T-Shirts of the past Pt. 5: Robert Johnson

It's hard to overestimate the importance of Robert Johnson to the 20th century.  Though he only made 42 recordings over the course of his short life, they have lived on, and inspired many, long after his violent death in 1938.  His life has been mythologized to an extent that doesn't seem possible our modern, materialist age, where myth has supposedly disappeared in favor of reason.  He supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his musical talent.  He was poisoned (possibly) by a jealous husband of a woman he was flirting with in a bar. He was only known to have been photographed twice as an adult, including the photo on the shirt.  And his music, haunting and powerful, was long thought to have been played and recorded by two people, until contemporaries confirmed that he had done it all with his own two hands. 

And of course, when I look at the picture on this shirt, I can't help but see the mythology staring back at me.  Those piercing eyes, the cigarette hanging off his lips as a kind of challenge, the huge hands stretching over the guitar in some arcane chord I'll never be able to play.  As Martin Scorcese said:  "The thing about Robert Johnson was that he only existed on his records. He was pure legend." 

I don't remember when I first heard the name "Robert Johnson".  More than likely I had seen reference to it in some other book I was reading.  But I do remember, with crystal clarity, the first moment that I heard Robert Johnson's music.  I was taking a music history class at Boston University, and it was absolutely terrible.  The professor was teaching it for the first time, and she was much more interested in just getting through it all than in teaching us why we should care.  I left class that day feeling totally uninspired by music, and the heritage of Europe that I was supposed to be internalizing.  For some reason, my mind turned to Robert Johnson.  I knew that BU's music library had a copy of "The Complete Recordings", and as I was heading back to my dorm room, I made a detour to the music library, and requested a copy.  I sat down in their listening room (you couldn't take the discs with you), put on headphones, and pushed play. 

I stayed there all afternoon, listening to both CDs.  It was revelatory.  I had never heard music like that, let alone blues music, which I had always associated with the overweight pasty white guys who played in crappy bars in my hometown.  As a guitar player, I was caught up in the complexity of the fingerings, trying to figure out how he could play so many notes at the same time--particularly on songs like "Terraplane Blues", which still vexes me to this day.  As a music-lover, I was overcome with emotion at hearing his mournful hum at the beginning of "Come on in my kitchen", and horrified at the callous murder in "32 20 Blues".  As a burgeoning anthropologist and cultural critic, I was amazed that this music had eluded me for so long. 

But of course, it hadn't--I just hadn't been listening, or been educated.  Robert Johnson, though mostly unpopular during his lifetime, was hugely influential on later blues, R&B, and Rock and Roll.  I later saw a documentary where Keith Richards called Robert Johnson "the Bach of the Blues", and talked about how important the original "King of the Delta Blues Singers" LP was to him and Brian Jones in the 1950s and 60s.  The Rolling Stones covered Johnson on record three times, with my favorite probably being their rollicking version of "Stop Breaking Down" on "Exile on Main Street".  Eric Clapton, whose band Cream, covered "Crossroad Blues" in the 1960s, recently released an entire album of Robert Johnson songs.  The 1986 movie Crossroads starring Ralph Macchio, which I saw on an airplane when I was maybe 6 or 7, is basically a modern retelling of Johnson's Faustian legend.  Sherman Alexie wrote a book that I read the same year I first heard those records called "Reservation Blues" which begins with a miraculously not-dead Robert Johnson turning up on the Spokane Indian reservation in the 1990s, and passing off his possessed guitar to young storyteller and musician. 

There's a lot more I could say about Johnson--how he influenced my own guitar playing, how his music contains numerous references to Africa and African-American folklore and spirituality (for example, the "crossroads" is the place of power in the map of the Bakongo universe known as the Cosmogram), or how my discovery of Robert Johnson's music parallelled my increasing interest in vernacular musical traditions.  But really, the best thing to do is just listen, so here's Robert Johnson's complete recordings, which you should own.