The Devil And Mr Johnson

Next year marks the centenary of Woody Guthrie’s birth. Already the tribute albums and memorial gigs are stacking up. Indeed some, like Note Of Hope which features the likes of Jackson Browne and Ani diFranco, have already hit the shops.

Another notable anniversary is the 100 centenary of the birth of the orginal bluesman Robert Johnson, who, like Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain et al, passed away at the iconic age of 27.
Johnson was known as a schoolboy to play harmonica and jaw harp. But as a young musician he was never renowned for his virtuosity with the guitar. Everything changed when his young wife Virginia died in childbirth. He made the fateful decision to give up his settled life and make his living instead as an itinerant blues singer.
In the American south of the time embracing secular music was seen as flying in the face of God. Hence the legend that Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in return for his gifts as a guitarist.
Some might say the South hasn’t changed that much. Valerie June, brought up in the strict Baptist community of Memphis, tells how even now she is ostracised by some members of her congregation for her decision to take up the guitar. Singing the Lord’s praises in church may be seen as godly. Making music with a six string definitely isn’t.
By this stage the Johnson’s legend was starting to coalesce. He remarried briefly only to desert his new wife when she fell ill. In the early ‘30s, he relocated to the town of Hazlehurst, possibly in search of his birth father. While there he developed his guitar technique, honing the licks he picked up from older players such as Son House and Ike Zimmerman. When he returned to Clarksdale he was a transformed man, possessed of prodigious gifts of guitar-playing. Maybe Satan truly had given him superhuman virtuosity!
It’s a great story but probably at odds with the truth. While he was a blues phenomenon, laying down such genre-defining tracks as ‘Hellhound On My Trail’, ‘Me And The Devil Blues’ and ‘Stones In My Passway’, Johnson was not by all accounts the brooding troubled performer posterity remembers.
He moved around, stopping off in small towns across the American south and mid-west, venturing occasion as far as Canada. According to contemporary accounts, he was perfectly happy to play pop standards and country – whatever was popular in town and would help him earn his keep. He made friends everywhere and seems to have been an engaging character, often staying with his newfound chums on his next visit.
He was a hit with the ladies too. It was this rather than any Satanic curse that ultimately led to his demise. At the age of 27 he took up with a juke joint owner’s wife while playing an engagement at a country dance outside the town of Greenwood, Mississippi. The facts are murky. The legend tells that he died after drinking whiskey laced with strychnine by the cuckolded husband. It is also widely reported that he passed after three days in agony, which seem to contradict the strychnine prognosis. It would have killed him much more quickly. Even his place of final rest is unknown – a total of three grave markers vie for our attention.
It’s a potent legend, even if some of its elements seem to have migrated from a similar story told about his near contemporary Tommy Johnson. Whatever the facts, the tracks Robert Johnson recorded in San Antonio and later at a second session in Dallas mark him out as a seminal figure in the blues scene.
He is cited as a direct inspiration by Eric Clapton, Brian Jones and Keith Richards as well as by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. So how come the anniversary of his death passed unnoticed last May? Perhaps the facts, even the legend, are that little bit too vague to give anyone a hook to hang a celebration on. Or maybe, unlike Woodie Guthrie, it’s down to the fact he doesn’t have a family keeping his name in the public eye.
Still the legend lives on in the music it inspires. You can certainly hear Johnson in the dirty country blues of bands such as Cork’s Pavlov’s Dog whose single ‘Truth Of Your Lies’ is raw and rootsy. They may not have sold their soul to the devil at some crossroads somewhere. Instead they are doomed to inhabit the permanent purgatory which is life as a working musician in the modern world. Aparently this is called progress.