this meant that a single song could take a long time to complete, and when the musician finished he or she could be exhausted. This was especially true if you recorded more than four different songs at one sitting.
Robert was already used to playing for hours at a juke or party, so playing to a microphone, although a new experience, was certainly no more difficult than playing for several dozen drunken and carousing men and women. Showing his adaptability to recording rules, and his stamina, the twenty-five-year-old Delta musician completed eight songs his first day.
Most country bluesmen, as opposed to the more polished city bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy, varied their songs greatly between takes, holding true to their performance practices. Each performance of a song by Patton or House, for instance, could be wildly different from the previous rendition: they played it as they felt it, and that could mean taking great liberties with their lyrics or musicianship. Robert had a different perspective on his songs, however, and his second or alternate versions are almost identical to his first ones. The only differences in the takes occurred when the speed at which he performed a song was changed, necessitating either the addition or deletion of a verse to meet the three-minute time limit. Importantly, both such changes were initiated by the producer or engineer and not by Robert. Other than that, his takes are very similar to each other. His codifying of his material made an indelible impression on Saint Louis bluesman Henry Townsend. Townsend had already recorded numerous times for three different labels—Columbia, Paramount, and Bluebird—but Robert’s standardization of his songs was something new to him. “In my opinion, what made Robert’s music different was this—the older music was more or less various tunes but it didn’t have no specific body to it. What I mean when I say body; they didn’t play in any certain direction. They would play it this way this time, and the next time it was altogether different—the same tune but it was altogether different. But Robert, he was not like that. Each time, whatever he played, was uniform, and this could make you notice.”1
Robert was beginning to develop a lyrical and musical consistency that would bring a new self-consciousness to the blues as art. While most of his contemporaries accepted that their verses could vary both in number and content, Robert believed a song should not be changed but should be played the same way every time: it was a finished and fixed product. That Robert saw his songs as finished compositions is evident in the fact that he wrote them down in the little notebook he kept. He was, after all, a product of the technology of his time. The songs he heard on the radio or a record were identical each time he heard them, so why should his songs be any different?
This new type of self-consciousness as a musician was relatively innovative in the country blues. It placed Robert into a more modern category than Son House or Charlie Patton. This approach is evident right from the first song he recorded: “Kind Hearted Woman Blues.”
“They always did their best four songs first,” Speir explained. “They did the ones they thought were their best.”2 Robert wanted to make hit records, and he borrowed “Kind Hearted Woman Blues” from a number of sources that were already hits for other bluesmen. It was both musically and lyrically aligned with Leroy Carr’s “Mean Mistreater Mama” and Bumble Bee Slim’s “Cruel Hearted Woman Blues.” But Robert’s genius was beyond just knowing good songs to copy: he rewrote them, changed the tempo, synced his guitar more closely with his vocal than those who preceeded him, added a guitar riff, and literally remade the piece. Although inspired by the original, the new song was really all his. Several aspects of his playing accentuated his ownership. First, Robert saw “Kind Hearted Woman Blues” as a complete composition. The song’s lyrics are thematically cohesive and the overall effect is of a musical whole, and not the type of whole that one would normally hear in a juke joint. This wasn’t a rollicking good-time piece designed to keep jukers dancing. On the contrary, “Kind Hearted Woman Blues” was a well-thought-out composition with a beginning, middle, and end.
This was the song that Speir remembered Robert playing at his audition. Played in the key of A in natural tuning, Robert recorded two takes. The first included a guitar break that added a unique dimension to his performance. Most guitar blues recordings did not feature guitar breaks but rather consisted of a continuous stream of lyrics. “Kind Hearted Woman Blues,” for whatever reason, was the only recorded song he performed with such a guitar break. The second take of the song was more up-tempo and included one different, additional final lyric verse. Musically, with the exception of having to add an extra verse, the two takes are virtually identical.
Leroy Carr. Promo photo for Vocalion Race Record Ad #1432
Robert tuned his guitar one-half step (one guitar fret) lower than most bluesmen when he used an open tuning such as D, G, A, or E. That was apparently a technique he had learned from Willie Brown, whose influence on Robert was undeniable. Brown had used the A flat tuning on his legendary 1930 Paramount recording of “Fu
ture Blues.” Robert also either tuned or capoed his guitar (usually on the second fret) to match his singing voice, as had Patton and House.3
Shifting to what was probably open E tuning, Robert next recorded “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” a song made even more famous by Elmore James in 1951 as “Dust My Broom” for the Jackson Trumpet label. Ironically, Robert did not use the bottleneck on the tune as James would. Instead, Robert slid his fingers up the neck to play a triplet riff against his driving boogie bass pattern. Possibly also displaying Robert’s awareness of current events obtained from newspapers, he mentioned Ethiopia—where Emperor Hallie Salassie was fighting Italian invaders—as well as China and the Philippine Islands in the song. For local color, he used an old Patton trick and also sang about his home area. “If I don’t find her in West Helena, she must be in East Monroe, I know,” referring to the county adjacent to Helena. Robert was, perhaps because of his education and urban upbringing, turning his songs into more cosmopolitan pieces than the usual good old down-home blues.
Melodically the song borrowed from another Carr tune—“I Believe I’ll Make a Change”—as well as lyrical influences from Kokomo Arnold’s “Sagefield Woman Blues” and “Sissy Man Blues.” Although always assumed to be about leaving, being unhappy with your cheating girlfriend and packing up (dusting one’s broom), Robert may have included his first reference to hoodoo practice in the song. The first verse ran, “I’m gon’ get up in the mornin’, I believe I’ll dust my broom. Girlfriend, the black man you been lovin’, girlfriend, can get my room.”
Hoodoo references abound concerning the use of the broom as a means of ridding oneself of an unwanted visitor. Harry Middleton Hyatt collected black folklore in the 1930s, and among the beliefs he found were that to rid one’s home of an unwanted person “one needed [to] sweep salt and pepper out the door when they leave and they’ll never be able to come back.”4 Other references stated that dusting one’s broom with magic powder and then using it to sweep your house would free it of unwanted houseguests.5 There are literally dozens of documented hoodoo folk beliefs involving the use of a broom and “dust”—some form of magic powder—to rid oneself of someone or something. When Robert sang, “You can mistreat me here, but you can’t when I get home” it was almost certainly because he knew about the hoodoo practice he had described.
Musically, “Dust My Broom” is a hard-driving, forceful song in which Robert’s signature high-note triplet riff increased the tension of his boogie-driven bass. He was the first blues guitarist to make such a boogie pattern a standard part of his repertoire, and thereafter the song became a standard among many Chicago blues stylists.
Robert then shifted back to natural tuning for more of the walkin’ boogie that he had earlier taught Johnnie Temple. “Sweet Home Chicago,” with its even heavier and more intentional bass boogie pattern and rhythm, became another classic that surpassed “Dust My Broom” in its musical influence on postwar musicians. It was his adaptation of Kokomo Arnold’s “Old Original Kokomo Blues.” Arnold’s version employed a virtuosic slide guitar performance that bordered on the manic. At times there seems little relationship between Arnold’s playing and his vocal. Robert’s adaptation, on the other hand, synced the music and lyrics into a thick and driven whole.
Robert’s fourth song, “Ramblin’ on My Mind,” stands out as a unique piece because of its unusual open tuning. Somehow Robert developed a tuning that was apparently never used by any other guitarist. Computer analysis of his recording produced a transcription identifying an inventory of the notes he played in his opening guitar riff, revealing his tuning: to play all the notes identified, Robert could have only tuned his guitar to an open F chord (from low E to high E) C F C A C F, but not just an ordinary open F. Interestingly, prior to this research, guitarist Rory Block had for years been using this same tuning for this song after arriving at it through her own painstaking process of listening to what Robert was playing and testing the various tuning possibilities. This computer analysis confirmed that her tuning was indeed accurate.
Opening notes to “Ramblin’ on My Mind.” Bruce Conforth and Michael Malis
Robert tuned his low E string down to C, his A string down to F, and his D string down to C. But he tuned his G string up to A, his B string up to C, and his E string up to F. He kept this “split open F” original tuning from being displayed to any other guitarists. It belonged to him alone. Almost certainly this could not have been the only song he used this tuning on. In live performance it would have taken too much time to tune his guitar to this unique set of notes only to have to retune it again for his next song. It would have made much more sense for him to use the tuning for several songs before changing back to another tuning. Unfortunately, we only have this one recorded example of his musical ingenuity.
Like “Kind Hearted Woman Blues,” Robert’s first take of “Ramblin’” was slow. He repeated one verse twice: as the second and last verse of the song. His second take was considerably faster and he never repeated a verse. Otherwise, the takes are quite similar. According to former Delta bluesman Johnny Shines in a 1966 article by Down Beat’s music historian Pete Welding, “Ramblin’” was autobiographical. Shines noted that by 1937, after Robert’s first records were released and the two men began to travel together, rambling was their way of life. “His home was where his hat was, and even then a lot of times he didn’t know where that was. We used to travel all over, meet the pay days (Saturday) in the lumber camps, the track gangs—anywhere the money was.” Like other bluesmen, they traveled mostly by rail. “Used to catch freights everywhere. Played for dances, in taverns, on sidewalks. Didn’t matter where, far as he was concerned.”6 The lyrics and powerfully driving guitar in “Ramblin’” seem to reflect Robert’s itinerant lifestyle: rough and urgent. His friends back in Robinsonville, House and Brown, were never driven to ramble the way Robert did; they stayed largely in the Delta regions where they lived. But by the time of this recording Robert had already established himself as a rambler inside and outside Mississippi. And musically, neither House nor Brown used the piano boogie in their guitar arrangements that Robert showcased on these two recordings that Monday.
The bottleneck style was probably based on a combination of the African one-string instruments that so many blues players started out with such as the diddley bow, the Hawaiian sound that had become popular in the early years of the twentieth century, and various tunings used by Mexican laborers. As they helped clear Delta forests and swamps around 1900, Mexicans brought the guitar to the Delta. They used an open G tuning, and when black laborers adopted it they called it Spanish tuning. Charley Patton often tuned two frets higher to a Spanish A (E-A-E-A-C#-E), capoed at the second fret to make his bottleneck sound more effective by pitching the song in the key of B. But while Robert’s elders tended to use a highly formulaic guitar pattern, almost always returning to the starting chord after their variations of the standard twelve bars, Robert was among the first Delta musicians to feature a piano turnaround at the end of the normal twelve bars of music. Robert also displayed his damping effect on the bass strings to provide more rhythm for dancing. Few, if any, Delta blues musicians had ever recorded a similar damping sound prior to Robert.
Lyrically, “Ramblin’” may have been even more autobiographical than even Shines realized, for in the third verse Robert sang a line that has usually been interpreted as “Runnin’ down to the station, catch that first mail train I see.” But more likely Robert was singing about the “Fast Mail” train: the precise name of a train that ran on the Southern Railway line from Memphis to New Orleans. His lyric was almost certainly a personal reference from his time traveling back and forth to his Memphis family.
“When You Got a Good Friend,” Robert’s fifth song, was musically structured in the same manner as “Kind Hearted Woman.” It varied only slightly in both takes: the first was shorter than the alternate, which Robert added an extra verse to. A very personal song, Robert bemoaned his unaccountable mi
streatment of his woman. He was puzzled by his own behavior and both opened and closed the song with the same admonition: “When you got a good friend that will stay right by your side, give her all your spare time, love and treat her right.” This was a tender side of Robert he rarely made public. Perhaps due to such an open admission of his vulnerability, the song was never released by the record company.
Considered one of Robert’s masterpieces, “Come on in My Kitchen” was his sixth selection that day. He used the Spanish tuning for his adaptation of the old melody that had been an enormous hit for the Mississippi Sheiks in 1930, “Sitting on Top of the World.” His ability to showcase a song in two different ways included one take that produced a fast Delta dance rhythm, while the other was a slow, haunting version painting images of a chilling Delta winter wind, blowing across barren cotton fields. His first take, slower and more deliberate, mournful, sensitive, and eerie, is almost certainly the version that Johnny Shines repeatedly stated would “make grown men cry.” Shines recalled that during their last trip together in 1938 he particularly noticed the effect this song could have on a crowd. “One time in Saint Louis we were playing one of the songs that Robert would like to play with someone once in a great while, ‘Come on in My Kitchen.’ He was playing very slow and passionately, and when we quit, I noticed no one was saying anything. Then I realized they were crying—both men and women.”7 Apparently the slower version did not impress Satherly, who chose to release the second, faster take. But Robert’s first run-through is still acknowledged as the greater of the two.
Robert’s seventh selection, once again with bottleneck, became his best-selling signature song among record buyers at that time. “Terraplane Blues” featured the fast-car image with highly developed sexual overtones. These “get dirty” lyrics helped sell more records in the Depression, according to Harry Charles, a Birmingham-based scout who began to use that technique before 1930. “I’m gonna’ h’ist your hood, mama, I bound to check your oil,” Robert sang. “I’m gonna get deep down in this connection, keep on tanglin’ with your wires.”
Up Jumped the Devil Page 13