Following this recording, Robert reached back to hearing House and Brown in country jukes in Robinsonville and their influence on him, for “Walkin’ Blues” was a direct reworking of House’s “My Black Mama” that featured the same bottleneck styling. “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” highlighted his Hattiesburg connection and featured damping on the bass strings with his right palm with the bottleneck added. It was a throwback to the type of work song Robert had first sung for Willie Moore shortly after they met around 1928. In it he emphasized the hardships of working on a railroad track gang, and dealing with a “captain so mean, good Lord.” This was a common reference to the white boss man who towered over his black crew moving steel rails to and from a roadbed. His location was the “Gulfport Island Road,” or the Gulfport and Ship Island that had been formed in 1900. It ran daily from Gulfport north to Hattiesburg, where it met the New Orleans and Northeastern (Southern) and then on to Jackson. It was the kind of heavy work that Robert avoided when he came to Hazlehurst in 1930 while Ike Zimmerman worked six days a week clearing a roadway for paving Highway 51. In fact, he could have learned it from Zimmerman, for it consisted of an A, A, A, B lyric format more often found in work songs than the A, A, B form of Johnson’s usual blues formula.
“Preachin’ the Blues,” subtitled “Up Jumped the Devil,” was Robert’s rendition of House’s “Preaching the Blues” from 1930. House had sung with intense conviction on his recording, and it seems Robert tried to duplicate his performance. His playing was masterful, and despite not possessing the powerful, overwhelming voice of House, Robert’s emotions were still riveting. He urged himself on—“Help me, you gonna help me?”—as if he were talking to someone else in the room, creating a crescendo of emotions as he played.
Robert’s last song, “If I Had Possession over Judgment Day,” was musically borrowed from Hambone Willie Newbern’s “Roll and Tumble Blues,” but where Newbern sang about lost love, Robert sang about sex and power, combining his own fears of them with the fantasy of controlling them. It was another song that was never issued in the 1930s.
Robert finished his recordings on Friday, November 27, though Law’s recording sessions lasted until Sunday, November 30. Robert stayed in San Antonio until all the recording was done just in case he was asked to provide another few songs. That Sunday afternoon Tony Garza, a shipping clerk for the company, took Robert, along with recording engineer Vincent Liebler, to a cockfight. Mexicans had brought the Sunday afternoon blood sport to San Antonio, and although officially outlawed, it was still embraced as one of that town’s gambling operations.20
Robert Johnson left San Antonio with a nice roll of cash for his sixteen songs, the most he ever made as a professional bluesman. According to Don Law he was paid about twenty-five dollars per song. The companies paid what a musician would accept. Since a record deal meant name recognition back home, most bluesmen accepted what money a company offered them. And Robert was an untested unknown. “They [the musicians] didn’t trust the companies to pay them royalties,” Speir recalled. “They wanted cash when they got through recording.”21 During the 1920s, when companies were more prosperous, Speir had gotten as much as fifty dollars a song for some of his talent. But records in the 1930s sold for thirty-five cents on cut-rate labels (Okeh and Vocalion), but Columbia and Brunswick records ran anywhere from seventy-five cents to one dollar and fifty cents each. Columbia Masterwork records could command as much as two dollars each. “Getting on record was more important to a bluesman than the fee,” Speir concluded. “When they had a record out, they could make more money playing on the streets and for parties.”22 Speir never saw Robert after his Texas sessions and said Oertle only told him later that he had taken Robert to Texas to record. Oertle died from a sudden heart attack in November 1941. Another voice from Robert’s life had been silenced shortly after their connection.
Robert left San Antonio feeling he had attained his primary goal in life, just as he had told both Elizabeth Moore and Eula Mae Williams he would. At twenty-five he was now a recorded bluesman, a major feat when only three major companies controlled all recordings. If H. C. Speir’s belief that Robert’s music was perfect for the emerging jukebox market was correct then it might not be too long before his records began appearing on them. And they certainly would be offered in a variety of record stores throughout the South. And there were no hellhounds on his trail, just more of being a ramblin’ professional bluesman who worked primarily on the weekends of his choice.
Arriving back in the Delta at the end of 1936, Robert temporarily moved back in with his mother and stepfather in Tunica. Perhaps the success of his returning from a recording session smoothed out the problems that Dusty Willis had with his stepson, for Robert seems to have stayed with them for a number of months without incident. While there he courted Willie Mae Holmes, the eighteen-year-old cousin of Honeyboy Edwards. Holmes was staying on a farm run by Albert Creason, a sixty-three-year-old black man in Commerce, the same community Robert lived in as a youth on the Abbay and Leatherman plantation.
Willie Mae Holmes Powell. © Delta Haze Corporation
It was Robert’s music, as usual, that introduced the couple. “He was on his way to make music somewhere that Saturday evening, and me and my girlfriend were sitting out on the porch, and he started talking with us, and that’s how I got acquainted with him.”23 Robert saw Willie Mae as another available companion: a woman living with a much older man with whom she had no real connection. Soon Robert won Willie Mae’s affection. She remembered him as being both handsome and loving. “He was a nice conditioned person. He was lovin’ kind. He was a handsome boy. He was real young, and I was too. The cutest little brown thing you ever did see in your life. Oh, he was very handsome, he sure was. I was very much in love with him.” Robert, of course, used his musical skills in his courtship. “Sit on the back porch: house was a shotgun house, facing the levee. And we’d be out on the back porch sittin’ on the steps and he’d pick his box for me.”24
They started courting in December 1936, and six months later, in June 1937, Robert left for Dallas for his last recording sessions. He told Willie Mae that he was leaving to go make more records, and two of the songs he sang for her before he left were “Stones in My Passway” and “I’m a Steady Rollin’ Man,” the two songs he would begin his Dallas recording sessions with. He asked her to come along with him, but she declined. Without her company, Robert vowed to put her in a song. “He said he was gonna [write a song about me].”25 That song, of course, became “Love in Vain,” the penultimate song of his recording career. Robert Johnson had kept his promise.
Another kind hearted woman had passed through his life.
13
I LEFT WITH MY HEAD CUT
Robert Johnson, waiting for his recordings to be released, fell back into his old, familiar patterns: he courted at least one woman, Willie Mae Holmes; he went back and forth between his mother’s home in Robinsonville and his Memphis stepfamily; he traveled to his musical haunts in Helena; and he played guitar whenever and wherever he could.
While Robert was busy performing in Mississippi, Tennessee, or Arkansas, in New York Art Satherly was scheduling the first release from Robert’s November San Antonio sessions for the March 1937 Vocalion record catalog. Typically the company would issue one recording a month by a new artist, and Satherly placed “Kind Hearted Woman Blues” and “Terraplane Blues” on opposite sides of a single disc using the time-honored policy of placing a slow song with an up-tempo one. That coupling was released on both Vocalion 03416, for thirty-five cents, and ARC’s (American Recording Company) other labels, which were sold through dime stores for twenty-five cents.
“Terraplane Blues” was his major seller and may have sold as many as ten thousand copies, the amount Speir said designated a hit. More copies have been found of that record than any other Robert Johnson release. But the release Satherly chose for April, “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” backed with “Dead Shrimp Blues,” also sold well and
had an initial pressing of at least five thousand copies. Vocalion later released it on the Conqueror label for sale through the Sears Roebuck catalog for rural dwellers who had no access to a record store. Only best sellers from the catalog were issued on Conqueror and surprisingly “Terraplane Blues,” the assumed best seller, was not.
In May, Robert’s best two-sided record from a Delta standpoint, with both sides showcasing his slide guitar talents, was offered to the public: “Cross Road Blues” and “Ramblin’ on My Mind.” Although neither song became a hit then, they were still widely heard in the Delta. Son House was considerably impressed when he heard Robert’s recordings. “We heard a couple of his pieces come out on records. Believe the first one I heard was ‘Terraplane Blues.’ Jesus, it was good! We all admired it. Said, ‘That boy is really going places.’”1 Elizabeth Moore heard the records too, and Robert’s use of Willie Brown’s name in “Cross Road Blues” didn’t surprise her. She had seen the two together many times at jukes. “He used to go around, sit and play with Willie Brown lots of days at Robinsonville. See, they had a colored juke just up the railroad north a little piece outta town. Some big dances or another, he’d be in there and Willie Brown knowed his blues—what he’s playing. He played right there with Willie.” After hearing “Cross Road Blues” she asked Brown, whom she called “old cat,” if he had heard the record. “I say, ‘Hey old cat, have you heard your name in Robert’s record?’ He say, ‘Naw, girl. I ain’t heard no record with my name in it.’ I say, ‘Well Robert done got your name right there.’ He say, ‘Well you know, I told Robert the only way I’d know he ever made a record like me, was to put my name in one of ’em.’ I say, ‘Sure nuff, Robert done made a record and your name right there in it.’”2
In just three months—March, April, and May of 1937—Robert had six of his songs released. The successes of these recordings gave Robert a sense of himself as a legitimate musician. In whatever manner Robert had presented himself before his recordings were released, he was now more sure of himself as a professional musician than ever before. That self-assurance might explain why an Arkansas piano player wanted to have his friend try to take Robert down a few pegs. The unrecorded Johnny Shines ended up becoming the victim of this scheme.
Shines was working in nearby Hughes, Arkansas, with a piano player, Jerry Hooks, who called himself M&O.3 “I was playing in Hughes in a place called Doc Pickens,” Shines remembered. “An old piano player called M&O, he was playing there, and I was playing with him, and he was telling me about this guy in Helena. He was supposed to be tough. But you know the guys had an act of cutting heads. You know, you hit up on a guy that’s supposed to be good, you supposed to beat him playing, well this is what M&O expected [me to do]. Evidently he had some kind of bone to pick with Robert as a musician. At the time I was young, strong, playing hard, singing loud, and he thought I could outdo Robert Johnson. He [M&O] wanted me to go to Helena and cut Robert’s head, outdo him and steal his crowd away from him; pull his crowd away from him. In other words, I make all the money; he makes nothing. That’s what they call ‘head cutting.’”4 But when Shines and Hooks hopped a freight train and went to Helena to musically confront Johnson, he quickly realized it was his head that would be cut.
“I went to Helena,” Shines recalled, “and I heard some of his records, a couple of his records, and that changed my mind about cutting his head because I knew how that was going, and it went like I thought it was going. I left with my head cut.”5 When they finally met and played together, Robert left Shines with his mouth open and his pockets empty. One of the most time-consuming tasks in writing a biography of Robert Johnson was attaching dates to people, places, and events. Johnny Shines, while being a very accurate informant concerning what Johnson was like and what he did—he traveled more with Johnson than any other musician or person—was off on dating his years (easily understandable since he was trying to recall, even in his first interviews, thirty years in the past). Most of his claims were that he met Johnson in 1934 or ’35, but according to his own stories it was actually early 1937. If this recollection of him hearing Johnson’s recordings before or at the time of meeting him is true, and there is no reason to doubt it, their meeting had to have taken place after Johnson’s records were released in March 1937. If it was in March, the songs Shines would have heard were “Kind Hearted Woman Blues,” in which Johnson, uncharacteristic for most Delta bluesmen, played largely out of the first position and included a guitar break, and “Terraplane Blues,” in which Johnson first makes use of a signature slide guitar riff. If their meeting occurred in April, then Shines would have also had a chance to hear “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” with both another signature slide riff and its hard-driving boogie beat, and “Dead Shrimp Blues,” with its complex bass against melody picking. All four songs would have sounded different than the usual recordings coming out of the Delta and probably would have seemed quite imposing to Shines.
Ordinarily this would have been the end of their association, but their meeting proved to be propitious for both men: Shines found a mentor, and Robert, usually a loner, found a traveling companion who just wouldn’t leave him alone. Robert was now able to take the role that Son House and Ike Zimmerman had played for him, and it provided him with a partner upon whom he could, when he wanted or needed it, depend on for company and support. Shines quickly became a Johnson acolyte, learning from and traveling with him when he could, helping him out of scrapes, and introducing him to other musicians. “I met a man who could beat me playing. And that was the man I was looking for: someone who could beat me playing because I wanted to advance. And Robert was the man, I was trying to get up his pant leg, you know? But he was one of the greatest in my eyesights: he was the master. Robert was doing some of the things I wanted to do. Things that I never heard a guitar player do.”6 Once Shines found his master he was determined not to leave Robert until he had learned all he could from him. Robert simply couldn’t shake Shines from his path. No matter where he went, Shines wanted to go with him. “The fact of it was that I was the bad penny. I stayed on Robert’s heels, and at that time I would follow anyone who had a riff, or a chord that I wanted until I got it, if they were friendly at all.”7
Johnny Shines. Christopher Smith
By most accounts Robert really was that much of a better guitarist than many of his known contemporaries, for Shines was not the only musician who admired his playing: Robert Lockwood was equally effusive. “Didn’t nobody else play it like that. Guitar players didn’t know how to play that way. Guitar players had another guitar player with him to play the chords and the other one played the melody. Robert was playing it all. Hacksaw Harney. He was the only one that I knew [who could also play like that].”8 Henry Townsend also considered Robert to be a master after hearing him perform in Saint Louis. “But to me he was such a good musician! I thought he was great; matter of fact, my ambition was to keep in touch with him as much as I could because I felt like I could learn quite a bit. I was excited because to me he was a rare type of executor of music. Yes, he was that far advanced to me.”9 Another time he recalled more about Robert’s playing style: “Oh Robert was doing, I think you’ll find on his recordings, some real close up stuff of Lonnie Johnson. And the chords that he would make some, he would do all the sevenths, the ninths, and what have you, and he’d make it fit. Robert woulda left people shaking their heads.”10
Although Robert’s recordings didn’t make much of an impact outside of a specific circle in Mississippi, anyone who saw him live at that time felt as though they were in the presence of a master talent. Even in the 1960s when blues guitarist and one of his musical contemporaries Ishmon Bracey heard Robert’s recording of “Dead Shrimp Blues,” he insisted that one guitarist could not play that way. “I know there is [two guitars on that recording]. See he can’t carry that bass and tempo all at the same time like that.”11
But Robert’s playing was about more than just being able to play the bass, melody, and chords at
the same time. What made him unique was his total approach to the guitar. Perhaps it was from the jazzy orchestras Robert heard in Memphis, or the piano players in Hattiesburg from whom he most likely adapted his boogie bass pattern, but Robert was determined to treat the guitar as an entirely different instrument than the one his peers played. As Robert Lockwood observed: “The mysterious quality was that he played guitar like you played the piano. See that’s the way he played, and that’s real difficult. People all over the world wants to do that. I knew what Robert was playing was rare because other guitar players didn’t have it. You always seen two guitar players together, and one would back the other up. But Robert didn’t need nobody to back him up. That’s what attracted my attention, ’cause I never knew there was gonna be a time when you could put a piano in a case and walk away with it, you know. I didn’t have no dream that was ever gonna happen.”12
Virtually all the younger musicians who heard him knew that they were hearing something unique. Johnny Shines agreed that it was Robert’s ability to imitate what was done by piano players that truly made his playing so special. “Anything I’ve heard a fellow do on the piano he could do it on the guitar. And he did it! It was a sound you had to stop and listen to. And that’s the sound a lot of people are looking for today. Me, myself, I’m still looking for it.”13 On another occasion Shines stated: “To me, he was just as great as Charlie Parker. The man did everything they did—whatsoever you did on a horn or on a piano, he figured he could do it on a guitar, and he did it…. Whatever you wanted him to play, he’d play it. I never seen him look for a chord. I know many chords he never heard of, because he couldn’t read music, but he could make them.”14 Shines did not know, of course, that Johnson did have school music training as a child in Memphis. This would not necessarily have taught him to read music, but it probably gave him a better theoretical perspective toward music, no matter how elementary, than his contemporaries were aware of. Shines remembers: “Ninths, diminisheds, augmenteds, sevenths, tenths, thirteenths, all that stuff. He made ’em and he made ’em in the right place!”15
Up Jumped the Devil Page 15