BOOK REVIEW - Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson
By Tommy Womack
When Robert Johnson’s original set of 78 singles from 1937 and 38 were collected on an LP from Columbia Records in 1961, the blues world basically gasped. People had heard OF Robert Johnson, but the general public at large had never actually heard him. There were stories about him people knew. He was an incredible musician who got murdered by a jealous husband, and, yes, *sigh* he sold himself to the devil and all that crap.
When “Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers” appeared on record shelves 20-plus years later amidst the folk and folk blues revivals of the late 50s/early 60s, it caused a sensation. Not sales-wise necessarily, but in the same way that Bob Dylan was a sensation even though his first LP sold sparingly too. The two LPs were released near enough together to both be taken as hip items amongst college students, beatniks, purists, status-conscious NYC arbiters of cool, and a slew of amazed adolescent apprentice guitarists including Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Taylor, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, John Hammond Jr., Mike Bloomfield, and all the others who would take what they learned from Robert Johnson’s LP and invent rock and roll for the ‘60s and beyond.
Robert Johnson’s recordings can be slashing and savage stuff on first listen. His high voice had a quiver of fear to it - it wasn’t a comforting voice - and his guitar work is on first blush chaotic-sounding but was in actuality complex bits of sheer beauty. And for me, though initially recoiled by it, there was (and is) something about it that makes you listen to it again, and then again, and once you “get it,” boy is there a lot there to get. What other 1930s acoustic blues artist gets compared to Mozart?
A delicious quality of Robert Johnson has always been that there was so very little known about him. Cream turned his “Crossroads Blues” into simply “Crossroads” and revolutionized rock guitar playing. “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Dust my Broom” became standards, The Rolling Stones recorded “Love in Vain” and “Stop Breaking Down,” Led Zeppelin did “Traveling Riverside Blues” and stole some of Johnson’s lyrics wholesale in several of their other releases. But what else did we know? About the man?
He was a wanderer, that we knew, he never stayed in one place for very long, he was said to like a wee drink or eight, and his eye wandered as much as he did, which may be part of the reason he tended to skip town quickly from whatever town he was in at the time. Research has been done and relatives were found and interviewed, census data has been pored over, and what did we get for the best and most research we had? We got the very justly respected music journalist Peter Guralnick’s Searching for Robert Johnson. It’s an excellent book. It runs 63 pages. The title was apt. People were searching for him, and not finding much.
And now we have THIS. 270 pages and not a bum in the lot. Noted (and dogged) researchers Bruce Conforth & Gayle Dean Wardlow, who are steeped in not only the blues but life in the Mississippi delta as it was in Robert’s time, have given the gift of a masterfully-written testament to research. Birth records, found ‘em, census records, school records, found ‘em (and nobody had even known before that he’d ever gone to school, much less in Memphis, which is where a sizable chunk of his childhood was actually spent and nobody knew that either). They found people who knew him and left testimonies, and they tracked down practically every one of the dwindling number of people (including one sister) who can personally remember him at all.
Magical (if macabre) details abound. Here’s one. His murderer (the owner of the juke joint near Clarksdale, Mississippi where Robert was playing on August 14th, 1938) was later consumed by guilt because he didn’t mean to kill Robert Johnson, just throw a scare into him. He had noticed his wife and Robert being taken with one another, and he did pass Robert a half-pint bottle of whiskey with several moth balls melted in it. But that wasn’t considered a lethal thing to do. Most all who suffered such fate became severely ill for several days and then recovered with a lesson learned about who not to mess with anymore. But perhaps the juke-owner-killer didn’t realize how much Robert had already had to drink that night, or how much abuse his young body had already been through. Thanks to the authors, we now know that Robert was taken to a hospital the next day (medical records, found ‘em.) He was treated with the same unloving care as any Mississippi negro and sent back “home” to a relative’s house on a plantation near Clarksdale, where he died on August 16th, (the same death day as Elvis coincidentally).
Will some complain that stripping away so much of the mystery takes away some of the appeal? Yes, because there’s always somebody who will complain about anything. The mystery is still there where it belongs and always has been: in the music itself, in “King of the Delta Blues” which I bought in 1984 and to this day I hear new things every time I listen to it. The mystery’s intact as well in the excellent recent 2-CD remaster The Centennial Collection, which sounds like Robert is right there in the room with you. And even close as he sounds, and the more we know about him now, he made music that drips mystery. It always will. That’s what genius does.
Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth & Gayle Dean Wardlow Chicago Review Press www.chicagoreviewpress.com
Tommy Womack is a founding member of Bowling Green’s legendary Government Cheese. His next band, the bis-quits, made one album for John Prine’s Oh Boy label. He is a member of the part-time band Daddy with Will Kimbrough. He’s made eight solo records, authored three books and is the only two-time winner of the Best Song award in the Nashville Scene Critics Poll. He lives in Nashville.