The first day of recording, Thursday June 17, featured Al Dexter and Luke Owens. Friday’s session laid down recordings by a group called the Hi-Flyers and several others by Roy Newan and His Boys. Saturdays work began with the Crystal Springs Ramblers, a Western swing band featuring great piano, saxophone, and fiddle, and a thumping bass fiddle style with a break, a technique that spawned rockabilly music in the early 1950s. The band was named after the Crystal Springs Palace west of Fort Worth that had been the stomping grounds for Milton Brown and His Brownies. Robert recorded after them and was followed by Zeke Williams and His Rambling Cowboys.
The Light Crust Doughboys, formed in 1933 to advertise Light Crust Flour, opened Sunday’s session and recorded eight sides. By 1937 some of the best musicians in the history of Western swing were members of this ensemble: Kenneth Pitts and Clifford Gross on fiddles, Dick Reinhart and Muryel Campbell on guitars, and Ramon DeArman was on bass with John “Knocky” Parker on piano. Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery played tenor banjo. Clifford Cross and Muryel Campbell followed the Doughboys, then it was Robert’s turn again.
In 1959, Montgomery, the longtime leader of the Dallas-based Doughboys, was interviewed during an annual Jimmy Rodgers Festival in Meridian, the blue yodeler’s hometown. Montgomery had known members of the Ramblers personally. He had either played with or knew the musicians for a large number of Western swing bands that had recorded either in Dallas or San Antonio for Law or his rivals Decca and Bluebird.9
Although Montgomery had no recollections of Robert being in the studio, he did remember seeing a blues musician at the session. And he remembered important contextual information about the sessions: they recorded in the rear of the third floor of the building where a massive number of newly pressed records were kept in boxes after being shipped in from pressing plants. The studio conditions in Dallas were vastly different than the comfort of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio. “They had cleared out a little place up there in the back of the building,” Montgomery recalled, “and the recording machine was set up in a little booth. We got in front of those record boxes and gathered around one mike to record. They had another mike on the piano and the engineer had his equipment in that little booth.”10
The weekend sessions gave the artists a distinct advantage over those held on weekdays. Usually there was too much noise from street traffic during the week for a suitable recording environment, unless the sessions were held at night. The weekend sessions were somewhat quieter. But the building was a warehouse with few windows, and since it was June in Texas, the temperature soared. Montgomery remembered the stifling heat in the building. “This was kind of a storage place as far as I could tell, and it was a pretty big building. We were right out in the middle of it, but it seemed like they had some boxes around the side of us or something to keep us from wandering off in any other part of the place when we was playing. The air-conditioning was a big chunk of ice with a fan blowing over it, but then when they got ready to take a cut they had to turn the fans off [since] the humming of the fans was too much to be on record.”11 Although the washtubs full of ice and fans were placed around the recording area, turning them off during the actual recording ended up helping the musicians and everyone else very little, leaving them drenched in sweat.
Robert opened his new recording session with “Stones in My Passway,” a uniquely personal introspection with an obvious double entendre:
I got three legs to truck on, boys,
Please don’t block my road.
Been feelin’ ashamed ’bout my rider
I’m booked and I got to go.
Robert often used the vernacular that was used daily by the Delta sharecroppers he played for. He sang countless expressions along the lines of his “rider” (the woman he was having sex with) or “makin’ a spread,” and “quiverin’ down” (for intercourse). But what makes the lyrics in “Stones in My Passway” of particular interest is Robert’s very direct reference to hoodoo practice:
I got stones in my passway and my road seems dark as night.
My enemies have betrayed me, have overtaken poor Bob at last
And there’s one thing certain, they have stones all in my pass
You laid a passway for me now, what are you trying to do
There is no question that he was singing about hoodoo practice. Foot-track magic, a distincly African form of laying down tricks, is accomplished when an arrangment of objects (in Robert’s lyrics, stones), called a “mess,” is laid out in a pattern, line, cross mark, or crossroads symbol. The mess is positioned where the intended victim will walk over it, and is intended to hurt or poison the victim through the feet. The intent is physical harm, unlike much other magic that affects love, fortunes, or luck.12 Robert’s lyrics do claim that the passway stones did affect his health: “I have pains in my heart, they have taken my appetite.”
Vintage Hot Foot Powder ad. Bruce Conforth
Robert’s second song, “I’m a Steady Rollin’ Man,” also had a double meaning. Primarily, he indicated that he was a good provider and worked hard “both night and day” for his woman. He stressed, “I have been a hard workin’ man for many long years, I know.” But the other meaning was fully sexual: “rollin’” was slang for performing consistently in bed. This seems in direct opposition to his failure to perform in songs like “Dead Shrimp Blues” and perhaps even in “Phonograph Blues.” But those songs were from some seven months earlier. Since that time Robert’s records had been released, he was becoming more of a known musician in the black community, and his access to women had become much easier. It shouldn’t be a surprise, therefore, that he bragged about the women he had and could keep with his sexual prowess.
Robert had one more song to record that day before he headed out to the Dallas Juneteenth celebrations. He finished his Saturday session with another personal narration, “From Four Until Late.” Robert began by singing about one of his old hangouts, Gulfport on the Mississippi Coast, where the Gulf and Ship Island Railroad began its journey to Jackson. Located in Harrison County, Gulfport was a busy port where fruit from the Caribbean arrived to be shipped all over the country. It also offered bonded whiskey for sale, unlike the rest of Mississippi, which was supposedly dry. Until liquor became legal in the state on a local county-option basis, Gulfport and Biloxi, the adjacent city, were among the most wide open places in the state.
The song became more autobiographical when he lyrically painted a travelogue: “From Memphis to Norfolk,” where his nephew Louis was stationed in the US Navy, “is a thirty-six hour ride.” The song was also one of the few times that he did not rhyme the last word of the third line with the last word of the first two lines in his variations of the standard twelve-bar blues phrasing. Melodically, Robert took the tune from the “Four o’Clock Blues” that Memphis bandleader Johnny Dunn had recorded in 1922. This seems to be more evidence of how important Memphis was to him as a child and as an adult. It is also evidence that Robert was no stranger to the East Coast, where he had relatives in both North and South Carolina and family members there who mentioned him visiting. Robert also employed a theme recently recorded by Charley Jordan for Decca in March of that year under his pseudonym of Uncle Skipper, titled “Chiffarobe Blues.” The Saint Louis musician did four verses comparing a woman to having “dresser drawers” that a man rambles through. Robert similarly sang: “A woman is just like a dresser / Some man always ramblin’ through her drawers.” Apparently he had heard Jordan’s June release and was borrowing lyrics his contemporaries were having success with.
As Robert finished his session and was packing his guitar after his day’s musical production, Zeke Williams and His Ramblin’ Cowboys were waiting to take the microphone. He walked out of the studio with money in his pocket.
Reported in local newspapers as the largest Juneteenth celebration ever held in Dallas with parades, dances, and suppers with music, bootleg whiskey in fruit jars, and homebrew that was sometimes referred to as “Sister-Get-You-Ready,” black
Dallas was ready to offer Robert anything he wanted, including lots of women.13 That year’s festival was the biggest in Dallas history and featured four parades in that single weekend. The famous, and highly paid, black dancer and entertainer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson was performing free in Fair Park and there would be even larger crowds of people than for the regular festival. Robert strutted, or trucked, his way to the waiting audience, eager to play his music and impress and find one of those “Saturday night women [who] love to ape and clown.” This time he didn’t lack a nickel.
The lyrics that Robert sang the next day would be deeper and darker than any he had previously recorded. Some historians refer to these songs as his “devil connection.” Perhaps he was remembering all the dark crossroads in his life: his mother’s abandonment of him when he was just an infant, being uprooted again and taken from the city to the plantation, the beatings he got for not wanting to work in the fields, the deaths of Virginia and their unborn child and being blamed for them because of his playing the devil’s music, the loss of Virgie and Claud for the same reason, and a whole host of other personal disappointments. When he reentered the makeshift studio, Robert’s recordings projected distinct fears.
This was notable especially in his first song, “Hell Hound on My Trail.” It is so different from his other compositions that it is often singled out as Robert’s masterpiece, his most intense performance. The melody was borrowed from Skip James’s 1931 Paramount recording “Devil Got My Woman,” but Robert seemed entranced, in a fearful, unexplainable mindset. Either he was suffering from deep lingering fears and trauma from the tragedies in his life, or he was a master at projecting himself into a performance and selling a song. Placing the number in the same open E minor tuning that James had used for his recording—and which Robert had learned from Johnnie Temple—he tuned his guitar a full tone higher than James, causing him to strain to reach his singing notes. The musical and lyrical tension this created for the listener seems almost unbearable. And Robert seemed either unsure of his playing or overwhelmed by the song itself, for he muffed one guitar riff (early in the second verse) before he found the right notes. As an accomplished guitarist that was unusual for him.
The strange qualities of “Hell Hound” began with its first verse, “I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving, blues fallin’ down like hail … and the days keep on worryin’ me: there’s a hellhound on my trail.”
Robert never mentioned either hellhounds or the devil in succeeding verses. Only once before had a known blues musician sung about hellhounds: Oklahoma bluesman “Funny Paper” Smith, who also used the nickname “Howlin’ Wolf” before Chester Burnett appropriated it. In 1931 Smith seemed to use the hellhound reference to describe something less demonic: “I often get blue and start howlin’ and the hellhound gets on my trail. I’m that wolf that digs a hole and stick my nose down in the ground.” Smith, in all likelihood, was using his “wolf” association to speak about white law enforcement officers. Robert, on the other hand, presented a more ambiguous, and even mysterious, meaning when he used the term.
Whatever Robert’s hellhounds were, one can sense a certain angst in this song. It’s not a happy piece, and it includes another distinct reference to hoodoo magic: the use of hot foot powder. Like his song “Stones in My Passway,” the reference to hot foot powder refers to foot traffic magic. It’s not unlike a hunter laying down a snare for his prey. Foot traffic magic is perhaps among the oldest forms of hoodoo practice, along with Goofer Dust, Graveyard Dirt, and Crossing Powder. Such magic seems to be of African origin and predates the nineteenth century. It’s used precisely the way Robert spoke about it in his song: once sprinkled across someone’s path, the victim must lead a life of restlessness and rambling.14
As in “Stones in My Passway” and possibly “Dust My Broom,” Robert was being specific about hoodoo practice and how it worked. Add the eerie cry in his voice, more haunting than James’s falsetto, and “Hell Hound” became one of his most noted performances. Of all his songs, “Hell Hound” has the most evocative imagery. Almost surrealist in its approach, the song paints visions and sound pictures. Robert emulates “the leaves tremblin’ on the tree” by playing his slide in a shimmering single note vibrato. The effect is haunting.
His next songs, “Malted Milk” and “Drunken Hearted Man,” appeared to center around an alcoholic theme, but perhaps only the latter truly does.
Most scholars have posited that “Malted Milk” referred to beer or malt liquor. However, when Robert was a child growing up in Memphis, Horlick’s Malted Milk was a widely advertised and used product.
Since Memphis played such a huge role in his early life, Robert might have simply been taking a rather sugary, innocent approach to healing his blues in this song. The last verse of the song even depicts one of the most common childhood fears: “My doorknob keeps on turnin’, It must be spooks around my bed. I have a warm, old feelin’ and the hair risin’ on my head.” The influence of Lonnie Johnson, a major race artist since 1926 and Robert’s musical idol, was obvious in his guitar playing on “Malted Milk.” It was smooth and jazzlike, and in it Robert demonstrated his ability to play with a subtle touch.
Horlick’s Malted Milk ad. Bruce Conforth
“Drunken Hearted Man,” conversely, was clearly about sorrows both caused by drink and being drowned by it. Vocalion chose not to release this song, one of five songs judged noncommercial for various reasons. Perhaps the song was too personal or autobiographical to be a commercial success. The complete recording, never publically released, contains a hidden treasure: a sound check with Robert playing a D major chord. Lyrically, Robert speaks of his mother and father: his father being absent and his mother doing the best she could. These events, he confesses, led to his alcoholism and womanizing. It’s a sad song to hear and was about a life that Johnny Shines described in a 1966 interview. “Of course when he drank, and he was a heavy drinker, he was unpredictable. [He was] close to a split personality. You never knew what he was going to do or how he’d react to something. Sometimes he’d be the most mild mannered, quiet person you’d ever meet; at other times, he would get so violent so suddenly, and you couldn’t do nothin’ with him. He was that changeable. [He was] different things to different people.”15 Yet Robert hadn’t always been so unpredictable. Willie Moore had seen a different Robert in his younger years. “I ain’t knowed him to get in no fights. He wudn’t no clowny [arguing/bragging] person like that, you know. I never knowed Robert go out and get in no fights with nobody, [he didn’t make] no fuss with that old guitar.”16 Obviously something had caused a change in Johnson’s life and behavior in the years between the memories of Moore and Shines. Was it the loss of one wife and one potential wife and two children, all because he was accused of playing the devil’s music? Was that the real crossroads in his life?
“Traveling Riverside Blues” was loosely based upon the 1929 “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” bottleneck piece that was a huge hit in the Delta for “Hambone” Willie Newbern when it was released on the Okeh label. At his San Antonio session, Robert had used that same arrangement for “If I Had Possession over Judgment Day.” In “Traveling Riverside Blues” Robert took the listener on a riverfront tour of the Mississippi Delta. Reaching back for the localizing technique, Robert once again sang about his home territory: “I got women from Vicksburg, clean on in to Tennessee / but my Friars Point rider jumps all over me.” Robert also mentioned Rosedale, and all three locations lie along Highway 1, which ran beside the Mississippi River. But the lyrics also contained his exhortation: “You can squeeze my lemon, ’til the juice runs down my leg.” That line was OK for juke house singing but it was unacceptable for Satherly, who, Speir said, “understood what they were singing better than any other recording director.”17 As a result, “Traveling” became the third unissued title from this session.
Another somewhat autobiographical song, “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues,” was probably about Robert’s relationship with women, but his lyr
ics were laden with danger. “Now I give my baby the ninety-nine degree, she jumped up and threw a pistol down on me.” The song’s refrain had been recorded by Luke Jordan, a Virginia bluesman in 1927, and by the white guitarist Dick Justice in 1929: “Stop breaking down, please stop breakin’ down. / The stuff I got / It’s gonna bust your brains out baby, / ooh ooh, it’ll make you lose your mind.” Many believe this implied that he had access to cocaine, a familiar drug in the blues scene that the Memphis Jug Band had sung about in 1930 on their “Cocaine Habit Blues.”
But Robert’s bestseller from the session ended up being his 1938 release of “Little Queen of Spades” backed with “Me and the Devil Blues.” More copies of that record and “Stop Breakin’ Down” have been found in unsold store stocks—or by door knocking—than of his other Dallas recordings.
“Little Queen of Spades” was another reworking of the guitar style and pattern he created with “Kind Hearted Woman.” His playing was concise and he took no new chances. This is not surprising, however, for throughout Robert’s Dallas sessions his songs are even more compositionally constructed than his repertoire in San Antonio: it seems that every word, note, and nuance was planned.
This is particularly true of “Me and the Devil Blues.” Even his added spoken asides in that song, “Now, babe, you know you ain’t doin’ me right” in the first line of the second verse, and “Baby, I don’t care where you bury my body when I’m dead and gone” in the last verse, are identical in both of the existing takes. Robert’s consistency reinforces his view that his songs were strict compositions, as inviolable as songs he heard on the radio.
Up Jumped the Devil Page 17