Interesting article about Blues singers.

Mike Perlowin · From: Los Angeles CA

the following appears in the N.Y. Times, 2/28/04

Revisionists Sing New Blues History By BEN SISARIO

Robert Johnson left 29 songs and little else, but it was enough. Johnson has long since become the most famous blues singer of all time, reaching a level in the pantheon of American music occupied by figures like Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. The myths inevitably grew up around him. Most writers who have dealt with him have found it impossible to resist the story of his deal with the devil, or the image of him pursued by "hellhounds."

But as Johnson's popularity has grown — the box set of his "Complete Recordings" (Columbia/Legacy) has sold nearly two million copies worldwide — a growing number of music scholars have begun to question Johnson's place in the canon, and the received wisdom about blues history itself.

Elijah Wald's new "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues" (Amistad/HarperCollins) is one of the most contentious yet, daring to suggest that Johnson's primacy was largely a creation of white fans and music critics of the 1960's.
"As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure," Mr. Wald writes, "and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note."

With extensive research into the listening habits of the audience of the time, Mr. Wald describes a history of the blues that is markedly different from the one in accounts like Martin Scorsese's recent seven-part PBS series, "The Blues."

In Mr. Wald's history, the principal players are not lonesome folk singers from dusty hamlets, but seasoned professionals riding the latest trends in black pop. They have names that are largely unknown today except among experts: Peetie Wheatstraw, Leroy Carr and Kokomo Arnold. And most of them were women. The kings of the blues were actually the queens of the blues: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and dozens of others now all but forgotten, singers like Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey and Sara Martin.

Johnson, who died in 1938, emerges in Mr. Wald's account as a regional player eager to copy the latest hits. And he was only marginally successful. Just 11 of his songs were issued in his lifetime — the biggest stars recorded well over 100 songs, Mr. Wald points out — and his biggest hit, "Terraplane Blues," sold about 5,000 copies.

Mr. Wald and other critics argue that the discrepancy between Johnson's stature and his accomplishments stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of blues music by later, mostly white, writers.
Last year Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch's "Robert Johnson: Lost and Found" (University of Illinois Press) traced the paper trail of the Johnson myth through the decades and found that white critics and promoters were telling tall tales about him while he was still alive. The authors tracked down misleading articles about him dating to 1937, and reconstructed the comical spread of Johnson's Faust legend — that he sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in return for his extraordinary gifts as a guitarist — from a single, dubious 1966 interview with Johnson's friend and fellow blues musician Son House.

Another book, Patricia R. Schroeder's "Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture" (due from University of Illinois Press in July), traces the persistence of Johnson's image in the culture at large, from postage stamps to novels to plays. Johnson's myth, it suggests, is truly larger than his life.

"This just adds to the legend of Johnson," said David Evans, a professor of music at the University of Memphis and a veteran blues researcher. "Like Elvis and Hank Williams and certain other stars, he can be all things to all people."

Stopping for coffee at a Midtown hotel during his recent book tour, Mr. Wald explained that "the blues was pop music — it simply wasn't folk music."

He continued: "It was invented retroactively as black folk music, which brought a new set of standards to bear on it and created a whole new pantheon of heroes. Suddenly the people who were the biggest stars were too slick to be real."

Johnson became a perfect model for the 1960's rock star. He lived hard, played like a man possessed and died young — at around 27 — in mysterious circumstances. No wonder he appealed to the Jim Morrison generation. The obsession with Johnson at the expense of almost all other blues singers, Mr. Wald suggests, has grossly distorted the history of the blues. Prewar blues musicians were much more versatile and pop oriented than is widely known; Mr. Wald notes that when Alan Lomax interviewed Muddy Waters in Mississippi in the early 1940's, he found that Waters's repertory included "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and seven Gene Autry songs — more pop than blues. And the immediate origins of the blues, Mr. Wald writes, are most likely in black vaudeville, not in field hollers. The blues, in other words, was up-to-the-minute pop, a sign of urbanization, technology and sophistication, not primitivism or tradition.

Not all historians agree with Mr. Wald's critique. Johnson may not have been a star, some say, but he had many important followers like Muddy Waters and Elmore James, who continued to play his songs in the decades after his death.

And the blues queens, some argue, cannot really be considered neglected. John Szwed, a professor of anthropology and African-American studies at Yale and currently the Louis Armstrong visiting professor of jazz studies at Columbia, called them overvalued. "The classic women blues singers have always received more attention from jazz critics and historians, the folks who canonized the blues tradition," he said.

Some critics also see a red herring in measuring importance in terms of raw pop appeal. "You can argue that Emily Dickinson wasn't that important," said Jeff Todd Titon, a professor of ethnomusicology at Brown. "Nobody in the 19th century was influenced by her poetry, not until literary critics got ahold of her."

But the notion that Johnson's fortunes and the history of the blues have largely been decided by the white rock 'n' roll world appeals to many blues experts.

"There are problems with the idea of the blues as a roots music," Mr. Titon said. "Because if so, then rock 'n' roll is the flower. It used to be that the flower was jazz, which is equally misleading. Blues is a music in and of itself."

Mr. Wald has a looser definition. Blues music, as he sees it, is simply part of a continuum of black pop. Robert Johnson, Leroy Carr and Bessie Smith were not moaning field laborers. "They were Sam Cooke, they were Snoop Dogg, they were Aretha Franklin," he said. "That's what we've forgotten, and that's what a lot of white blues fans don't want them to be."

David Doggett · Posted 28 Feb 2004 2:11 pm

Well, I haven't read Wald's book, but so far I agree with most of what he says in this article. Robert Johnson was a minor pop blues singer/player in a long line that stretches back before him and continued on into R&B and now hip hop. I question even his influence on people like Elmore James. The dust-my-broom slide sound pre-existed RJ, and was a minor compenent of RJ's repertoire. And Son House, Muddy, Howlin' Wolf and a host of others who long outlived RJ were more than ample to provide Elmore James with everything he had.

A lot of the stuff RJ did that white rockers and writers find so enthralling was very unique to him, and not typical of Delta blues before or since. It was genius, yeah, but strictly musically he was not the king or the father of the Delta Blues, as he is usually portrayed. I would lay that title on Son House. He bridged the gap between the idiosyncratic primitive Delta singer/players like Charley Patton, and the generation that moved from the Delta to Memphis, Chicago and Detroit and electrified the blues. They call it Chicago blues, but those guys all came from Mississippi and had learned from Son House (and his cohorts), the same as Robert Johnson. As much as any single person, Son House was the channel for the typical 12-bar, slide and harmonica dominated Delta blues form and style that was electrified in the cities.

The "classic blues" of Ma Rainy, Besse Smith, and John Handy was musically very different from Delta and Chicago blues. As this article says, it came as much from Vaudeville and New Orleans, as from Delta field hollers. The classic blues relates to the Delta Blues only in the sense that they were both part of black popular music.

Well, let the white musicologists and historians say what they will. It's all good.

Stephen Gambrell · From: Over there

With all respect to Mr. Wald, the absolute LAST thing we(I)need, is some pointy-headed analysis of something as emotional as old blues music. I never bought into the "posession" thing about Robert Johnson, I just dig his music. The same with Scrapper Blackwell, Son House, Willie McTell, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, or Frank Zappa. Emotionalism cannot be intellectualized!
WHEN WILL THEY LEARN?????????

Bill Hatcher · From: Atlanta Ga. USA

PR is everthing.

Mitch Drumm · From: Frostbite Falls, hard by Veronica Lake

i'm glad to see someone expose the johnson worship of the last 30 plus years for what it is--just another instance of revisionist history promulgated by what are laughingly called journalists. the johnson thing fits in very nicely with the preconceived notions of these self-absorbed twits who apparently wouldn't dream of disagreeing with john hammond or the british blues axis. i can understand keith richards/eric clapton/et al for simply being out of the cultural loop, but the parroting of their unexamined yammering for the last generation and more is a bit much.

next, i'd like to see an expose of the "pat boone is the anti-christ" story. but that would require perspective from music bidness journalists, which seems to be in short supply.

here is another review of the book:

Music Historian Explores Work of Blues Legend Robert Johnson
Nancy Beardsley
Washington
15 Feb 2004, 02:09 UTC

Blues musician Robert Johnson is famous both for the songs he recorded and the legends he inspired. His name has been widely linked to tales of how he sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for musical talent. Musician and music historian Elijah Wald has written a book that looks beyond those myths to examine the real roots of Robert Johnson's talent, and the impact of his career. It's called Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues.

"Terraplane Blues" is one of Robert Johnson's most popular songs, but not everyone appreciates it for the same reasons. Elijah Wald found that out when he traveled south to the small community of Morgan City, Mississippi. He was there to help dedicate a grave marker for Robert
Johnson.

"We were playing Robert Johnson's music, and there were all these white record executives and white reporters and they were all nodding their heads because we sounded like Robert Johnson - we were very authentic,"
he recalled. "And there were also all the black people who had never heard of Robert Johnson, and they were just laughing at the funny lines in the song. That was one of the moments that set me on the trail of this book. I thought, this isn't deep dark folklore, this is fun."

In Escaping the Delta, Elijah Wald writes that blues music should be celebrated not just in scholarly documentaries, but for what it originally was - a form of popular entertainment among rural southern blacks. And if Robert Johnson is now considered one of the most important figures in the history of that entertainment, Elijah Wald says his renown came only after his death.

"When he made his records in 1935, the black public who was buying blues records showed almost no interest whatsoever," he said. "There were a lot of people around in those times who were very, very good, and he was not all that distinctive for those times. He certainly is not revolutionary. Whereas if you hear him coming backwards from the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, you've never heard anything like that before, and he knocks your socks off. And also, the stars were in Chicago, and he was trying to break in out of Mississippi."

Robert Johnson was born in 1911, just as the first blues hits were starting to get published and recorded in Chicago and other big cities. He grew up with the music, in and around the Mississippi Delta region
that's come to be known as the birthplace of the blues.

"Everybody talks about how he could play any music he heard," said Elijah Wald. "He could play Bing Crosby. He could play country and
western. He could play hillbilly. And how crowds would just gravitate to him. He was this perfect fusion of the older, deeper Delta sound and this smooth sound coming in on records from Chicago."

Elijah Wald has put out a companion CD with his book called Back to the Crossroads. It contains musicians who influenced Robert Johnson, including Kokomo Arnold playing "Old Original Kokomo Blues."

"Robert Johnson's probably most famous song, 'Sweet Home Chicago,' was just a reworking of 'Old Original Kokomo Blues,'" said Elijah Wald. "We often think of these people as being the beginning, but they had their roots as well."

Had Robert Johnson lived longer, Elijah Wald believes he might have achieved the kind of success he craved. But he died at the age of 27. According to one story, he was poisoned by an angry husband, whose wife had flirted with the musician. He left behind at least one very influential fan.

"There was this guy, John Hammond at Columbia Records, who back in the late 1930s got this idea that Robert Johnson was the greatest blues singer of all time," said Elijah Wald. "And when Elvis Presley hit 20
years later, and there began to be a market of people looking for early rock and roll, he arranged for Columbia Records to put out an LP of old Robert Johnson records. And all these English rockers like Eric Clapton
and Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac - to them it just opened up a whole new world. So it really inspired a whole generation of rock-and-rollers and has continued to do that to this day."

The power of Robert Johnson's music was enhanced by the dark legends that grew up around him. Elijah Wald believes the myths about Robert Johnson and the devil spring largely from the songs he sang. "There were
a couple of songs where he mentioned the devil," notes Elijah Wald.

"There's this wonderful interview with one of his old friends, who grew up with him in Mississippi, where a blues expert says, 'Did Robert Johnson ever talk about selling his soul to the devil?' And he said, 'Oh sure, he'd always come in joking around like that. We never did think nothing of it though.'" Elijah Wald says he drew on many sources to
write his book from the recollections of those who knew Robert Johnson to historic blues recordings now housed at the Library of Congress. He says his research gave him a new appreciation for Robert Johnson's
talent, and for the way blues music has come to mean so many different things for different people.

"Blues had evolved steadily as black popular music," he explained. "And black people started calling their music soul music and then funk music and it was still an evolution of the same music. But white people picked up blues because they were nostalgic. They wanted somebody they could
imagine sitting on the front porch in Mississippi with his guitar. And that took them straight back to Robert Johnson."

[This message was edited by Mitch Drumm on 29 February 2004 at 02:04 AM.]

[This message was edited by Mitch Drumm on 29 February 2004 at 02:07 AM.]

David Doggett · Posted 29 Feb 2004 7:56 am

Unh, Mitch...I'm not sure about Pat Boone not being the anti-Christ. The way I remember it, there was Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc. In other words, rock'n'roll. Then Elvis went into the army, and suddenly there was Pat Boone, Fabian, Tommy Sands, Ricky Nelson, etc. - not rock'n'roll as we knew it. When Elvis came back, Hollywood emasculated him - still no rock'n'roll. It took the British invasion, the hippies, and another infusion of southern spirit (Allman bros., etc.) to get rock'n'roll born again. I guess I don't get your reference to Pat Boone.

[This message was edited by David Doggett on 29 February 2004 at 07:57 AM.]

Earnest Bovine · From: Los Angeles CA USA

Bobby Lee · From: Cloverdale, California, USA

Robert Johnson's biggest influence was on rock musicians of my generation. I have never heard anyone claim that he was an influence on the blues music of his time (did Martin Scorsese really say that?), but there's no denying that he had a profound influence on the West Coast rock of the sixties.

When did Bach's music start to have a major influence on other composers? If people don't discover you until you're dead, does that diminish the importance of your music?

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Bobby Lee - email: quasar@b0b.com - gigs - CDs, Open Hearts
Sierra Session 12 (E9), Williams 400X (Emaj9, D6), Sierra Olympic 12 (C6add9),
Sierra Laptop 8 (E6add9), Fender Stringmaster (E13, A6),
Roland Handsonic, Line 6 Variax

David Doggett · Posted 29 Feb 2004 10:02 pm

b0b, as I remember, the Columbia LPs were titled Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues. Apparently this was John Hammond's personal opinion, and it stuck in the rock world. But this is like if rock writers in 50 years dig into the archives and declare Curley Chalker, or even Mike Perlowin the "King" of pedal steel guitar, simply because they are impressed with their unique musical ideas and technical abilities. In fact RJ was so unique in his technical skill and musical ideas, that he was out of the mainstream, and no one really followed up on a lot of his stuff. Some of this he seems to have gotten from a non-Delta mentor, who I think was from Alabama. It was in some ways different from either the pre-existing Delta style, or the later Chicago style. It really was RJ's own style, and it died with him. It's fine to recognize his genius after his death, or to recognize that his style is uniquely impressive to later rock ears. But for people outside the tradition to retroactively bestow on him the title of "King" or "father of" the Delta Blues seems inappropriate and revisionist.

Even the Stones and other rockers who covered RJ songs, did so in a very different style from the originals. I really don't hear anything musically in the rock and blues of the '60s and later that would sound different if RJ had never lived. The transfer of blues into rock was very generic, and more by way of Memphis, Chicago and Detroit.

Mike Perlowin · From: Los Angeles CA

Orville Johnson · From: Seattle, Washington, USA

i think what mr. wald is doing is trying to put some context around the phenomena of RJ. as anyone who knows about political debate, advertising, or law, the framing of the issue can drive the story in certain directions. we view it in terms of when and where we heard RJ, what we read or heard about RJ but i think wald is researching and placing RJ in the context of his own era.

i spoke with mr. wald at a reading he did here in seattle recently and one thing we discussed was how the northern record producers who came to the delta only wanted to record the guitar/vocal blues guys because that's what they had sold and marketed before. in fact, there were accounts of many other bands playing popular music of the day (swing,early jazz and the like) in the delta that were very good but never got the chance to record. if the companies wanted that kind of music thay would go to new york or kansas city, places they identified with those styles of music. so the record producers (marketers) were making these determinations thereby creating a frame or context that didn't necessarily reflect the reality of the music styles most frequently found in the delta and in the repertoires of the performers.
i found it to be a very interesting book.

CrowBear Schmitt · From: Ariege, - PairO'knees, - France

Mike, i'm havin' heck of time choosin' between Smiley and Howard R as Court Jester so please don't make it any harder on me
how bout a vote ?

btw; anybody know a book called: the Bluesman ?

[This message was edited by CrowBear Schmitt on 01 March 2004 at 02:31 AM.]

Tony Prior · From: Charlotte NC

And lets just throw this out there..

Yes Robert Johnson is and should be respected by the guitar blues minions..

But if EC didn't pick up that 335 and play Crossroads on that LIVE album..

I'm thinking that many still would not know who he RJ was..

My thinking is that you cannot tell an RJ story and not mention that EC was somewhat prominent in bringing his name forward to the minions who had no clue who RJ was..

I was with a very young Tele picker this past weekend..excellent player..chicken picken, SRV..all that stuff..He thought James Burton started with Elvis..

He never heard of Ricky Nelson !

SO I said..

"Son..let me tell you how it all started..first of all..did you ever hear of a B+W Television ?"

then I told him the rest of the story...

I think RJ may have fallen into this catagory had it not been for EC's intense cover of Crossroads..

t

David Doggett · Posted 1 Mar 2004 6:12 am

Speaking of Eric Clapton, driving in to work, I just heard the local college radio station play EC doing "If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day," from his new album, "Me and Mr. Johnson." EC is better than ever, and I guess the RJ worship will continue unabated. Come to think of it, I'm also part of the problem. I'm in a group called The Terraplanes, and we don't even play any blues to speak of. I keep threatening to work up a version of Terraplane Blues on my Dobro roundneck, but the rythmn is really quirky, and the timing of the spoken parts is beyond this white boy.

Mike Perlowin · From: Los Angeles CA

Getting back to the article, I find it intruiging that Muddy Waters included some Gene Autry songs in his early repetoire. I wish these had been recorded.

We know that a lot of rural southern blacks listened to the Grand Ole Opry in the days prior WW2, but as far as I know, the only blues artist to cross over and record country style music was Blind Willie Johnson.

It's too bad more of this phenominon had not been recorded and preserved.

John Steele · From: Renfrew, Ontario, Canada

I don't think they were as big on categorizing music in those days.
I know one of the oldest recorded bluesmen was a guy named Henry Thomas, who made the first record of "Fishin' Blues" (later redone by Taj Mahal). I read somewhere that "Fishin' Blues" was one of the last songs Stringbean performed on the Opry, hours before his untimely death.
The Henry Thomas recording of it features a wind instrument much like a pan pipe... which was apparently a popular instrument in blues settings, since lost to history.
-John

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www.ottawajazz.com

Jussi Huhtakangas · From: Helsinki, Finland

Quote: "We know that a lot of rural southern blacks listened to the Grand Ole Opry in the days prior WW2"

Ray Charles did just that, and look what happened!

Jesse Pearson · From: San Diego , CA

Charlie Patton was the guy who is credited as the father of Delta Blues. Both Son House and RJ learned from him. Robert was into record copying and when he died, he had $16,000.00 in the bank. The blues songs he recorded, took place in San Antonio Texas. About half way through the recording process, he went out on the downtown streets to busk and the cops beat the dog crap out of him and busted his guitar up. He had to get bailed out of jail to finish the recordings. Willie Johnson (future blues)tried to save Robert from taking a drink from an already opened beer bottle because Robert had made some enemies with other men concerning their woman. It was a common practice to poison your enemies back in the Black culture of the Jim Crow era, the cops didn't care. Robert told Willie if he every slapped a bottle of beer out of his hand again that he would kick his ass. Robert lived thru the poisoning which took 3 days of pain to run it's course. Robert's system was weakened and he got pneumonia next and that's what killed him. The devil stuff was just part of the blues gimmick that seemed to work for blues player's back in those day's. If Son House got drunk during a recording session, he would get religion and wouldn't play anymore blues songs for the rest of the session.

[This message was edited by Jesse Pearson on 02 March 2004 at 03:01 PM.]

David L. Donald · From: Koh Samui Island, Thailand

I never much cared for Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton was much bluesier.

I have an old Rossetta cassette
Mean Mothers, Independant Womens Blues vol I
Found completely by accident in a lesbian run cafe/restarant in Black Rock Ct.

Now this critter REALLY is blues. By people who clearly LIVED the blues.
Includes :
Martha Copeland
Bessie Brown
Maggie Jones
Susie Edwards
Bernice Edwards
Gladys Bentley
Mary Dixon
Bertha Idaho
Rosa Henderson
Harlem Hannah
Lil Armstrong
Blue Lou Barker
Rosetta Howard
Ida Cox
Lil Green
and Billie Holiday

Now THIS is blues...
With the classic
"Why Don't You Do Right By Me"
( also sung by Jessica, Roger Rabbi'st main squeezee.

This Pat Boone song gives me spinal twists and angina. ooh the contortions. Auughh! had to shut it off after round 2