Without fanfare or publicity, his first album appeared in 1961. The music was strikingly out of place and out of time, particularly in a year when the best-selling album in America was Elvis Presley's Blue Hawaii. Still, as one critic has aptly remarked, King of the Delta Blues Singers turned Robert Johnson into “a sort of invisible pop star.”
The album consisted of sixteen songs, several with starkly evocative, even apocalyptic titles: “Hellhound on My Trail,” “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day,” “Me and the Devil Blues.” The songs had been recorded in 1936 and 1937. Robert Johnson had been dead for a generation. In 1961, no photographs of him were known to exist. A mysterious and elusive figure, he was-literally- invisible. He nevertheless became a pop star: minor, perhaps, but highly influential just the same.
In his own lifetime, a total of twelve recordings had been released. With the exception of the first one, “Terraplane Blues,” none of them had sold well, even in Johnson's home region, the mid-South. From the start, the quality of his music was nevertheless recognized, if only by fellow blues singers, as well as by a handful of respected writers and record collectors.
After the appearance of King of the Delta Blues Singers, Johnson's reputation steadily grew. His music was heard, and imitated, by a coterie of prominent young musicians. Among the cognoscenti, his album became a badge of hip taste: in the photo on the cover of Bob Dylan's *Bringing It All Back Home* (1965), the Johnson album is prominent among the emblematic pieces of bohemian bric-a-brac on display. What people like Dylan took away from Johnson's life and work became the source of a tacit ethos, silently transmitted, internationally shared, creating a new mythic measure of what rock and roll could *be*, quite apart from the example of Elvis Presley.
But who was Robert Johnson? In an era when worthless teen idols were routinely ballyhooed, Robert Johnson was a mystery, unknown, remote, accessible only through his music. The most storied of the classic Delta bluesmen, his legend had its roots in a failed quest to find him.
The search had begun in 1938. In December of that year, John Hammond was staging the first of his “Spirituals to Swing” concerts at Carnegie Hall (it was this concert that would introduce the jump blues of Big Joe Turner to New York listeners). Hammond was the first important jazz critic and record collector to become an impresario and record producer in his own right, serving as a role model for Ahmet Ertegun when he started Atlantic Records a decade later. An avowed socialist despite his pedigree (his mother was a Vanderbilt), Hammond in the 1930s was committed to advancing the cause of “the people” through a suitably classy presentation of suitably populist strains of music. In an announcement for the Carnegie Hall concert printed in the New Masses (a wieldy that was an avowed cultural organ of the nation's “class-conscious workers and revolutionary intellectuals”), Hammond promised a program of “American Negro music as it was invented, developed, sung and played by the Negro himself--the true, untainted folk song, spirituals, work songs, songs of protest, chain gang songs, Holy Roller chants, shouts, blues, minstrel music, honky-tonk piano, early jazz and, finally, the contemporary swing of Count Basie.” The list of featured artists included Robert Johnson.
A few months before, Hammond had gone to work for Columbia Records, and had chanced upon Johnson's masters, transcriptions of all of his original recordings, many of them still unissued at the time. Transfixed by Johnson's music, Hammond was convinced that he had found an archetypal troubadour--the purest, most powerful (and most authentically populist and proletarian) blues singer in the Deep South.
A call went out. John Hammond wanted to bring Robert Johnson to Carnegie Hall. In Texas and Mississippi, the music men who had first found and recorded Johnson made inquiries. Piecing together information from a variety of itinerant informants, they learned that Johnson had died just weeks before, under uncertain but sinister circumstances.
One search was over. But another was just beginning. In these same months, Hammond played Johnson’s unreleased masters for a young friend of his, the Harvard-educated folklorist Alan Lomax. Though he was only twenty-six, Lomax was already a seasoned student of American folk music. In 1934, he had accompanied his father, John, editor of the first major anthology of American folk song, on a trip to the South to record indigenous musicians in the field. Their express purpose had been “to find the Negro who had had the least contact with jazz, the radio, and with the white man.” On that trip, they had visited the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where they had discovered Huddie Ledbetter. aka Leadbelly, whose release they secured, and whom they subsequently took on a well-published tour of Harvard and other college campuses: *Life*, a weekly magazine, covered the phenomenon under the headline “Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel.”
Leadbelly's tour naturally compromised the authenticity of his claim to be “the Negro who had had the least contact with jazz, the radio, and with the white man.” Robert Johnson's recordings, on the other hand, suitably esoteric as they were, suggested someone who came closer to embodying that elusive (and implicitly revolutionary) ideal. Even better, he was dead: so his work would forever remain untainted by contact with “the white man” (never mind that Lomax, like Hammond, was white). But the fact of his death only added urgency to the riddle that now haunted Lomax: who was Robert Johnson- who had he been?
In 1941, Lomax headed south, in search now of a ghost. He did not return to New York empty-handed. Assembling evidence and following clues from Memphis back to the Mississippi Delta, Lomax was able to locate Robert Johnson's mother. He discovered Son House, one of Johnson’s mentors. And he found one of Johnson's most talented disciples, McKinley Morganfield, later famous as Muddy Waters, who in 1941 was still living on a plantation (he moved to the South Side of Chicago two years later).
From these sources, a legend began to take shape. Some friends said that he'd been hot by a jealous man; others swore that he'd been poisoned by a woman. In his death throes, they said, he crawled on all fours and barked like a dog- the victim of a voodoo curse. In later years, Son House hinted that Robert Johnson had sold his soul to the devil-- to House, this was the only conceivable explanation for the man's musical genius.
John Hammond and Alan Lomax first talked about compiling an album of Robert Johnson's music in 1939. But the project was shelved, and, evidently, forgotten. The rugged beauty of Johnson's recordings, well known by reputation, was rarely experienced firsthand.
The album consisted of sixteen songs, several with starkly evocative, even apocalyptic titles: “Hellhound on My Trail,” “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day,” “Me and the Devil Blues.” The songs had been recorded in 1936 and 1937. Robert Johnson had been dead for a generation. In 1961, no photographs of him were known to exist. A mysterious and elusive figure, he was-literally- invisible. He nevertheless became a pop star: minor, perhaps, but highly influential just the same.
In his own lifetime, a total of twelve recordings had been released. With the exception of the first one, “Terraplane Blues,” none of them had sold well, even in Johnson's home region, the mid-South. From the start, the quality of his music was nevertheless recognized, if only by fellow blues singers, as well as by a handful of respected writers and record collectors.
After the appearance of King of the Delta Blues Singers, Johnson's reputation steadily grew. His music was heard, and imitated, by a coterie of prominent young musicians. Among the cognoscenti, his album became a badge of hip taste: in the photo on the cover of Bob Dylan's *Bringing It All Back Home* (1965), the Johnson album is prominent among the emblematic pieces of bohemian bric-a-brac on display. What people like Dylan took away from Johnson's life and work became the source of a tacit ethos, silently transmitted, internationally shared, creating a new mythic measure of what rock and roll could *be*, quite apart from the example of Elvis Presley.
But who was Robert Johnson? In an era when worthless teen idols were routinely ballyhooed, Robert Johnson was a mystery, unknown, remote, accessible only through his music. The most storied of the classic Delta bluesmen, his legend had its roots in a failed quest to find him.
The search had begun in 1938. In December of that year, John Hammond was staging the first of his “Spirituals to Swing” concerts at Carnegie Hall (it was this concert that would introduce the jump blues of Big Joe Turner to New York listeners). Hammond was the first important jazz critic and record collector to become an impresario and record producer in his own right, serving as a role model for Ahmet Ertegun when he started Atlantic Records a decade later. An avowed socialist despite his pedigree (his mother was a Vanderbilt), Hammond in the 1930s was committed to advancing the cause of “the people” through a suitably classy presentation of suitably populist strains of music. In an announcement for the Carnegie Hall concert printed in the New Masses (a wieldy that was an avowed cultural organ of the nation's “class-conscious workers and revolutionary intellectuals”), Hammond promised a program of “American Negro music as it was invented, developed, sung and played by the Negro himself--the true, untainted folk song, spirituals, work songs, songs of protest, chain gang songs, Holy Roller chants, shouts, blues, minstrel music, honky-tonk piano, early jazz and, finally, the contemporary swing of Count Basie.” The list of featured artists included Robert Johnson.
A few months before, Hammond had gone to work for Columbia Records, and had chanced upon Johnson's masters, transcriptions of all of his original recordings, many of them still unissued at the time. Transfixed by Johnson's music, Hammond was convinced that he had found an archetypal troubadour--the purest, most powerful (and most authentically populist and proletarian) blues singer in the Deep South.
A call went out. John Hammond wanted to bring Robert Johnson to Carnegie Hall. In Texas and Mississippi, the music men who had first found and recorded Johnson made inquiries. Piecing together information from a variety of itinerant informants, they learned that Johnson had died just weeks before, under uncertain but sinister circumstances.
One search was over. But another was just beginning. In these same months, Hammond played Johnson’s unreleased masters for a young friend of his, the Harvard-educated folklorist Alan Lomax. Though he was only twenty-six, Lomax was already a seasoned student of American folk music. In 1934, he had accompanied his father, John, editor of the first major anthology of American folk song, on a trip to the South to record indigenous musicians in the field. Their express purpose had been “to find the Negro who had had the least contact with jazz, the radio, and with the white man.” On that trip, they had visited the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, where they had discovered Huddie Ledbetter. aka Leadbelly, whose release they secured, and whom they subsequently took on a well-published tour of Harvard and other college campuses: *Life*, a weekly magazine, covered the phenomenon under the headline “Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel.”
Leadbelly's tour naturally compromised the authenticity of his claim to be “the Negro who had had the least contact with jazz, the radio, and with the white man.” Robert Johnson's recordings, on the other hand, suitably esoteric as they were, suggested someone who came closer to embodying that elusive (and implicitly revolutionary) ideal. Even better, he was dead: so his work would forever remain untainted by contact with “the white man” (never mind that Lomax, like Hammond, was white). But the fact of his death only added urgency to the riddle that now haunted Lomax: who was Robert Johnson- who had he been?
In 1941, Lomax headed south, in search now of a ghost. He did not return to New York empty-handed. Assembling evidence and following clues from Memphis back to the Mississippi Delta, Lomax was able to locate Robert Johnson's mother. He discovered Son House, one of Johnson’s mentors. And he found one of Johnson's most talented disciples, McKinley Morganfield, later famous as Muddy Waters, who in 1941 was still living on a plantation (he moved to the South Side of Chicago two years later).
From these sources, a legend began to take shape. Some friends said that he'd been hot by a jealous man; others swore that he'd been poisoned by a woman. In his death throes, they said, he crawled on all fours and barked like a dog- the victim of a voodoo curse. In later years, Son House hinted that Robert Johnson had sold his soul to the devil-- to House, this was the only conceivable explanation for the man's musical genius.
John Hammond and Alan Lomax first talked about compiling an album of Robert Johnson's music in 1939. But the project was shelved, and, evidently, forgotten. The rugged beauty of Johnson's recordings, well known by reputation, was rarely experienced firsthand.
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