SEARCHING FOR ROBERT JOHNSON by Peter Guralnick

Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick

New York:  Penguin Group

$12.00 - 85 pages

Early this morning 

when you knocked upon my door

And I said “Hello, Satan,

I believe its time to go.”

                                              -“Me and the Devil Blues” by Robert Johnson

   I have always been fascinated by the folklore attending the too- short life of Robert Johnson, “King of the Delta Blues Singers.”  For me, he was another doomed genius like James Dean, John Keats and Hank Williams -men who flashed across the night sky like the momentary radiance of a shooting star and then they were  gone forever. Robert Johnson was 27 when he was either poisoned, shot or stabbed to death near Greenwood, Mississippi. Documents are scant and accounts of his life are mostly oral, gleaned from the memory of aging friends (mostly musicians)  with colorful names like Son House, Muddy Waters and Johnny Shines.

   Of course, everyone repeats the legend about Robert’s midnight meeting with the Devil at the crossroads (#61 and #49) just outside Greenwood in a community called Three Forks. I found a half-dozen variations of his meeting with Satan on youtube.  I especially like the scene in “Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou” in which George Clooney and his cohorts pick up a black man with a guitar at a lonely Mississippi crossroads (circa 1930). Robert introduces himself as “Tommy Johnson” (something he did frequently for he admired his famous relative.) Robert tells Clooney that he has just completed his bargain with Satan. When asked if the Devil was red, scaled  and had a tail, Robert says, “Oh, no, sir. He is just as white as you folks.”  He adds, that in exchange for his soul, the Devil told him that he would teach Robert to play the guitar “real good.” The Devil accomplished this feat by simply taking Robert’s guitar, tuning it and handing it back to him.

   In this compact little book, Peter Guralnick takes the material in a dozen biographies, “blues” histories, and oral interviews and distills this information into what could be called the essence of what we know about Johnson. Born illegitimate to Julia Majors Dobbs, Robert was her eleventh child. Reared in poverty, Robert lived with his mother and step-father in an atmosphere of constant tension.  When Robert displayed an early interest in music and began to show up at dances and balls where he played the jews harp and harmonica, his step-father objected, telling the youth that he was “playing the Devil’s music.”  Eventually, Robert left home and began a “rambling life” in which he lived with a multitude of relatives. Friends from this part of his life invariably commented on his character: genial, generous a bit “reserved” or shy and determined to be a musician.  Most of Robert’s friends comment on his rapid success describing how Robert went from a passable guitar player to an astonishingly adept musician in a very short time. They also recall that by the time Robert was seventeen, he had been married, widowed (his first wife died in childbirth) and married again. In the company of older, accomplished musicians, he began traveling as far afield as Ohio and Missouri.  He also developed an amazing number of “lady friends” who provided him with food and board. It wasn’t long before he made some enemies because of his “way with the ladies.  As late as 1970, when Johnson had been dead for almost forty years, friends recalled the reports of men who carried grudges because their wives and girlfriends took up with Johnson.

   Noted blues singers all commented on Robert’s ability to charm women.  As his lyrics demonstrate, his songs were often bold, sexual invitations to the women. “You better come on in my kitchen,” he sang, “It’s going to be rainin’ outdoors.”  Son House and Muddy Waters remember that Johnson sang this song in a kind of “sexual growl.” Even in this age of license, some of Robert’s song lyrics border on the offensive.  “You can squeeze my lemon, til the juice runs down my leg,” he sings in “Traveling Riverside Blues.” To me, these lyrics add considerable credence to the story about an irate husband  decided to poison this smooth, nattily-dressed blues man. According to the story, the stricken Johnson died in agony, “crawling on the floor and howling like a dog.”

   Despite a reputation that spread throughout the Mississippi Delta, we would probably know nothing about Johnson today if it had not been for a folklorist named Mack McCormick who began doing research some thirty years after Johnson’s death. In some instances, he tracked majorsources like Son House and Muddy Waters to  Chicago and Saint Louis, and located an impressive number of women who remembered Johnson as  a man who was not at ease around white people and was given to abrupt departures. Time and time again, friends remembered that he would be with his friends, laughing and talking and he would suddenly rise and walk out the door. Gone.  No farewells.  It might be months or years before he returned.

   A second event that saved Robert Johnson from obscurity was a recording engineer who managed to get Robert into a studio.  H. C. Speir, a white man who ran a music store in Jackson, Mississippi. Johnson heard about Speir and knew that he had made a number of Mississippi musicians famous. When Speir head Robert play he immediately sent him to a talent scout name Ernie Oertle.  In turn, Oertle took Robert to San Antonia to be recorded.  It was a memorable trip with Johnson playing in juke joints and dance clubs all the way.  in San Antonia, he was an astonishing hit, but it was also noted that he had some “eccentricities.”  He refused to play with a group of Mexican musicians and developed a habit of turning his back to other performers so they could not see how he chorded his guitar. The recording engineers said he recorded all of his famous songs (29) in this week-long session, although folklorist McCormick says there is at least one original song that has not been accounted for.

   For a brief period, Robert had everything he had ever wanted.  He loved expensive clothes and they are in evidence in few photographs that exist. He was sought after and was even contacted to appear in Carnegie Hall in a concert which was advertised to take place on December 23rd, 1938. Robert didn’t live to make that show.  What is left is not so much a mystery as a void.  Mack McCormick has been writing the definitive biography for forty years, called The Biography of a Phantom.  He recently announced that it would never be published and there is considerable speculation as to why.  McCormick has always been forthright in interviews. A popular explanation is that McCormick has  some valuable material which is worth a great deal of money.  Should he publish this material, he would be immediately sued by a host of folks who have become wealthy by acquiring the rights to any and all Robert Johnson material.

   I am convinced that we will never know one singular piece of information. 

All of the musicians who knew him invariably commented on the fact that Robert and his music had a “haunted” quality and that Robert was “driven.” By what?  Why is the subject matter of so much of his music concern demons and hell-hounds?  Maybe you don’t need to strike a bargain at a midnight cross-roads.  Maybe you can make that bargain in your own heart. I think Robert Johnson did that.

   

WOE TO LIVE ON by Daniel Woodrell

Woe to Live On by Daniel Woodrell

New York:  Little, Brown and Company

$14.99 - 225 pages

   It took me almost a year to read this book.  I kept losing it, leaving it in restaurants and other people’s cars.  However, the major reason for the delay was, I didn’t want to finish it.  I kept going back to the beginning

and becoming enamored again and again of a young Jake Roedel’s surreal journey through the killing fields of “Bloody Kansas” and Missouri during the final years of the Civil War. 

    I have always been a slow reader, but Woodrell’s narrative brings out the bovine in me; like a cow, I like to re-digest Woodrell’s gift for a narrative that is a blend of courtly and biblical speech, imaginative details and dark humor. Consider this description of the terrified flight of the residents of Lawrence, Kansas in 1863:

       All that season they were driven to us.  Woeful widows with hung

       husbands and squalling babes. White-haired grannies with 

       toothless mouths and fierce feelings.  Hard-faced farm boys who would    

      now apprentice themselves to the study of revenge.

   The infamous burning of this benighted town and the slaughter of some 200 of its citizens, like many of  the outrages committed by the First Kansas Irregulars, is an act of revenge.  For Jake Roedel and his comrades, the war is deeply personal.  It is retribution for the hangings of fathers and the burning of homesteads by Jayhawkers and Union troops. Frequently, these men ride chanting the names of their hated enemies. Jake searches for the man who shot his father, and Riley Crawford, searches for a treacherous Union officer named Major Grubbs, who has become famous for his atrocities against women and children.  “I want to kill him,” he tells Jake who notes that Riley “had been weaned from hope and only bloodshed raised his morale.”

   And again, Jake finds this nightmarish scene on a wooded hillside in Cass County:

     High in the branches, seasoned beyond recognition, there swung seven

     noosed rebels. It was macabre and altogether eerie. The bodies draped    

     down through the leaves like rancid baubles in the locks of a horrible

     harlot.

   In such  hellish setting, life, death and random murders become commonplace and whimsical. Jake is quickly transformed into a galloping demon who sports a necklace of pistols, chanting rebel yells, firing his weapons indiscriminately and striking down both the innocent and guilty.  In the course of this tale, he finds himself riding with notorious folks:  William Quantrill, Frank James, Coleman Younger -Dangerous men who ride with the Kansas Irregulars for a spell, share a bottle and the spoils of a few raids, and then they vanish....off to keep another rendezvous.

   Out of the numerous memorable passages in Woe to Live On, several are unforgettable.  One deals with the acquisition of a mail pouch that is packed with letters written by wives,mothers and sweethearts.  Jake, being literate, is elected to read the letters aloud. In one instance, a dying Union soldier is forced to listen to a letter from his wife. Initially, Jake’s companions find the letters amusing, but as time passes, they yearn to hear them again, and begin drawing a kind of solace and inspiration from them. Some are nothing more than catalogs of personal grief while others are erotic, touching and poignant.  As the First Kansas Regulars move through this blighted and torn landscape, camping in remote coves, Jake is asked to read the letters again and again.  (It is interesting to note that Woodrell read collections of letters much like the ones Jake reads. This experience probably influenced Woodrell when he came to create the speech of his characters.)

   Time and time again, Jake stumbles on scenes of slaughter that leaves him benumbed. The roads are clogged with refugees, many of which are starving frightened children.  “It just let the grease right out of your heart to see them,” he says as he watches these hapless survivors creep through

miles of burned and scorched earth, where nothing but lone chimneys stand where farms and villages once prospered.

   Jake participates in a prisoner exchange in which captured Union prisoners are offered for rebels that are slated to be hanged. Not only does

the barter fail, it also starts a series of brutal executions, beheadings and

heedless slaughters that leave Roedel haunted by images and dreams that he will carry for the rest of his life.  At such times, as he shares a meal and another bottle of pop skull, he asks his companions a singular question: Why?  This unanswered question troubles Jake throughout Woe to Live On.  He is asking why he and his companions are suffered to live. It is as though he is waiting for some divine power to intervene.  Why has he and his ilk not been wiped from the earth?  And further, why is the human race allowed to continue breeding and murdering?

   Yet, out of this carnage and suffering are born two remarkable events.  In time, Jake’s closest friend becomes a freed slave named Holt who rides with the First Kansas Regulars for no discernible reason other than the perversity of chance. Holt is a contradiction to the entire war and he rides and murders with the same deadly zest as Jake.  Why is he here?  And yes, there were many like him as the old photographs of Quantrill’s Raiders attest. Slowly, a bond develops between these two men that transcends war and allegiance.

   The second event is passion.  Yes, Jake Roedel, who prides himself of his long rebel locks and his bachelor state finds romance in the midst of war. Her name is Sue Lee and she is pregnant by one of Jake’s companions, Black John. After devoting a considerable time to describing his puzzlement at all things having to do with sex and women, Jake finds himself married to Sue Lee, a black-haired smart-mouthed hussy with a chipped tooth (and Jake thinks he knows how the tooth got chipped). Some folks think that Jake is the father of Sue Lee’s child, but in actual fact, the father is Black John, a man that Jake admires.  (One of the most moving scenes in this novel is the one in which Jake chews up raw potatoes and feeds them into the mouth of Black John, his dying companion.)

   So, in the final pages of Woe to Live on, Jake shaves his rebel locks, abandons his cavalier clothing and  loads his new wife and child into a wagon, preparing to be yet another GTT (Gone To Texas) migrant.  The reader is left to ponder his fate. Will he survive, or will he end up a victim of the ever-present violence that flourishes on the road?  I would like to know that Jake Roedel survived, and I am hoping for a sequel. Incidentally, this novel has been made into a movie:  “Ride With the Devil.”  I hope to check it out on Netflex.  (Netflex gave it a 4.5) However, I’m a bit anxious about Toby McGuire in the role of Jake Roedel.