Robert Johnson - A Blues for the Devil

If I had the possession over judgment day

Then the woman I’m lovin’ wouldn’t have no right to pray

("If I had my way

If I had my way

The woman I love would have no right to pray")

Robert Johnson is one of the most important musical figures of the last century. He built the grammar and semantics of blues and rock, establishing a universal standard that can be traced unmistakably through a host of contemporary musicians. A large part of American popular music evolves from his insights, even though he was neither the first nor the most prolific of the pre-war bluesmen. Let's try to analyze the reasons for his enormous importance with a brief look at the socio-cultural context that literally erupted into producing a figure of this kind. American society at the turn of the 20th century was shaped by the contradictions inherent in its political and economic direction. The Civil War had the harmful effect of emboldening the imperialist ambitions of the northern states, marginalizing the agricultural economy that was the South's only means of subsistence. This situation created the ideal breeding ground for racial segregation to take permanent root, in a trajectory whose origins lie in early 19th-century America, where, despite the Bill of Rights (1791), the slave system was never delegitimized — on the contrary, it was (in practice) recognized as a founding element of the American economy. Over the course of two centuries, the social status of Black Americans shifted only slightly, moving from outright slavery to a condition of servitude shaped by the needs of the post-Civil War era. Black music blooms like a delicate flower in a moral wasteland.

The spiritual is a communal song of liberation, expressing a people's need to transcend their existential condition and find the path to paradise. It is not, in fact, an exclusively Black form of song, but springs from the confluence of two traditions: on one side, the work songs and litanies of the ancient farming peoples of West Africa, and on the other, the psalms of white immigrants from the Old World. In converting to Christianity, the slave absorbed its themes, internalized its religious essence, and adapted it all to the rhythmic structures of African musical culture.

Blues derives from the spiritual, in a path that reaches its decisive turning point with the end of the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery. Black men and women were now free, but their material conditions did not change — and so the blues took shape as an individual song, aimed not at expressing a collective need for liberation, but the despair, loneliness and disorientation of the individual, the painful condition of Black people formally integrated yet in practice repressed within a society dominated by whites. Individual music, then, that translates the painful themes of life into notes — music which, no longer accompanied by a chorus, needed a musical backdrop to carry those feelings. Banjo, guitar and harmonica came to define the instrumental toolkit of the early bluesmen of the early 20th century.

The imagery and evocative power contained in this music are likewise the result of the customs, rhythms and lack of choices of early 20th-century American society, and its less than benevolent disposition toward Black people. The bluesman travels far and wide across America (hence the railroad ballad), tries to earn a living by means not always legal (hence the violence and the prison songs), finds love or sex that can only be fleeting, given his wandering existence (hence the love songs, the betrayed husbands, the brawls), drowns his sins in alcohol, and sings of death not as a passage toward the joys of paradise, but as the material end of earthly life and its sufferings. In the period between the 1910s and 1920s, blues became a fully-fledged musical genre, splitting into classic blues and rural blues (country blues).

Classic blues is urban music, performed by Black singers recruited by record labels from vaudeville theaters, medicine shows, or directly from the Delta region, who "betrayed" its original spirit and turned it into a commercial tool. The stories told in classic blues songs were often artfully crafted by semi-professional songwriters so as to suit white aesthetic tastes, and they expressed the renewed aspirations of Black people who, now formally free, longed for full integration. Classic blues became a source of profit for record labels (it was easier to sell that kind of story to the white middle class), and its leading performers certainly included Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters.

On the other hand, country blues developed (or rather, continued its own tradition), with its artistic epicenter in the farming regions of the Mississippi Delta and eastern Texas, in Louisiana. Musically rougher around the edges (its performers lacked the small backing orchestras available to classic blues artists), it nonetheless remained true to the sincere, traditional spirit of Black music, not yet corrupted by the record industry's commercial interests. In this context, the most significant artists were Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Leadbelly, Skip James, and Son House, Robert Johnson's first mentor.

None of this is meant to suggest that classic blues performers wrote empty music — quite the opposite, the work of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey stands as a monument of unassailable beauty. But if you're looking for the origins of the art of Beefheart, Waits, Cave, Cramps, Blues Explosion, Red Red Meat and Old Time Relijun, it's the page on rural bluesmen where the encyclopedia of rock needs to be opened.

Robert Johnson is the archetype of the cursed artist, the man to whom the devil gave a guitar and from whom he stole a soul, composer of sick litanies, dust, crows, prisons and railroads, violated brides and wrath, actions, feelings, despair. He was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, on May 8, 1911 (though this is not certain), the result of an extramarital affair between his mother, Julia Dodds, and Noah Johnson, a man she met after her husband, Charles Dodds Jr., had to flee to escape a personal vendetta. Even at a young age, Robert showed an interest in music, and indeed he learned to play the harmonica early on, self-taught, before turning to the guitar, with his brother teaching him the basics. Little is known about Johnson's private life, and what is known is not entirely reliable. It is fairly certain that around 1930, after spending a few years in Memphis, he married and moved with his wife Virginia Travis to Robinsonville; Virginia died very young, at just sixteen, during the birth of their first child. From that moment on, Johnson began to wander among the various towns of the Mississippi Delta, perhaps to ease that pain and give new meaning to his life, setting souls ablaze with his fiery, symbolic music, perfectly embodying the figure of the drinking, womanizing Black bard from hell.

Johnson is now considered the greatest bluesman of the Delta, not only for his enormous guitar skill, but also for the dark allure that surrounds his figure. The legend, which he himself helped spread, tells of how he came to acquire his immense talent after striking a deal with the devil. At first not a particularly skilled guitarist, he was steered by House toward the harmonica, but Johnson disappeared (following Virginia's death), and reappeared a year later as a six-string phenomenon. It's frankly hard to understand how he managed such an improvement in so little time. The lore of the era tells of a meeting between the bluesman and a mysterious man in black, who at the stroke of midnight offered him a trade: his soul for guitar talent. In reality, the more plausible theory is that Johnson, perpetually wandering in search of himself and his real father, had in the meantime met the mysterious bluesman Ike Zinneman, who became his mentor. Zinneman himself is shrouded in a kind of gothic legend, as he was said to love playing in cemeteries, among the graves, so much so that many saw him as the devil's own embodiment.

Another incredible anecdote (perhaps the product of fantasy?) tells of how Johnson was able to reproduce note for note music he had heard on the radio the day before, heard in a crowded room and without paying it the slightest attention.

Robert Johnson died very young, on August 16, '38, in Greenwood, Mississippi, at 27 — an unlucky age for other future rock stars to come — and he couldn't help but die young, because it was written that way, because that's how genius and recklessness sink into the abyss, because perhaps a "normal" death isn't meant for the greats, or maybe simply because his way of living could not have had any other ending. He died tragically, shrouded in mystery, perhaps poisoned by bootleg whiskey, perhaps brutally stabbed by a jealous husband convinced the bluesman was courting his wife. He lingered in agony for several days before dying, and it is said that he used his last strength to write a kind of will, with one phrase in particular standing out: "I know my Redeemer liveth and He will call me from the grave." Greil Marcus, writing about his death, said: "He died in mystery: some recall he was stabbed, others that he was poisoned; that he died on his knees, on his hands, barking like a dog; that his death had something to do with black magic." But before the devil came to claim his soul, Johnson left us twenty-nine glittering treasures containing the future history of rock, both from a strictly musical standpoint and from a narrative/iconographic one. He managed to record them thanks to the help of a Jackson record store owner, one H.C. Speir, who had the merit of introducing him to Ernie Oertle, a talent scout for ARC.

Ernie Oertle and Robert Johnson put together most of the material in just five days in San Antonio, toward the end of November '36, at either the Blue Bonnet Hotel or the Gunter Hotel (historical accounts differ on this point too). In this first session, 16 songs saw the light of day: "Kindhearted Woman Blues", "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom", "Sweet Home Chicago", "Rambling On My Mind", "When You Got a Good Friend", "Come On In My Kitchen", "Terraplane Blues", "Phonograph Blues", "32-20 Blues", "They're Red Hot", "Dead Shrimp Blues", "Cross Road Blues", "Walking Blues", "Last Fair Deal Gone Down", "Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)", and "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day". Once the recordings were finished, Johnson returned to Mississippi, and then recorded the remaining tracks in Dallas in June '37, including "Hellhound On My Trail", "Drunken Hearted Man", and "Me And The Devil Blues".

Twenty-nine songs with a capital S, marking an evolution from the approach of pre-war bluesmen of the period, taking the form of a vibrant, dynamic sound that reveals Johnson's ability to make up for the lack of rhythm instruments with the guitar alone. The guitar is rhythmic and lead at the same time. Genuine proto-rock'n'roll can be heard, for example, in the explosive "Preaching Blues" and "32-20 Blues", "They're Red Hot", the more measured "Walking Blues" and the gorgeous "Stones In My Passway". Elsewhere Johnson literally invented modern post-war blues-rock, as in the hugely famous "Sweet Home Chicago".

In some tracks, he carries out a complete disintegration of harmony and rhythm (and thus of song form itself), in a continuous back-and-forth of chords and moans. At times the bluesman doesn't sing but mutters, as if narrating his own immense loneliness to himself. "Come In My Kitchen" is exemplary in this sense, sounding almost non-musical, partly due to Johnson's monotone soliloquy. Some accounts even speak of a small rock'n'roll combo that Johnson put together shortly before his death, complete with drums and electric instruments (an electric pickup for the guitar), but there is no certainty about this.

Robert Johnson's music is one long, searing descent into the hell of the soul. He sings of a world without salvation, without any possibility of redemption, where sins are the price to be paid for the overwhelming thirst to satisfy humanity's innermost urges. His music is a fascinating search for the meaning of life, for why man desires more than he has, for the instincts that drive the individual to betray, to kill, to commodify himself. For Johnson, satisfaction doesn't lie in finding these answers (which is impossible), but in wandering and struggling in search of them. The meanings and imagery the bluesman draws on, reworks and puts forward are those of America the great nation, keeper of a thousand opportunities, homeland of infinite possibilities; personal failure is thus not just an individual defeat, but the nullification of shared collective hopes, a betrayal of the nation's spirit, a flag at half-mast marking the funeral of the American Dream. Johnson's iconographic fabric feeds on the defeat of marginalization, on the despair of the dispossessed, of those materially prevented from fulfilling their dreams.

The image of the devil is an obsessive constant in his music, as in "Me And The Devil Blues": “Early this moring/ When you knocked upon my door/ I said, Hello, Satan/ I believe it’s time to go” (“Questa mattina presto/ quando hai bussato alla mia porta/ ho detto: “Buon giorno, Satana/ credo sia ora di andare”).

The devil's presence in the songs of the Delta bluesmen, and in Johnson's in particular, can be read through two interpretive keys: one concerns the personal sphere of behavior and actions. Johnson, a drinking, womanizing man who loved sex for its own sake, encounters sin and lets himself be ruled by it, and so comes to know the devil, who offers him the chance to sin and who is embodied in sin itself. An incorrigible transgressor, he repeatedly makes deals with the devil, yet fears him, because he is aware of his destructive power, of his ability to offer immediate gratification but eternal damnation. He knows that for every sin committed, the devil will claim a piece of his soul.

The second interpretive level draws on the fabric of early-20th-century Puritan American society, where preachers and religious communities built the foundations of their daily life on the dictates of God, work, and respect for one's neighbor, but also on the denial of difference. These communities turned the threat of sin, of the devil who offers it, and of the eternal damnation that follows from accepting it, into a tool of social control, a more powerful deterrent than any corporal punishment. Within the folds of this rigid worldview lie the sharpest contradictions and tensions, arising from the stark contrast between the formal commitment to living by the dictates of religion (God) and a reality made of temptations, transgressions and guilt (Satan).

Johnson sings of this too in his apocryphal psalms, bringing this contradiction to life, standing as both narrator and cautionary example, a dazzling demon embodying sin and superstition. A testament to the state of affairs in rural America at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries — staying strictly within the musical realm — is Nick Cave's splendid "And The Ass Saw The Angel", in which the bard of Melbourne lays bare, amid blood and dust, the eruption of these contradictions, between suicides and summary executions, fanatical preachers and the vengeance of the Almighty. Particularly striking is the passage in which Cave recounts the punishment the townspeople mete out to Cosey Mo, a self-declared prostitute who lives on the edge of the village and of God's grace. Blind fury rains down on her, stirred up by those who hypocritically claim to be the keepers of reason and faith, but who have skeletons in their closets and far graver sins to atone for.

The boundary between good and evil, between redemption and damnation, is touched upon by Johnson in "Cross Road Blues". Here the crossroads can be understood as the turning point in a man's life, caught between ever-lurking sinful, self-destructive temptations and the often faint will to stand up to them and embrace the main road to redemption:

I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees Asked the Lord above, have mercy,

I believe I’m sinking down

(“Sono andato al crocevia, sono caduto in ginocchio/ ho chiesto al Signore lassù, abbi pietà, risparmia il povero Bob, ti prego./ Me ne stavo al crocevia, cercavo qualcuno che mi desse un passaggio/ sembra che nessuno mi riconosca, tutti mi passano davanti./ Il sole sta calando, gente, il buio mi sorprenderà qui/ senza una dolce donnina piena d’amore che comprenda la mia angoscia./ Puoi correre a dire al mio amico, il povero Willie Brown/ che me ne sto al crocevia, credo che non resisterò a lungo”).

In "Cross Road Blues" all the themes of the artist's poetics converge: God, to whom Johnson pleads for help and mercy for his sins — though more as a last resort than out of genuine faith — the darkness, a metaphor for Satan inexorably coming to claim his soul, and, at the crossroads, in the Hamlet-like doubt between redemption and salvation, the desire to have a woman by his side, or rather "a little woman full of love," to soothe the pain of his soul before his departure.

Despite being afraid of him, Robert Johnson was on good terms with the devil, because he knew he was damned, and he was practically the devil's incarnation in his dealings with the opposite sex. He possessed an incredible charm; he would show up in clubs with his vibrant music and his haunted stories, and he managed to win over the hearts of young women bewitched by his lifestyle, so at odds with the monotony of everyday life, as he sings in "Stop Breakin' Down Blues": "Stuff I got'll bust our brain out baby/ It'll make you lose your mind" ("The stuff I've got will blow your mind, baby/ it'll make you lose your head").

The women he came across during his wanderings were nothing more than pornographic objects to be used and immortalized in his own songs. Johnson lived in the present, caressed the past, but knew he had no future, and in this Mephistophelian worldview, the idea of woman could only coincide with that of a lover in the purely physical sense, where romanticism is merely a facade concealing an implicit invitation, as in "Hellhound On My Trail":

If today was Cristmas Eve, If today was Cristmas Eve

And tomorrow was Christmans day

If today was Cristmas Eve, If today was Cristmas Eve

And tomorrow was Christmans day

I’m gonna bid your fair, farewell

When I leave this town

I’m gonna bid your fair, farewell

And when I return Again

I got a kindhearted woman, do anything in this world for me.

But evil-hearted women, man, they will not let me be.

I love my baby, my baby don’t love me.