Dead Rebel Of the Week
~ Robert Johnson ~
Robert Johnson… You say that name and you think to yourself; “Yeah, the dude who sold his soul to the devil and invented Blues.”
Well, nobody ever said he invented Blues (except you just now) but he broke a lot of ground for it and did so in a most memorable fashion. See, it’s not always the first guy that’s worth remembering; sometimes it’s the one that sticks out like a sore thumb that gets the job done…
Born as Robert Spencer on the old Leatherman Plantation in 1911 to a crop farming family he was a nobody from the start. When he was 16 years old he ran away from home, supposedly to look for his biological father, but more likely so he could chase his dreams by tagging along the distinguished blues men Son House and Willie Brown.
Now House and Brown were the real deal back then. Nobody played like they did and they used to fill the Blues bars (called juke joints) to the last spittoon and Young Robert idolized them. Wherever they went he went. He was dabbling on the guitar already at this time but he wasn’t any good… He was horrible… In fact, House and Brown used to put him on stage with them and have him play his guitar to the roaring laughter of everybody in the crowd. People would throw stuff at Robert and he was dubbed by all as the most hopeless guitar player of the South.
In 1931 Robert, who now assumed the name Johnson after his lost father, got married to Calletta Craft, gave up his dreams of glory with his music and settled down to be a crop farmer, just like everyone else in his family had always done, in slavery as in freedom. As fate would have it happiness was not in the cards for poor Bob, and thus his wife died during childbirth, taking their child with her to greener pastures.
This is where the story of the unfortunate black man of the south takes a twist. This is where historians and Joe Schmoes all have their theory on what happened. I’ll give you the background and you make up your own…
Right after his wife’s death Robert took to the road, bringing nothing but his Kalamazoo guitar. There is no record of where he went or what he did for nine months but when he came back he was a changed man. He walked into the local juke joint where the giants of that time, like Son House and Charlie Patton, still reigned supreme, got up on stage in front of a crowd who still remembered him for being the worst guitar player south of the North Pole with glee and was looking forward to ridicule him further. Robert Johnson just stood there and waited until the worst of the verbal abuse had settled down and the audience started growing impatient…
Then he played his guitar... And how he played… He owned every soul in there from the first meaty bar to the last twangy chord. From the first line of poetic pain to the last “Oh Yeah…” he was wiping the floor with anybody who had ever been upon that very same stage. He was the most phenomenal guitar player anybody had ever heard rocking this southern cradle of blues.
Could this be the very same Robert Johnson people had laughed themselves into eruption at a year earlier? The very same scrappy fella’ that they used to pelt with garbage when he tortured them with his sad attempts at playing his guitar? Impossible… And what was up with the black painted guitar? Clearly he had made a deal with the Devil… There was no other explanation.
Robert rose to fame in the whole south, playing juke joint after juke joint, and people would travel from near and afar to see the “Devil’s man” play the most incredible stuff night after night.
The rumor of his supposed deal with the Devil was never denied or even acknowledged by RJ himself. The tale that got around was that he had gone to a particularly ill fabled Crossroad in the middle of night, signed a contract with the Devil (since God obviously had turned his back on him with the matter of his wife dying and all) and then had learned from him how to play the most soulful and technical chops ever to resound throughout the lands… Robert Johnson had thus become everything he had ever dreamed to be: The most prominent guitar player of his time. (Of course there was that matter of his soul belonging to Satan and all but in the big scheme of things… Petty stuff…)
In 1936 and 1937 he got to put his 29 songs down in recording. These tunes are to this day a major inspiration to young and old throughout the whole spectrum of musical genres. You don’t have to be a blues man to appreciate the soul and emotion that runs rampage in Robert Johnson’s songs of life and death and whisky and women… You just have to have a soul and you’re set…
Speaking of which…
One night in 1938 when Robert was done with his performance at the local Greenwood bar he had been hired to play for a full month he downed his whisky and immediately dropped to the floor in convulsions. Turned out that he had been bonking the bar owner’s wife and that the poor guy had found out… What does every sensible husband do in times as such? Lace the culprit’s whisky with strychnine of course and send him to his grave…
Some friends of RJ carried him to the house he was staying at and tried to get a doctor for him, but to no avail… See, as a black man during these times there was no way any white doctor would come to his aid for any money… And as Robert Johnson, there was no way any black doctor would affiliate himself with the “Voodoo Man”. So whether RJ really sold his soul to the devil or not, the assumption that he did helped speeding him on his way to whatever maker he had bargained with. He died that night, at the age of 27, and since he was black and also tainted by the Devil he was unceremoniously dumped into a shallow grave without a headstone.
Historians have later reasoned out that he would have been dead later that week anyway from the syphilis related pneumonia he was suffering from. Guess the contract was up and the Devil had to collect…
But the fact remains… Robert Johnson was, and still is, one of the most important characters to ever enter the music scene. Without him music might have looked entirely different today. He was the main inspiration for Muddy Waters who gets credited for starting rock’n’roll and such eminent artists as Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd have all covered his songs.
He achieved this by following his dream at any cost to himself. Whether he actually did sell his soul to the Devil or just practiced every day for 23 ½ hours we’ll never know, but he made that dream of his come true in the face of all the doubters, abusers, garbage-throwers and fellow musicians in the biggest way possible… By sticking it to them… A vintage rebel.
Check out the “Complete Recordings” and get all the 41 recordings he ever made (including the alternate takes).
Early this mornin', ooh
when you knocked upon my door
And I said, "Hello, Satan,
I believe it's time to go."
“Me and the Devil Blues” – Robert Johnson
