Eventually they arrived in the Windy City. Although the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s gained much greater attention, Chicago was undergoing its own aesthetic flowering in the arts in the 1930s. The Great Migration brought thousands of southern blacks to northen cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, where manufacturing was booming. There they developed an urban culture that influenced all manner of the arts. By this time Chicago had already become a home for recording and performing music, and the new migrants quickly made their presence felt. The South Side of Chicago soon became known as the “Black Belt” or “Black Ghetto” and the more racist “Darkie Town.” The new spirit of racial pride caused many blacks to resent these names until James J. Gentry, a theater editor for the Chicago Bee, suggested that the word Bronzeville should be used to identify the community. Most Chicago blacks loved the idea.
In addition to a cultural renaissance, Chicago was undergoing a musical shift largely spearheaded by Lester Melrose, who worked for several record labels simultaneously in the 1930s, including RCA Victor, Bluebird, Columbia, and Okeh. Melrose, along with J. Mayo Williams of Decca, helped found the sound known as the Chicago blues. Most of his recordings were made with a small group of session musicians and had a similar sound. The Chicago blues of the 1930s was largely full-band arrangements, ensemble playing with a rhythm section. The arrangements appealed to the increasingly urbanized black record-buying audience. Among the artists he recorded were Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Minnie, Roosevelt Sykes, Lonnie Johnson, Big Joe Williams, and Washboard Sam.
Maxwell Street on the South Side flourished as the main center for these bluesmen. In the 1880s, Eastern European Jews had become the dominant ethnic group in the neighborhood, which remained predominantly Jewish until the 1920s. During this period the open-air pushcart market made the neighborhood famous. After 1920, most of the residents were blacks who came north in the Great Migration, although most businesses continued to be Jewish owned. In the 1930s and 1940s, when many black musicians came to Chicago from the segregated South, they brought with them their outdoor music. The area soon became well known for its street musicians, mostly playing the blues, but also gospel and other styles. Almost all of the musicians already in Chicago also played on Maxwell Street. Although there are no specific reports of such encounters, it seems likely that Robert, as a recording artist with at least one minor hit—“Terraplane Blues”—would have met Broonzy, Memphis Minnie, or some of the other local players while in Chicago.
From Chicago the trio headed east, bound ultimately for Canada, but stopped first in Detroit, just across the river from Windsor, Ontario. The Black Bottom or Paradise Alley section of Detroit was the equivalent of Chicago’s Bronzeville. Originally settled by Jewish immigrants, in the 1920s it began to be home for black migrants coming from the South looking for industrial jobs. The inexpensive, wood-framed houses that lined Hastings Street made suitable housing for the new black residents and soon the area rivaled New York’s Harlem, Beale Street in Memphis, or Maxwell Street in Chicago for its entertainment, especially the blues. Bessie Smith performed on Hastings Street, Blind Blake named one of his songs after it, and other artists like Barbecue Bob (Robert Hicks), Victoria Spivey, and Bob Campbell all sang about Detroit in the 1920s and 30s.
Map of Detroit’s Black Bottom and Hastings Street. Bruce Conforth
Soon after arriving the trio met blues pianist Big Maceo Merriweather and performed with him in one or more of the clubs in which Merriweather played—The Post Club, Brown’s Bar, and Crystal Bar, among others. But it was Robert’s recordings that led to two of their most interesting musical performances in the area. The Reverend Clarence Leslie Morton Sr. hired Robert and Shines to perform on his Windsor-Chatham gospel radio show.23 Morton was called to religious service as a child, and although a doctor’s prognosis gave him only a few years to live, he apparently experienced several “divine interventions” and was healed. Never allowed to attend school, he nonetheless acquired, through what some claimed to be supernatural means, the ability to read and write. His religious convictions forced him to refuse to fight in the First World War and, although sentenced to prison for his refusal, he was freed by the passing of the conscientious objector law. This allowed him to return to religious practice. He created several Full Gospel, Pentecostal churches in Canada and preached on the streets of Windsor. In 1936 his ministry had become large enough that he became one of the earliest black preachers to have his own international radio program.24
Originally the show was broadcast only on radio station CFCO in Chatham, but by 1938 it was being aired on CKLW from Windsor and was also heard in Detroit. Morton was no stranger to the blues. Joe Stenson and Arkaner Campbell, the parents of his second wife, Mathilda Stenson, came from a “long line of guitar pickers and blues singers.” Arkaner was possibly related to Bob Campbell who sang about Detroit.25 Johnny Shines well remembered their performance at his church. “He was a preacher and he broadcasted out of Canada. Lots of people could pick him up back over there in Detroit and all over Canada. He was a sanctified preacher, and he wanted a lot of music with his outfit, you know. He had a pretty good-sized choir. Robert, Calvin, and myself, we go over there and play for him.”26 The trio played the gospel songs “Ship of Zion,” “Stand by Me,” “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” and “Just Over in Glory Land.” The following week they played for a riverfront baptism for Reverand Morton at the mouth of the Detroit River.
Robert soon heard the road calling for him again. Frazier had relatives in Detroit and decided to stay there, while Shines and Robert left and headed for Buffalo, New York, where Shines recalled “there were several places we could play.”27 Whether they then stopped in New Jersey or went directly to New York City is unknown; however, Shines did recall that in Paterson or Newark, New Jersey, there were two or three places they played—speakeasies, taverns, houses. Both cities had large black populations and Harlem was only nineteen miles away. Finding work was easy since John Henry Hammond II had already praised Robert in his writings and his records were on local jukeboxes. “[We’d] hear ’em on jukeboxes,” Shines remembered. “[Robert] was very proud of having it.”28
Playing popular tunes, as well as anything else requested by the crowds, added to their popularity and marketability. And if they didn’t know a particular song they just played the correct tempo for dancing. Shines commented that for waltzes “you could play anything just so long as you played it in cut-time, ¾ time. You could make up your numbers; you just had to set the right tempo.”29 This ability to fake their way through any genre provided varied opportunities. While in New York City they were asked to return to Newark to perform at an Italian wedding. As Shines noted, they already knew polkas and Jewish music, and for the wedding they played primarily tarantellas, adapting some of their own songs, a few standards, and some new ones to conform to the traditional 6/8 tarantella rhythm.30
Returning to New York City, Robert and Shines started seeing women in town, but Robert refused serious romance. He had a special goal on his mind: to appear on, and perhaps win, the Major Bowes Amateur Hour. In order to pursue this dream he left Shines to seek his own fame.
Edward Bowes’s show was broadcast on the CBS network during the 1930s and 1940s. Amateur winners of his program were invited to tour vaudeville theaters under the Major Bowes name. It became a launching pad for many famous artists. Frank Sinatra originally appeared on the show as part of the Hoboken Four quartet in 1935; and Maria Callas performed a piece from Madame Butterfly when she was only eleven. After Bowes’s death the show reappared on television with host Ted Mack and was the forerunner of such popular television shows as Star Search in the 1970s, American Idol, and The Voice.
For Robert, as for thousands of other poor blacks from the South, the Amateur Hour looked like a one-way ticket to fame. He had already fulfilled one of his ambitions by becoming a recording artist; now he wanted to take an even larger step toward national success. Bu
t it was simply not to be. Over ten thousand people applied to be on the Major Bowes show every week, and only a few hundred were auditioned. We do not know what happened, but it’s likely that if Robert got the chance to audition, his listeners weren’t interested.
Regardless, Harlem did provide myriad opportunities for Johnson and Shines. In 1938 the Harlem Renaissance was long past its peak, but the Apollo Theater had opened in 1934; in 1935 Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway with an all-black cast; Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and other black writers were publishing their written works, and black visual artists such as Aaron Douglas were exhibiting their own gallery shows. Paul Robeson was being featured in films and performances, and clubs like the Alhambra Ballroom, Clark Monroe’s Uptown House, Barron’s Club, the Theatrical Grill, and the Sugar Cane Club were among the many venues in Harlem that kept the nights jumping. There one could find such artists as Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Frank Manning, Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, and Count Basie in residence. The great blues singer Victoria Spivey (“Black Snake Blues,” “My Handy Man,” “Dope Head Blues,” etc.) was working in Broadway musicals and was appearing in the hit Hellzapoppin’ when she ran into Robert in Harlem, as she later related to John Paul Hammond.31 And Harlem wasn’t just getting jazzier, it was also going electric.
Charlie Christian had begun using an electric guitar in 1936, and the instrument was becoming a standard in jazz ensembles. After meeting a local club musician on the streets of Harlem, Robert was invited to play the man’s electric guitar. The musician saw Robert and Shines carrying acoustic guitars and wanted to turn them on to the latest technology. He took them to the club where his guitar and amplifier were set up and let Robert try his hand at playing it. Although he liked the volume, Robert told the guitarist and Shines he “couldn’t make it talk” like he wanted.32 The necessity of having to carry an amplifier to use with the guitar would also have seriously impaired Robert’s wanderlust. And, of course, many of the jukes, plantations, parties, and picnics that he played had no electricity. Robert had no use for an electric guitar. He was happy with his small-bodied acoustic Kalamazoo.
With or without electricity, the music they performed in New York and New Jersey was still good enough to make them, by Shines’s own admission, “good money.” Their audiences appreciated their skills, and by this time the two musicians had been playing together so long that Shines said they “were really unloading.”33
Robert showed merely a friendly interest in the women he was seeing, and no matter how they pleased him they weren’t enough to keep him in New York. His plan to appear on the Major Bowes show had failed, almost certainly leaving him disappointed. Finally, the guitarists there were playing new instruments louder and faster than his songs called for. It was time to ramble again: destination Chicago.
Robert and Shines backtracked to Chicago only to have Robert disappear again. A befuddled Shines eventually heard that he was back in Saint Louis and found him again there, but as quickly as Shines found him Robert left for Blythesville, Arkansas. Then he went back to Memphis; on to Hughes, Arkansas; and finally to Helena, where Shines found him for the very last time. Their trip had lasted three months and it was turning to early spring 1938. It seemed like Robert was being driven faster than ever, but he still wanted Shines to come with him. “He was going over to Friars Point, and he wanted me to go with him, and I said, ‘No, no. I don’t want nothing in Mississippi. Nothing!’ I wouldn’t go to Mississippi with him. So he went there by hisself. It was open season on black people in Mississippi at that time. Kill ’em anywhere you see ’em. And hell, I didn’t like that. So I went back in Arkansas.”34
Robert went back to Memphis to visit his family, and then his mother in Robinsonville. After saying his final good-byes, he headed south. It was the last trip of his Delta rambling.
16
YOU MAY BURY MY BODY DOWN BY THE HIGHWAY SIDE
In early 1938, CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) purchased the ARC/Vocalion labels and immediately discontinued the five cheap twenty-five-cent labels that had featured releases by Robert Johnson. It kept its thirty-five-cent Vocalion label and issued Robert’s recordings into early 1939. However, Robert was not called back to Texas for more recordings in 1938 because of poor sales from his 1937 session. He was deeply disappointed that none of his Dallas recordings met with the success of “Terraplane Blues” or any of the others from his San Antonio session. At Dallas he had produced some of his most memorable and arguably original recordings, but the music business, including the blues, was changing drastically and was quickly evolving into a city sound that no longer featured a solo guitarist but rather an ensemble that might feature an electric guitar. Robert was still able to continue his weekly performing out of Helena, Arkansas, and despite these changes his country blues style guitar was still popular on plantations as he went back and forth between the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta regions. Sometimes he went to towns where he had been previously popular along the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad (Yellow Dog), which ran from Clarksdale south to Yazoo City over two different routes. “I been down yonder on that old Mud Line,” he told Elizabeth, referring to the rail line. “I sure had me a time down there.”1 Sometimes Robert mentioned performing in Lambert, a small town just northeast of Clarksdale, and other small towns where country dances were always staged on Saturday nights with a musician providing the music. He was primarily traveling alone now, not with Shines or Frazier. “Whenever he come into a place where I’d be playing, he always be by himself. Never saw him with anybody else. Strictly a lone wolf,” Shines recalled. “The only thing he was ever close to was his guitar and he never let that go; took it with him everywhere.”2
One Delta town that was easily accessible by car, bus, or train was Greenwood. One of the three largest towns in the Delta, in 1930 it had a population of just over eleven thousand. On its streets, Robert had no competition to match his skills or reputation. He had been to Greenwood many times before and, like many of the places he traveled to, he had extended family there. A relative, Jessie Dodds, whose family was from Hazlehurst and kin to Robert’s stepfather, Charlie Dodds Spencer, lived on the nearby Star of the West plantation. Before he left Memphis, however, at the urging of his half sister Carrie, Robert went to see a doctor for stomach and chest pains. The doctor at the John Gaston Hospital there diagnosed him as having an ulcer and advised Robert to quit drinking, advice he was not going to follow. Concerned about his welfare, Carrie didn’t want him to leave Memphis, but he left for Greenwood anyway.3
The seat of Leflore County, Greenwood, is on the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta, 96 miles north of Jackson and 130 miles south of Memphis. It was a center of cotton planter culture and its two rail lines shortened transportation to cotton markets. Front Street, bordering the Yazoo River, was filled with cotton brokers and related businesses and was known as Cotton Row.
Howard Street, Greenwood, Mississippi, 1930s. Bruce Conforth
Baptist Town, where Robert stayed whenever he visited Greenwood, is one of the town’s oldest black neighborhoods. It was settled in the 1800s as the cotton industry began to flourish. Robert could rent a room there for only three dollars a week: easy money for a Delta guitarist of his skill. Life there was undemanding for Robert. He played on the streets of Greenwood during the day, in local jukes in the evening, and when they closed, unless he had a better offer, he would play on one of the nearby plantations. There was no closing time for a juke at a plantation, especially on weekends. There was also no electricity in most plantation jukes, so kerosene lamps and barrels provided illumination and heat. In contrast, in Greenwood proper, he had to compete with loud volume recordings on jukeboxes—even his own records. Sometimes audiences didn’t even believe that he was the same artist on those recordings. Honeyboy Edwards remembered a 1938 situation where such an event occured.
“When I first met him he was on Johnson S
treet near Main in Greenwood, playing right back on the alley. He was right outside of Emma Collins’s—she kept a good-timing house and used to sell whiskey too. He was standing on a block and had a crowd of people back in the alley ganging around him. But they didn’t know who he was! I didn’t know at first either, and when I walked up I thought he was sounding a little like Kokomo Arnold. I walked up with my little old guitar, put mine on back and started listening. He was playing the blues so good.
“One woman, she was full of that old corn whiskey. She said, ‘Mister, you play me “Terraplane Blues!”’ She didn’t know she was talking to the man who made it! She said, ‘If you play me “Terraplane Blues,” I’ll give you a dime!’ He said, ‘Miss, that’s my number.’ ‘Well, you play it then.’ He started playing and they knew who he was then. He was playing and trembling and hollering. It was a little after noon and the people was coming out of the country, coming to town. He had the street blocked with all the people listening to him play.
“He was dressed nice, wearing a brown hat. He wore a hat most of the time broke down over that bad eye. I got acquainted with him when he finished playing. We started talking and I found out he was from around Robinsonville, had just been through Tunica. I asked him did he know my cousin there, Willie Mae Powell, and he said, ‘That’s my girlfriend!’ And I said ‘That’s my first cousin!’ So we started to laughing, chatting it up a bit and we kind of hooked up and started drinking and hanging around together. That’s how I got attached with him. I met him and found out he was going with my cousin.”4
The two men quickly became part of a Greenwood musical scene that centered around the home of Tommy and Ophelia McClennan. Although McClennan, nicknamed “Sugar,” didn’t start recording until the year after Robert died, he became one of the most successful down-home blues recording artists, with twenty singles for the Bluebird label (1939–1942). Among his most notable numbers were “Bottle It Up and Go,” “Cross Cut Saw,” “Travelin’ Highway Man,” and “New Highway No. 51 Blues.” Also included in this musical scene were Robert Petway and Hound Dog Taylor. The men helped introduce Robert to many available, and some unavailable but willing, women, and true to his character, he soon started seeing several of them. As Johnny Shines said, “Sometimes he was too forward. Even men’s wives were fair game for him.”5
Up Jumped the Devil Page 20