Robert Johnson Still Inspires Poetry, Begs Questions 97 Years After Birth

Ted Drozdowski | 05.08.2008

He could see that hell hound
That he had that song about
“Hell hound on my trail,
Got to keep moving”
But he couldn’t move his hand
Or get up off the ground

Robert Johnson
He couldn’t get up to move
He laid there on the ground
Poison eating away at his life, staring up
Into the drooling jaws
Of the dreadful hell hound

Standing dead up over him
Blood dripping from its eyes
Its foul breath in his face –
“Robert Johnson”
On his way to the spirit world
Catch a Greyhound bus & gone
— John Sinclair, in “Hell Hound on My Trail” from 2002’s Fattening Frogs for Snakes: A Delta Sound Suite

That dramatic version of the end of Robert Johnson’s life―hastened by a jealous husband and a bottle of poisoned whiskey at a juke joint outside Greenwood, Mississippi, in August 1938―conjured by the poet and revolutionary John Sinclair is typical of the kind of romantic visions the Delta blues giant’s music and patchwork story have inspired since his recordings were first reissued in 1966.

Two prominent poets of the guitar, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, were among the first generation of young white musicians profoundly touched by that reissue album, King of the Delta Blues Singers, and the tunes it collected: “Cross Road Blues,” “Terraplane Blues,” “Come on in My Kitchen,” “Rambling on My Mind,” and the spiritually audacious “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day,” among others.

Clapton, as a troubled and complex young man, took “When You Got a Good Friend” to heart and claimed Johnson’s ghost as a soul mate.

“It came as a shock to me that there could be anything that powerful,” the British guitar god wrote in the liner notes to the definitive 1990 CD set Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, which featured all 41 of the existing Johnson shellac 78s remastered for the first time in the digital age. “It seemed like he wasn’t playing for an audience at all; it didn’t obey the rules of harmony or anything―he was just playing for himself. It was almost as if he felt things so acutely he found it almost unbearable. Up until the time I was 25, if you didn’t know who Robert Johnson was I wouldn’t talk to you. Robert Johnson to me is the most important blues musician who ever lived.”

And Johnson will, indeed, live forever thanks to the magic of his dexterous, emotional performances caught in hotel rooms and studios by the record man Don Law in 1936 and ’37.

If Johnson hadn’t drank that poisoned whiskey, and had the iron constitution of his still-performing sidekick Honeyboy Edwards, he’d turn 97 this week, on May 8. As it is, in death he has resisted attempts to demystify his legacy.

Those who contend that his recorded repertoire doesn’t reflect his interests as a musician, and that he was, in essence, a jack-of-all-styles who’d learn and play anything from a Stephen Foster tune to a waltz to keep his tip jar full or get money from a record label, are wrong-headedly belittling what’s plainly audible in those 41 sides. That’s the sound of a deeply committed artist, whose playing is his own intimate, idiosyncratic, and inventive creation―regardless of his influences like Kokomo Arnold and Son House―and whose lyrics do, indeed, reflect the wandering life and thoughts of a lover and poet.

How Johnson arrived at the deliberate, obviously well honed style forever fixed in the amber of his recordings isn’t entirely clear. By all accounts of his contemporaries, however, it would have continued to evolve. For example, pianist Henry Townsend, who died in 2006, said he performed in a band that featured Johnson playing electric guitar several times before that fateful Greenwood night.

Johnson concocted his own myth, or at least refused to dispel occult speculation, to go with his song titles like “Hell Hound on My Trail” and “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.”

Another Delta bluesman, Tommy Johnson of “Canned Heat Blues” fame, publicly claimed the secret to playing guitar literally like a demon was to take your six-string to a crossroads and sit and play in the moonlight. At midnight, a big black man would come along, take it from you, retune it, and hand it back. So that became a part of the Delta’s superstitious fabric.

Tommy Johnson never elaborated on the payment for this dark gift, and when this explanation for Robert’s skills was suggested to Robert by his own fans and his previous detractors, like House and Willie Brown, who knew him before he could play a lick, Robert simply said nothing.

House and the prolific Charley Patton were the twin pillars of early Delta blues. Nonetheless, the younger Johnson remains a more profound musical influence to this day. His virtuosic slide guitar approach, perfected with the edge of a knife or the sawed-off neck of a glass bottle, remains the model. His penchant for combining lead and rhythm lines is still a hallmark of the finest self-propelled accompanists. The accents of his voice―the way he stretched and held notes, pushed and relaxed dynamics―presaged the whisper-to-shout and falsetto styles of the blues and soul singers of the ’50s and ’60s, whether they went to church or, like Robert, apparently, did not. And his lyrics were vivid, adult, and contemporary. His “Dead Shrimp Blues” uses metaphor to tell the story of a man’s impotence and his women’s search for fulfillment elsewhere. He dealt with the same topic again in “Phonograph Blues,” singing “we played it on the sofa/we played it on the wall/my needles have got rusty, baby/they will not play at all.” And “Kindhearted Woman Blues,” with its damsel who “studies evil all the time,” thrives on irony, while “Come on in My Kitchen” is an invitation to sexual comfort.

As much as he sang about erectile dysfunction, it doesn’t seem to have been as much an issue as a creative obsession for Johnson. He often lived off the kindness of women, finding one to keep him whenever he drifted into a new area for a prolonged stay. Ultimately choosing a married woman proved his undoing. Even if Johnson had possession over his own judgment day, he had no control over its arrival. He died at the age of 26, with unfulfilled dreams of further rambling on his mind.

Honeyboy Edwards provides a detailed account of Johnson’s long and painful death from poisoning in his salty, enjoyable autobiography The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, published in 2000. And it’s only slightly less horrible than Sinclair’s nightmarish vision of the hell hound, “blood dripping from its eyes.”

Sinclair’s line about catching a Greyhound bus in his poem “Hell Hound on My Trail” comes from Johnson’s own powerfully evocative “Me and the Devil Blues,” where he may or may not have made an ominous prediction about the circumstances of his departure: “Early this morning’ oooh/when you knock upon my door/And I said, ‘Hello, Satan/I believe it’s time to go.”

And yet, thanks to those indelible, influential recordings, here Johnson still remains―a force for all guitarists and songwriters who explore the human experience to reckon with.