Sexual innuendoes had always been in blues but they made a career for Bo Carter of Edwards, Mississippi, who later worked from the small town of Anguilla, just below Leland. Carter was considered “the dirtiest man” on records for recordings with such titles as “Banana in Your Fruit Basket,” “Ants in My Pants,” and “Please Warm My Weiner.” No respectable churchgoer would have dared purchase such a record (or at least admit to it). Such records sold well, though, and Robert used his fixation with the Terraplane he repeatedly saw parked near his Memphis family’s home to create his hit.
But in all probablility “Terrapane Blues” was not a hit for its sexual innuendo alone but also due to the newfound public attraction to highways and speed. Road construction had grown enormously throughout the 1920s with federal highways—numbered routes—gaining designation in 1926. America was becoming a motorized nation, and the car was even more of a status symbol than it had been before. Mississsippi, with its relatively flat terrain, boasted miles of straight flat-top upon which cars could travel faster than ever before. Ike Zimmerman helped build one such highway—Highway 51. And of all the cars being manufactured at that time the Terraplane was highly prized. The eight-cylinder 1933 Terraplane was believed to be one of the fastest production cars being made and was favored by such gangsters as John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. This, along with its sleek design, made the Terraplane even more attractive to the general public.
Robert ended the session with “Phonograph Blues,” another of the five unissued songs from his two Texas sessions. Interestingly, “Phonograph Blues” is one of only three songs Robert recorded in which he mentions a woman by name (the other two being “Honeymoon Blues” and “Love in Vain”): “Beatrice, she got a phonograph, and it won’t say a lonesome word. What evil have I done? What evil has the poor girl heard?”
The lyrics to “Phonograph Blues” are somewhat confusing. Played in the style of “Terraplane Blues,” a first listen seems to reveal just another double entendre song. The phonograph needle as Robert’s penis; “playing it on the sofa, we played it ’side the wall” apparently describing some sexual gymnastics. However, Robert offers that her phonograph won’t say anything anymore because of some evil he did or some evil that she heard. Then he bemoans that his needle has gotten rusty and won’t play anymore. Instead of the typical bluesman’s bragging about sexual potency, Robert seemed to be admitting, or at least addressing, the issue of impotence. And finally he begs Beatrice to gather up her clothes, come home, and “try me one more time.” It must have been confusing to the record company as well because it was never released during Robert’s lifetime.
With that awkward finish Robert ended the day’s sessions. Masterfully, however, he had recorded eight songs, a total of at least sixteen takes, in one day’s sitting. At three minutes per take, with at least several minutes set up and review time between each start, those recording efforts amount to several hours of concentrated focus. That was no easy task for someone who had never been in a studio before and who had been beaten up and spent time in jail the night before. Yet Robert had some idea what to do from the stories Willie Brown and Son House had told him about recording for Paramount, so he was probably somewhat prepared for the experience. “He always told us he was gonna go to New York some day and record like Son and Willie did,” Elizabeth Moore noted. “He heard ’em talkin’ ’bout how they had made them records they made.”8
Robert Johnson left the Gunter Hotel late that afternoon with more than one hundred dollars cash in his pocket. It was late Monday, Texas was still celebrating its centennial year, and Thanksgiving was only two days away. He had Tuesday and Wednesday to do as he pleased. What did he do? Speculations abound, but the most compelling account was told by Shirley Ratisseau, a white woman who grew up around Houston in the 1930s. George Ratisseau, Shirley’s father, owned two of the main blues bars in the area, and both T-Bone Walker and Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins played at his jukes. The Ratisseau family also owned the Jolly Roger Hunting and Fishing Club on Redfish Point near Rockport, Texas, a club well known to members of the black communities of both Houston and San Antonio. That club always welcomed them, and it was a prominent place for black Texans to vacation, fish, and relax. Needing just that kind of relaxing after being beaten by the police and then completing a strenuous day of recording, Robert seems to have used Tueday to ramble out to Rockport where, just before Thanksgiving, still looking battered, he showed up at the vacation grounds. Shirley, who was only seven or eight, met him there and offered to take him fishing. They made up a song about it together. After a few hours of sitting on the pier pulling in redfish, Shirley took Robert home to dine with her family, a most unique event for a young black man from Mississippi. Not to be outdone by her daughter’s kindness, Ratisseau’s mother, Thelma, felt sorry for the beaten and exhausted Robert and invited the musician to spend the night in their home. Robert had found a “kind hearted woman” to take care of him that night. After a good meal and a better night’s rest, Robert returned on Wednesday to San Antonio the next day to prepare for his second recording session.9
Robert had disappeared for two days before returning to San Antonio, and it seems likely that for that reason on Thursday, November 26, Robert recorded only one song, “32-20 Blues,” his arrangement of Skip James’s Paramount recording of “22-20 Blues.” In his version, Robert identified Hot Springs as being in both Arkansas and Wisconsin, an obvious reference from James’s 1931 recording. This recording would lead to an erroneous report by Sam Charters in his 1959 book, The Country Blues, that Johnson had recorded more than one master. Charters claimed the other recordings from that day were destroyed in a pool hall fight where the recordings reportedly took place. He provided no source for this information and no other researcher has substantiated his claim. The most probable reason Robert recorded only one song that day was very simple: Law had been unable to find Robert while he was in Rockport with the Ratisseaus and had booked other musicians for that day’s sessions not knowing when or if Robert would return.
Among these other musicians were the Texas gospel group Chuck Wagon Gang, who recorded six masters before Robert returned. Law continued to record this highly popular sacred group well into the 1950s after he became director of all country music artists for Columbia Records. Formed in 1935 by D. P. (Dad) Carter, and featuring son Jim (Ernest) and daughters Rose (Lola) and Anna (Effie), they recorded “The Engineer’s Child” (a Vernon Dalhart song of some ten years earlier) among other numbers. Following Robert’s one-song session, Tex-Mex performers Andres Berlanga and Francisco Montalvo recorded “Que Piensas Tu que Mi Amore (You Think You’re My Love)” and “Ay! Que Bonitos Ojitos (Oh! What Pretty Eyes).” Another Mexican duet, Hermanas Barraza and Daniel Palomo, followed with some additional Tex-Mex songs. They were released on Vocalion’s Mexican series. It was at this time, and only this time, that when asked to demonstrate his playing for Berlanga and Montalvo, Robert, already done recording for the day, turned his back on them to protect his techniques. Although he made his skills secret, the two musicians might still have been of some interest to Robert. They had established themselves as the Mexican equivalent of southern bluesmen by singing narrative corridos such as “Corrido de los Bootleggers (The Story of the Bootleggers).” And their songs contained the exploits of outlaws and outsiders.
Also like American bluesmen, Berlanga and Montalvo rode freight trains as itinerant troubadours during the Depression. And, like their Delta juke joint partners, they had also played for dances that went from dusk to dawn. “They just keep playing and the people just keep drinking and dancing,” Berlanga recalled. “Man, those were wonderful days.”10 Even their Tex-Mex lyrics were a variant of southen blues. One classic song, “Las Quejas de Zenaida,” amusingly describes a relationship gone bad, and its final verse could be right out of a Patton, House, Brown, or Johnson song:
Ya me voy de este pueblo maldito.
Donde quedan mis sueños dorados.
Now I�
��m leaving this cursed town.
Where my golden dreams remain.
After the demonstration of his playing for his fellow musicians, Robert returned to his boarding house to prepare for the final day of recording. He may have wondered if it would be his last opportunity to leave his footprints on American music. Would his records be short-lived and soon forgotten in a few years? He was facing an important challenge. He had to make his Friday songs compare in quality and energy to his mainline Monday performances. He would have to prove that his creative abilities were, indeed, as strong or stronger than his previous two days of recording.
Robert’s first recording of the final session was a surprising oddity for a Mississippi bluesman: “They’re Red Hot.” Stylistically the song is far more in keeping with the East Coast, Piedmont sound. What could have elicited such a unique sound from this Deltas bluesman? Since Robert was getting paid by the number of songs he recorded it was to his advantage to offer Law as many pieces as he could. Highly skilled in adapting melodies or even complete songs from other artists, the picturesque setting in which Robert found himself probably served as rich fodder for a new composition. Almost certainly the song was his response to having hot tamales for lunch while sitting around Alamo Plaza. For two consecutive days Robert, local well-to-do hanger-on Buster Wharton, and pianist Black Boy Shine bought their lunch in that plaza from Mexican street vendors.
Alamo Plaza, San Antonio, Texas, 1930s. Bruce Conforth
Robert combined a hokum melody in the song with suggestive lyrics creating an up-tempo happy tale about a woman selling hot tamales.11 “Hokum” was a term that primarily applied to happy, suggestive ditties with double meanings. Not only was it a different style of song for a Delta bluesman, it was an example of how Robert could vary his repertoire however he needed. Lyrically the song was also different for Robert, since most of its lines could be found in dozens of other blues and folk songs. “I got a gal, say she’s long and tall. She sleeps in the kitchen with her feets in the hall” was used by Will Shade in 1934 in “Take Your Fingers Off It.” That Robert borrowed a line from Will Shade should come as no surprise—the Memphis Jug Band leader recalled playing with Johnson in a band in West Memphis.12 But Robert borrowed lines for “They’re Red Hot” from many other artists as well. Buddy Boy Hawkins in “How Come Mama Blues” (1929), the Birmingham Jug Band in “Giving It Away” (1930), and Bill Wilbur’s 1935 “Greyhound Blues” all included “She got two for a nickel, got four for a dime. Would sell you more, but they ain’t none of mine.” Walter Taylor in “Thirty Eight and Four” (1930) and Sleepy John Estes’s 1935 “Stop That Thing” used the lyrics: “You know the monkey, now the baboon playin’ in the grass. Well the monkey stuck his finger in that old Good Gulf Gas.” The rest of Robert’s lines seem likely to have also come from either other blues or oral tradition:
I got a letter from a girl in the room
Now, she got somethin’ good she got to bring home soon, now.
The billy goat back in a bumblebee nest
Ever since that he can’t take his rest.
You know Grandma left and now Grandpa too
Well I wonder what in the world we chillum gon’ do.
In fact, the only original lyrics in the piece are probably the refrain: “Hot tamales and they’re red hot, yes, she got ’em for sale.”
The guitar arrangement to “They’re Red Hot” featured rhythm chords played in a fashion normally used by jazz or swing band musicians. But as different as “They’re Red Hot” was from Robert’s other tunes, Law was willing to record whatever he offered. Law left it up to Satherly to decide what songs were placed on which sides of a 78-rpm record, or which were even released.
When he continued recording, Robert depicted his intense sexual conflicts with women on “Dead Shrimp Blues.” Robert painted a masterful image of a young man whose woman has left him for another man: “I got dead shrimp here. Someone’s fishin’ in my pond.” Robert’s line “The hole where I used to fish, you got me posted out” was a southern expression for landowners who posted signs warning against trespassing on private property. But his most poignant plea was simply, “I couldn’t do nothin’ baby, till I got unwound.” The lyrics of “Dead Shrimp Blues” have puzzled most blues scholars. Struck by the obscurity of the song and its reference to shrimp, it’s been posited that this could have been a reference to shrimp as slang for prostitute.13 The answer, however, may be much simpler than anyone imagined.
Just as “They’re Red Hot” was almost certainly based on Robert’s Alamo Plaza lunches, it might not be necessary to look any further for the reference in “Dead Shrimp Blues” than Robert’s trip to the Jolly Roger Hunting and Fishing Club. Redfish Point is located on the outermost tip of Copano Bay, a natural nursery for shrimp. In fact, it is called Redfish Point because the crustaceans are so plentiful that they draw in schools of redfish. Whatever Robert meant metaphorically by the reference to shrimp is still unknown, but it’s highly likely that this is where his inspiration came from.
Robert waited until that day’s session to cut what has become known as one of his signature masterpieces: “Cross Road Blues.” Interestingly, no one who knew Robert from this period recalled him performing the song. When the recording was played for Elizabeth Moore she was surprised and said that she never heard anything like it from him.14
“Cross Road Blues,” now often called “Crossroad(s),” featured a first verse that actually contained a plea for salvation, not a deal with the devil: “I went to the crossroad and fell down on my knees, asked the Lord above have mercy, save poor Bob, if you please.” The song continued with references to the “sun’s going down, boys” before Robert named his best musical friend back in Robinsonville, Willie Brown: “You can run, you can run, tell my friend poor Willie Brown.”
Not once in that song did Robert say he had gone to the crossroad to sell his soul to the devil. Never once in any song did he make such a statement. Actually, as Reverend Booker Miller of Greenwood noted, “There weren’t many paved roads in them days. When you wanted to go to town, you walked down the dirt road from your house, ’til you come to where it crossed the [dirt] road goin’ to town. Then you waited for somebody to come by and give you a ride.”15 Asked how Robert traveled to jukes, Elizabeth Moore explained: “He catch a bus or get somebody to come get him. He didn’t have no car.”16 Miller further noted that a musician had a “much better chance of being picked up” than the average hitchhiker. “When somebody saw you with a guitar, they’d pick you up a lot quicker,” Miller explained. “A guitar picker stood out more than anyone else.”17 Other transportation included small trains called “Pea Vines,” or locals, that ran for short distances but left only once a day. Buses always traveled on Highways 49, 51, and 61 through the Delta, but if you lived on a plantation, you either hitchhiked, caught a bus, or hopped a freight train.
In “Cross Road Blues” Robert sings and plays with a sense of urgency. The sound is intense, and whatever caused him to fall down on his knees at the crossroad was a powerful influence. Only one other prewar blues had ever mentioned crossroads: Charley Patton’s 1929 “Joe Kirby,” which cited a specific crossroads. But it has none of the angst of Robert’s lyric. Patton sang: “Well, I was standin’ at Clack’s crossroad, biddin’ my rider goodbye. It [the train] blowed for the crossroad, Lord, she started to fly.” In Robert’s “Cross Road Blues,” however, one cannot help but acknowledge the black mythical belief associated with that spot. Virtually every collection of black folklore contains legends about the crossroads, a syncretic blending of African and Anglo folklore. Hyatt collected numerous variations on the crossroads story; the most iconic in its relation to the blues was this:
If you want to know how to play a banjo or a guitar or do magic tricks, you have to sell yourself to the devil. You have to go to the cemetery nine mornings and get some of the dirt and bring it back with you and put it in a little bottle, then go to some fork of the road and each morning sit there and
try to play that guitar. Don’t care what you see come there, don’t get ’fraid and run away. Just stay there for nine mornings and on the ninth morning there will come some rider riding at lightning speed in the form of the devil. You stay there then still playing your guitar and when he has passed you can play any tune you want to play or do any magic trick you want to do because you have sold yourself to the devil.18
Although the folklore is clear, we have no way of knowing what Robert meant by the song. He never mentioned a deal, the devil, or any other supernatural element. So why is his song so unique, and why does he sing it with such urgency?
Both versions of his song begin with Johnson kneeling at a crossroads to ask God’s mercy, while the second verse tells of his failed attempts to hitch a ride. In the third and fourth verses, Robert shows concern, if not outright fear, at being stranded as darkness approaches. Finally, he implores the listener to run and tell his friend Willie Brown that “I’m sinkin’ down.”
Despite many blues fans and even some scholars attempting to link this song to some Satanic or Faustian bargain, it contains not a single reference in that regard. The devil, Legba, hoodoo, nor any reference to any supernatural being or event are mentioned. However, the belief in the ability to make a deal at a croosroads was so prevalent in the southern black community that Robert must have known of it. But the song could also be about protest and social commentary. The second verse included “the sun goin’ down now, boy, dark gon’ catch me here.” This could be a reference to the sundown laws, or curfews, that were widely in place during racial segregation in the South. Signs in those rural regions advised “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on you here.” Robert may have been expressing a real fear of trumped up vagrancy charges or even lynching. It has been argued that the fifth verse in the second take captures the essence of the song: “left alone, abandoned, or mistreated, [Robert] stands at the crossroad, looking this way or that for his woman.”19 But what did Robert really mean? The passion in his voice indicates how seriously he took his lyrics. What he really meant, however, was known only to him.
Up Jumped the Devil Page 14