Robert Leroy Johnson
(May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938) was an American blues musician and songwriter.
His singing, guitar playing and songwriting on his landmark 1936 and 1937
recordings have influenced later generations of musicians. Although his
recording career spanned only seven months, he is recognized as a master of the
blues, particularly the Delta blues style, and as one of the most influential
musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as
perhaps "the first ever rock
star".
As a traveling performer who played mostly on street
corners, in juke joints, and at Saturday night dances, Johnson had little
commercial success or public recognition in his lifetime. He had only two
recording sessions both produced by Don Law, one in San Antonio in 1936, and
one in Dallas in 1937, that produced 29 distinct songs (with 13 surviving
alternate takes). These songs, recorded solo in improvised studios, were the
sum of his recorded output. Most were released as 10-inch, 78 rpm singles from
1937–1938, with a few released after his death. Other than these recordings,
very little was known of his life outside of the small musical circuit in the
Mississippi Delta where he spent most of his time. Much of his story has been
reconstructed by researchers. Johnson's poorly documented life and death have
given rise to legends. The one most often associated with him is that he sold
his soul to the devil at a local crossroads in return for musical success.
His music had a small, but influential, following during his
life and in the decades after his death. In late 1938, John Hammond sought him
out for a concert at Carnegie Hall, From Spirituals to Swing, only to discover
that Johnson had recently died. Hammond was a producer for Columbia Records
which bought Johnson's original recordings from Brunswick Records which owned
them. Musicologist Alan Lomax went to Mississippi in 1941 to record Johnson,
also not knowing of his death. In 1961, Columbia released an album of Johnson's
recordings titled King of the Delta Blues Singers, produced by legendary
producer and music historian Frank Driggs. It is credited with finally bringing
Johnson's work to a wider audience. The album would become influential,
especially in the nascent British blues movement; Eric Clapton called Johnson "the most important blues singer that
ever lived". Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, and Robert Plant have cited
both Johnson's lyrics and musicianship as key influences on their own work.
Many of Johnson's songs have been covered over the years, becoming hits for
other artists, and his guitar licks and lyrics have been borrowed by many later
musicians.
Renewed interest in Johnson's work and life led to a burst
of scholarship starting in the 1960s. Much of what is known about him was
reconstructed by researchers such as Gayle Dean Wardlow and Bruce Conforth,
especially in their 2019 award-winning biography of Johnson: Up Jumped the
Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson (Chicago Review Press). Two films, the
1991 documentary The Search for Robert Johnson by John Hammond Jr., and a 1997
documentary, Can't You Hear the Wind Howl?: The Life & Music of Robert
Johnson, which included reconstructed scenes with Keb' Mo' as Johnson,
attempted to document his life, and demonstrated the difficulties arising from
the scant historical record and conflicting oral accounts. Over the years, the
significance of Johnson and his music has been recognized by the Rock and Roll,
Grammy, and Blues Halls of Fame, and by the National Recording Preservation
Board.
Life and career
Early life
Robert Leroy Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi,
possibly on May 8, 1911, to Julia Major Dodds (born October 1874) and Noah
Johnson (born December 1884). Julia was married to Charles Dodds (born February
1865), a relatively prosperous landowner and furniture maker, with whom she had
ten children. Charles Dodds had been forced by a lynch mob to leave Hazlehurst
following a dispute with white landowners. Julia left Hazlehurst with baby
Robert, but in less than two years she took the boy to Memphis to live with her
husband, who had changed his name to Charles Spencer. Robert spent the next 8–9
years growing up in Memphis and attending the Carnes Avenue Colored School
where he received lessons in arithmetic, reading, language, music, geography,
and physical exercise.[6] It was in Memphis that he acquired his love for, and
knowledge of, the blues and popular music. His education and city upbringing
placed him apart from most of his contemporary blues musicians.
Robert rejoined his mother around 1919–1920 after she
married an illiterate sharecropper named Will "Dusty" Willis. They originally settled on a plantation
in Lucas Township in Crittenden County, Arkansas, but soon moved across the
Mississippi River to Commerce in the Mississippi Delta, near Tunica and
Robinsonville. They lived on the Abbay & Leatherman Plantation. Julia's new
husband was 24 years her junior. Robert was remembered by some residents as "Little Robert Dusty", but he
was registered at Tunica's Indian Creek School as Robert Spencer. In the 1920
census, he is listed as Robert Spencer, living in Lucas, Arkansas, with Will
and Julia Willis. Robert was at school in 1924 and 1927. The quality of his
signature on his marriage certificate suggests that he was relatively well
educated for a man of his background. A school friend, Willie Coffee, who was
interviewed and filmed in later life, recalled that as a youth Robert was
already noted for playing the harmonica and jaw harp. Coffee recalled that Robert
was absent for long periods, which suggests that he may have been living and studying
in Memphis.
Once Julia informed Robert about his biological father,
Robert adopted the surname Johnson, using it on the certificate of his marriage
to fourteen-year-old Virginia Travis in February 1929. She died in childbirth
shortly after. Surviving relatives of Virginia told the blues researcher Robert
"Mack" McCormick that this
was a divine punishment for Robert's decision to sing secular songs, known as "selling your soul to the Devil".
McCormick believed that Johnson himself accepted the phrase as a description of
his resolve to abandon the settled life of a husband and farmer to become a
full-time blues musician.
Around this time, the blues musician Son House moved to
Robinsonville, where his musical partner Willie Brown lived. Late in life,
House remembered Johnson as a little boy who was a competent harmonica player
but an embarrassingly bad guitarist. Soon after, Johnson left Robinsonville for
the area around Martinsville, close to his birthplace, possibly searching for
his natural father. Here he mastered the guitar style of House and learned
other styles from Isaiah "Ike"
Zimmerman. Zimmerman was rumored to have learned supernaturally to play guitar
by visiting graveyards at midnight. When Johnson next appeared in
Robinsonville, he seemed to have miraculously developed a mature guitar
technique. House was interviewed at a time when the legend of Johnson's pact
with the devil was well known among blues researchers. He was asked whether he
attributed Johnson's technique to this pact, and his equivocal answers have been
taken as confirmation.
While living in Martinsville, Johnson fathered a child with
Vergie Mae Smith. He married Caletta Craft in May 1931. In 1932, the couple
settled for a while in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the Delta, but Johnson soon
left for a career as a "walking"
or itinerant musician, and Caletta died in early 1933.
Itinerant musician
From 1932 until his death in 1938, Johnson moved frequently
between the cities of Memphis and Helena, and the smaller towns of the
Mississippi Delta and neighboring regions of Mississippi and Arkansas. On
occasion, he traveled much further. The blues musician Johnny Shines
accompanied him to Chicago, Texas, New York, Canada, Kentucky, and Indiana.
Henry Townsend worked with him in St. Louis. In many places he stayed with
members of his large extended family or with female friends. He did not marry
again but formed some long-term relationships with women to whom he would
return periodically. In other places he stayed with whatever woman he was able
to seduce at his performance. In each location, Johnson's hosts were largely
ignorant of his life elsewhere. He used different names in different places,
employing at least eight distinct surnames.
Biographers have looked for consistency from musicians who
knew Johnson in different contexts: Shines, who traveled extensively with him;
Robert Lockwood Jr., who knew him as his mother's partner; David "Honeyboy" Edwards, whose
cousin Willie Mae Powell had a relationship with Johnson. From a mass of
partial, conflicting, and inconsistent eyewitness accounts, biographers have
attempted to summarize Johnson's character. "He
was well mannered, he was soft spoken, and he was indecipherable".
"As for his character, everyone seems to agree that, while he was pleasant
and outgoing in public, in private he was reserved and liked to go his own
way". "Musicians who knew Johnson testified that he was a nice guy
and fairly average—except, of course, for his musical talent, his weakness for
whiskey and women, and his commitment to the road".
When Johnson arrived in a new town, he would play for tips
on street corners or in front of the local barbershop or a restaurant. Musical
associates have said that in live performances Johnson often did not focus on
his dark and complex original compositions, but instead pleased audiences by
performing more well-known pop standards of the day – and not necessarily
blues. With an ability to pick up tunes at first hearing, he had no trouble
giving his audiences what they wanted, and certain of his contemporaries later
remarked on his interest in jazz and country music. He also had an uncanny
ability to establish a rapport with his audience; in every town in which he
stopped, he would establish ties to the local community that would serve him
well when he passed through again a month or a year later.
Shines was 20 when he met Johnson in 1936. He estimated
Johnson was maybe a year older than himself (Johnson was actually four years
older). Shines is quoted describing Johnson in Samuel Charters's Robert
Johnson:
Robert was a very
friendly person, even though he was sulky at times, you know. And I hung around
Robert for quite a while. One evening he disappeared. He was kind of a peculiar
fellow. Robert'd be standing up playing some place, playing like nobody's
business. At about that time it was a hustle with him as well as a pleasure.
And money'd be coming from all directions. But Robert'd just pick up and walk
off and leave you standing there playing. And you wouldn't see Robert no more
maybe in two or three weeks. ... So Robert and I, we began journeying off. I
was just, matter of fact, tagging along.
During this time Johnson established what would be a
relatively long-term relationship with Estella Coleman, a woman about 15 years
his senior and the mother of the blues musician Robert Lockwood Jr. Johnson
reportedly cultivated a woman to look after him in each town he played in. He
reputedly asked homely young women living in the country with their families
whether he could go home with them, and in most cases, he was accepted, until a
boyfriend arrived or Johnson was ready to move on.
In 1941, Alan Lomax learned from Muddy Waters that Johnson
had performed in the area around Clarksdale, Mississippi. By 1959, the
historian Samuel Charters could add only that Will Shade, of the Memphis Jug
Band, remembered Johnson had once briefly played with him in West Memphis,
Arkansas. In the last year of his life, Johnson is believed to have traveled to
St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, and New York City. In 1938, Columbia Records
producer John H. Hammond, who owned some of Johnson's records, directed record
producer Don Law to seek out Johnson to book him for the first "From Spirituals to Swing"
concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. On learning of Johnson's death, Hammond
replaced him with Big Bill Broonzy, but he played two of Johnson's records from
the stage.
Recording sessions
In Jackson, Mississippi, around 1936, Johnson sought out H.
C. Speir, who ran a general store and also acted as a talent scout. Speir put
Johnson in touch with Ernie Oertle, who, as a salesman for the ARC group of
labels, introduced Johnson to Don Law to record his first sessions in San
Antonio, Texas. The recording session was held on November 23–25, 1936, in room
414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio. In the ensuing three-day session, Johnson
played 16 selections and recorded alternate takes for most of them. Among the
songs Johnson recorded in San Antonio were "I
Believe I'll Dust My Broom", "Sweet Home Chicago", and "Cross Road Blues", which
later became blues standards. The first to be released was "Terraplane Blues", backed with "Last Fair Deal Gone Down", which sold as many as 10,000
copies.
Johnson traveled to Dallas, Texas, for another recording
session with Don Law in a makeshift studio at the Vitagraph (Warner Bros.) Building,
on June 19–20, 1937. Johnson recorded almost half of the 29 songs that make up
his entire discography in Dallas and eleven records from this session were
released within the following year. Most of Johnson's "somber and introspective" songs and performances come
from his second recording session. Johnson did two takes of most of these
songs, and recordings of those takes survived. Because of this, there is more
opportunity to compare different performances of a single song by Johnson than
for any other blues performer of his era. In contrast to most Delta players,
Johnson had absorbed the idea of fitting a composed song into the three minutes
of a 78-rpm side.
Death
Johnson died on August 16, 1938, at the age of 27, near Greenwood,
Mississippi, of unknown causes. Johnson's death was not reported publicly.
Almost 30 years later, Gayle Dean Wardlow, a Mississippi-based musicologist
researching Johnson's life, found Johnson's death certificate, which listed
only the date and location, with no official cause of death. No formal autopsy
had been done. Instead, a pro forma examination was done to file the death
certificate, and no immediate cause of death was determined. It is likely he
had congenital syphilis and it was suspected later by medical professionals
that this may have been a contributing factor in his death. However, 30 years
of local oral tradition had, like the rest of his life story, built a legend
which has filled in gaps in the scant historical record.
Several differing accounts have described the events
preceding his death. Johnson had been playing for a few weeks at a country
dance at the Three Forks Club in Itta Bena, about 15 miles (24 km) from
Greenwood. According to one theory, Johnson was murdered by the jealous husband
of a woman with whom he had flirted. In an account by the blues musician David 'Honeyboy' Edwards, Johnson had been
flirting with a married woman at a dance, and she gave him a bottle of whiskey
poisoned by her husband. When Johnson took the bottle, Edwards knocked it out
of his hand, admonishing him to never drink from a bottle that he had not
personally seen opened. Johnson replied, "Don't
ever knock a bottle out of my hand". Soon after, he was offered
another (poisoned) bottle and accepted it. Johnson is reported to have begun
feeling ill the evening after and had to be helped back to his room in the
early morning hours. Over the next three days his condition steadily worsened.
Witnesses reported that he died in a convulsive state of severe pain. The
musicologist Robert "Mack"
McCormick claimed to have tracked down the man who murdered Johnson and to have
obtained a confession from him in a personal interview, but he declined to
reveal the man's name.
While strychnine has been suggested as the poison that
killed Johnson, at least one scholar has disputed the notion. Tom Graves, in
his book Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson,
relies on expert testimony from toxicologists to argue that strychnine has such
a distinctive odor and taste that it cannot be disguised, even in strong
liquor. Graves also claims that a significant amount of strychnine would have
to be consumed in one sitting to be fatal, and that death from the poison would
occur within hours, not days.
In their 2019 book Up Jumped the Devil, Bruce Conforth and
Gayle Dean Wardlow suggest that the poison was naphthalene, from dissolved
mothballs. This was "a common way of
poisoning people in the rural South", but was rarely fatal. However,
Johnson had been diagnosed with an ulcer and with esophageal varices, and the
poison was sufficient to cause them to hemorrhage. He died after two days of
severe abdominal pain, vomiting, and bleeding from the mouth.
The Leflore County registrar, Cornelia Jordan, years later
and after conducting an investigation into Johnson's death for the state
director of vital statistics, R. N. Whitfield, wrote a clarifying note on the
back of Johnson's death certificate:
I talked with the
white man on whose place this Negro died and I also talked with a Negro woman
on the place. The plantation owner said the Negro man, seemingly about 26 years
old, came from Tunica two or three weeks before he died to play banjo at a Negro
dance given there on the plantation. He stayed in the house with some of the Negroes
saying he wanted to pick cotton. The white man did not have a doctor for this Negro
as he had not worked for him. He was buried in a homemade coffin furnished by
the county. The plantation owner said it was his opinion that the man died of
syphilis.
In 2006, a medical
practitioner, David Connell, suggested, on the basis of photographs showing
Johnson's "unnaturally long fingers" and "one bad eye",
that Johnson may have had Marfan syndrome, which could have both affected his
guitar playing and contributed to his death due to aortic dissection.
Gravesite
The true location of Johnson's grave is unknown; three
different markers have been erected at possible sites in church cemeteries
outside Greenwood.
Research in the 1980s and 1990s strongly suggests Johnson
was buried in the graveyard of the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church near
Morgan City, Mississippi, not far from Greenwood, in an unmarked grave. A
one-ton cenotaph in the shape of an obelisk, listing all of Johnson's song
titles, with a central inscription by Peter Guralnick, was placed at this location
in 1990, paid for by Columbia Records and numerous smaller contributions made
through the Mount Zion Memorial Fund.
In 1990, a small marker with the epitaph "Resting in the Blues" was
placed in the cemetery of Payne Chapel, near Quito, Mississippi, by an Atlanta
rock group named the Tombstones, after they saw a photograph in Living Blues
magazine of an unmarked spot alleged by one of Johnson's ex-girlfriends to be
Johnson's burial site.
More recent research by Stephen LaVere (including statements
from Rosie Eskridge, the wife of the supposed gravedigger, in 2000) indicates
that the actual grave site is under a big pecan tree in the cemetery of the
Little Zion Church, north of Greenwood along Money Road. Through LaVere, Sony
Music placed a marker at this site, which bears LaVere's name as well as
Johnson's. Researchers Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow also concluded
this was Johnson's resting place in their 2019 biography.
John Hammond Jr., in the documentary The Search for Robert
Johnson (1991), suggests that owing to poverty and lack of transportation
Johnson is most likely to have been buried in a pauper's grave (or "potter's field") very near
where he died.
Devil legend
According to legend, as a young man living on a plantation
in rural Mississippi, Johnson had a tremendous desire to become a great blues
musician. One of the legends often told says that Johnson was instructed to
take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight. (There are
claims for other sites as the location of the crossroads.) There he was met by
a large being (the Devil) who took the guitar and tuned it. The Devil played a
few songs and then returned the guitar to Johnson, giving him mastery of the
instrument. This story of a deal with the Devil at the crossroads mirrors the
legend of Faust. In exchange for his soul, Johnson was able to create the blues
for which he became famous.
This story was originally associated with Delta blues
musician Tommy Johnson, to whom Robert Johnson was unrelated. Tommy Johnson,
who grew up near the Dockery Plantation and learned the blues from Charlie
Patton and Willie Brown, first claimed to have sold his soul to the devil at a
crossroads in exchange for his mastery of the guitar.
Various accounts
This legend was developed over time and has been chronicled
by Gayle Dean Wardlow, Edward Komara and Elijah Wald, who sees the legend as
largely dating from Johnson's rediscovery by white fans more than two decades
after his death. Son House once told the story to Pete Welding as an
explanation of Johnson's astonishingly rapid mastery of the guitar. Other
interviewers failed to elicit any confirmation from House and there were two
full years between House's observation of Johnson as first a novice and then a
master.
Further details were absorbed from the imaginative
retellings by Greil Marcus and Robert Palmer. Most significantly, the detail
was added that Johnson received his gift from a large black man at a
crossroads. There is dispute as to how and when the crossroads detail was
attached to the Robert Johnson story. All the published evidence, including a
full chapter on the subject in the biography Crossroads, by Tom Graves,
suggests an origin in the story of the blues musician Tommy Johnson. This story
was collected from his musical associate Ishman Bracey and his elder brother
Ledell in the 1960s. One version of Ledell Johnson's account was published in
David Evans's 1971 biography of Tommy Johnson, and was repeated in print in
1982 alongside House's story in the widely read Searching for Robert Johnson,
by Peter Guralnick.
In another version, Ledell placed the meeting not at a
crossroads but in a graveyard. This resembles the story told to Steve LaVere
that Ike Zimmerman of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, learned to play the guitar at
midnight while sitting on tombstones. Zimmerman is believed to have influenced
the playing of the young Johnson.
The crossroads at
Clarksdale, Mississippi
Recent research by the blues scholar Bruce Conforth, in
Living Blues magazine, makes the story clearer. Johnson and Ike Zimmerman did
practice in a graveyard at night, because it was quiet and no one would disturb
them, but it was not the Hazlehurst cemetery as had been believed: Zimmerman
was not from Hazlehurst but nearby Beauregard, and he did not practice in one
graveyard, but in several in the area. Johnson spent about a year living with
and learning from Zimmerman, who ultimately accompanied Johnson back to the
Delta to look after him.
While Dockery, Hazlehurst and Beauregard have each been
claimed as the locations of the mythical crossroads, there are also tourist
attractions claiming to be "The
Crossroads" in both Clarksdale and Memphis. Residents of Rosedale,
Mississippi, claim Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the intersection of
Highways 1 and 8 in their town, while the 1986 movie Crossroads was filmed in
Beulah, Mississippi. The blues historian Steve Cheseborough wrote that it may
be impossible to discover the exact location of the mythical crossroads,
because "Robert Johnson was a
rambling guy".
Interpretations
Some scholars have argued that the devil in these songs may
refer not only to the Christian figure of Satan but also to the trickster god
of African origin, Legba, himself associated with crossroads. Folklorist Harry
M. Hyatt wrote that, during his research in the South from 1935 to 1939, when
African-Americans born in the 19th or early 20th century said they or anyone
else had "sold their soul to the
devil at the crossroads", they had a different meaning in mind. Hyatt
claimed there was evidence indicating African religious retentions surrounding
Legba and the making of a "deal"
(not selling the soul in the same sense as in the Faustian tradition cited by
Graves) with the so-called devil at the crossroads.
The Blues and the Blues singer have really special powers
over women, especially. It is said that the Blues singer could possess women
and have any woman they wanted. And so when Robert Johnson came back, having
left his community as an apparently mediocre musician, with a clear genius in
his guitar style and lyrics, people said he must have sold his soul to the
devil. And that fits in with this old African association with the crossroads
where you find wisdom: you go down to the crossroads to learn, and in his case
to learn in a Faustian pact, with the devil. You sell your soul to become the greatest
musician in history.
This view that the devil in Johnson's songs is derived from
an African deity was disputed by the blues scholar David Evans in an essay
published in 1999, "Demythologizing
the Blues":
There are ... several
serious problems with this crossroads myth. The devil imagery found in the
blues is thoroughly familiar from western folklore, and nowhere do blues
singers ever mention Legba or any other African deity in their songs or other
lore. The actual African music connected with cults of Legba and similar
trickster deities sounds nothing like the blues, but rather features
polyrhythmic percussion and choral call-and-response singing.
The musicologist Alan Lomax dismissed the myth, stating, "In fact, every blues fiddler, banjo
picker, harp blower, piano strummer and guitar framer was, in the opinion of
both himself and his peers, a child of the Devil, a consequence of the black
view of the European dance embrace as sinful in the extreme".
Both Lomax's and Evans's accounts themselves have been
disputed and dismissed by Black scholars and authors including Amiri Baraka and
Cornel West. West defines Blues as a creation of a people "who are willing to look unflinchingly at catastrophic
conditions", as children of God responding to those conditions.
Baraka's words are more directly critical of white writers who study
African-American Blues artform and culture from a Western viewpoint, stating
that "They have to do that to make
themselves superior in some kind of way: that everything has come from Europe,
which is not true". Baraka cites that rather than being formed out of
any Western context, Blues derives from an African context of its own. The
call-and-response singing Lomax argues is different from Blues has been widely
cited as being a central aspect of Blues music.
Musical style
Johnson is considered a master of the blues, particularly of
the Delta blues style. Keith Richards, of the Rolling Stones, said in 1990, "You want to know how good the blues
can get? Well, this is it". But according to Elijah Wald, in his book
Escaping the Delta, Johnson in his own time was most respected for his ability
to play in a wide range of styles, from raw country slide guitar to jazz and
pop licks, and for his ability to pick up guitar parts almost instantly upon
hearing a song. His first recorded song, "Kind
Hearted Woman Blues", in contrast to the prevailing Delta style of the
time, more resembled the style of Chicago or St. Louis, with "a full-fledged, abundantly varied
musical arrangement". The song was part of a cycle of spin-offs and
response songs that began with Leroy Carr's "Mean
Mistreater Mama" (1934). According to Wald, it was "the most musically complex in the cycle"
and stood apart from most rural blues as a thoroughly composed lyric, rather
than an arbitrary collection of more or less unrelated verses. Unusual for a
Delta player of the time, a recording exhibits what Johnson could do entirely
outside of a blues style. "They're
Red Hot", from his first recording session, shows that he was also
comfortable with an "uptown"
swing or ragtime sound similar to that of the Harlem Hamfats, but as Wald
remarked, "no record company was
heading to Mississippi in search of a down-home Ink Spots ... [H]e could
undoubtedly have come up with a lot more songs in this style if the producers
had wanted them."
To the uninitiated,
Johnson's recordings may sound like just another dusty Delta blues musician
wailing away. But a careful listen reveals that Johnson was a revisionist in
his time ... Johnson's tortured soul vocals and anxiety-ridden guitar playing
aren't found in the cotton-field blues of his contemporaries. —Marc Myers
Voice
An important aspect of Johnson's singing was his use of
microtonality. These subtle inflections of pitch help explain why his singing
conveys such powerful emotion. Eric Clapton described Johnson's music as "the most powerful cry that I think you
can find in the human voice". In two takes of "Me and the Devil Blues" he shows a high degree of
precision in the complex vocal delivery of the last verse: "The range of tone he can pack into a few lines is
astonishing." The song's "hip
humor and sophistication" is often overlooked. "[G]enerations of blues writers in search of wild Delta
primitivism", wrote Wald, have been inclined to overlook or undervalue
aspects that show Johnson as a polished professional performer.
Johnson is also known for using the guitar as "the other vocalist in the song",
a technique later perfected by B.B. King and his personified guitar named
Lucille: "In Africa and in
Afro-American tradition, there is the tradition of the talking instrument,
beginning with the drums ... the one-strand and then the six-strings with
bottleneck-style performance; it becomes a competing voice ... or a
complementary voice ... in the performance".
When Johnson started
singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in
full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever
heard. The songs weren't customary blues songs. They were so utterly fluid. At
first they went by quick, too quick to even get. They jumped all over the place
in range and subject matter, short punchy verses that resulted in some
panoramic story-fires of mankind blasting off the surface of this spinning
piece of plastic. —Bob Dylan
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