Fil Corbitt: Do you remember the first time you heard that story about Robert Johnson?
Chris Smith: Yeah, I do. And, and I heard it the way I think a lot of young white would be blues guys in the 1970s did, which is that an older person told it to me, probably another, slightly older white blues guy from whom I was trying to learn music
Chris Smith: I'm professor and chair of Musicology and Director of the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.
Chris also co-hosts a podcast called Sounding History, a great show that reframes global music history on a 500 year scale. In their first season, they made a piece about the fog of myth surrounding Robert Johnson.
Chris Smith: Son House was really the one who promulgated that story. Of course, Robert had died, and so Robert wasn't around to either confirm or deny it. But Robert's not the only person about whom that story was told. The blues man Tommy Johnson had that story told about him, and a great musician, great guitar player and singer called Pete Wheatstraw who called himself the devil's son-in-law. So it's this kind of common trope that blues guys used sometimes as a kind of self advertising thing. The thing about Robert is, Robert died young and he died as a result of malice. And Robert had a lot of songs about me and the Devil Blues and Hell Hound on my Trail. And he wrote toward that, if I could say. And he was an absolutely hellaciously good musician.
Fil Corbitt: I had noticed in the storytelling about Robert Johnson that there was this discrepancy between -- depending on who was telling it -- that there were certain people who were saying, he left for five or six months, came back, he was the best guitar player I ever saw. His grandson said he was gone for two or three years… Two to three years is plenty of time to get really good at the guitar. What he was doing in that time was he was going off to learn from Ike Zimmerman, an older blues man. And I mean, say it is one year, that is enough time I would imagine, to kind of develop a new style and pick up something if you're practicing it all the time.
Chris Smith: Yeah, And there's another thing about Robert that, that in the, in the early seventies when I first was introduced to his music, when the myth was still very alive amongst the young white guys of the blues revival... There's another thing that we didn't really realize about Robert at that time. Cause all we had was that Columbia LP set. Volume One and Volume Two of King of the Delta Blues Singers, and it collected all of his 78s. We didn't have the alternate takes. We didn't have other stuff. So it was this, almost like this fetish object. And here's this picture of Robert and in the, in the double one, the gatefold one, there's this beautiful image where he's sitting in the corner of a hotel room in Dallas, and he's facing into the corner of the room. This is the story we told on, on our own pod, on the sounding history pod, and he's doing it for a reason. He's doing it because he understands this technology behaves this way if I face in this direction. But it became this thing like, oh, but he was so tortured and shy that he couldn't bear to face people, and it wasn't anything like that. Ry Cooter said, no, that's not what he was doing, he was corner loading.
Corner loading is an audio technique, using the hard corner of a room to bounce and amplify certain frequencies over others. It’s a simple yet sophisticated approach to recording, and it can make a single voice and guitar sound just a little bit bigger.
Chris Smith: The other thing that we didn't really realize at that time was how much Robert was absolutely a second generation player, and one of the most important influences on Robert was that he could listen to records. Because that's where he really went to school. He went to school on the records of people like Henry Thomas and especially Charlie Patton. Charlie Patton was 30 years older than Robert. And the result was that Charlie started playing before there was recording. And there's a kind of beautiful, fascinating self consciousness that happens when a developing artist can access inspirations in material form, in physical form, and study them and like be a musicologist and go to school on them. And Henry Thomas and Charlie Patton, who were the first generation recorded, they couldn't do that. Not initially. Robert could, so Robert's second generation, kind of like we were the third generation who went to school on Robert’s records.
The fact that Robert Johnson had just one record - the 29 songs that made up King of the Delta Blues, was a big part of his legend.
Chris Smith: I mean, it's understandable, right? We want to mythologize artists. We don't necessarily want them all, we don't want to perceive them as as tortured necessarily, although it makes a good story. But you know, creativity is mysterious. it's a mysterious thing, you know, especially in an art form like the Delta Blues that wasn't studied in universities, that wasn't taught as a formal, as a, as a considered sophisticated art. The myth is understandable because creativity is mysterious.
Chris Smith: Any creativity is situational. It happens at a moment in a particular way, and it would happen differently at another moment. I think we so much inherit this European romantic thing of — either the tortured artist in their garret, composing music or painting that the world doesn't understand, no one understands me! — or that it's this divine inspiration and, and in fact, the art forms that I'm interested in, not just the blues, are things that emerge out of circumstances and people, and people coping with circumstances.
Chris Smith: And for sure if you were a black person, a young black man in the Jim Crow South and you didn't want to work behind a mule or chopping cotton your whole life, then you were making choices to try to better your life. To try to have a life that wasn't brutal physical labor. Maybe have a life that would get you out of the Jim Crow South and you were putting yourself at risk just by being that person.
• • •
Steven Johnson: He said I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees, and begged the lord to save poor Bobby if you please. Now, if you asking for God to save you, it don't sound like you was selling yourself to the devil, asking for salvation at the same time.
The grandson of the bluesman who sold his soul to the Devil, Steven is a now a blues musician and preacher.
Steven Johnson: I believe my granddad was at a crossroad in his life. It’s like, every time I go to do good, evil is present… When I first began to really study my Granddad's 29 songs, I listened to them and I understood the life that he lived from being a womanizer to being a person that wasn't brought up in a home with a loving mother and a father figure that he could see on a daily basis ,to being a traveling man to, being a womanizer and drinking... A lot of times he would drink to actually play the music and to do a lot of the devilish stuff that he did.
• • •
Chris Smith: Crossroads are mysterious places, mysterious, spooky. Risky places. Places full of risk and potential chaos in lots of world cultures. They are in West Africa. They are in the African Caribbean. They are in the American South. They were in in medieval Europe. That's why they put gallows and buried criminals at Crossroads. That's why Odysseus mistakenly meets his father and kills his father unknowingly at a crossroads, right? In the West African context, that crossroads is not a four-way crossroads. It's a three way crossroads. It's three roads that come together. And the reason is that I find that a particularly resonant image is because if you're in a four way crossroads, like the end of the Tom Hank Castaway film, right? Where he's driving a UPS truck and he stops at a crossroads and the camera pulls way back wide and he stops there and it's evident that he doesn't know in which direction he's gonna go. He can't decide, but he could also at a four way crossroads, even if it's deserted, he could proceed straight, But a three way crossroads you have to make a choice.
right, or left.
Chris Smith: there's, there's power in that because life does do that. Right? And we don't know what comes on the road not traveled…Elegua is the patron of the crossroads, He's the God of chance or chaos or accident. He's also the God in a santaria ceremony, he's the God who comes first. If you're participating in Santaria Ceremony, the first songs are to him. And you sing and you play and you cleanse yourself and you pray in hopes that Elegua will will come because it's Elegua who opens the path. Right? It's that pathway thing again Elegua opens the path for the other gods to come.
This god of the crossroads and chaos is deeply linked to, perhaps one in the same with, the trickster. A figure that appears in cultures all over the world.
Chris Smith: when I'm teaching my own students, they always think of Loki in the Marvel comics universe. Because you know, he starts out as being this chaos agent, right? But lots of cultures have chaos agents because I think in lots of cultures we understand that sometimes things happen for no good reason. Sometimes good things happen for no good reason and even more sometimes bad things. So we mythologize it. We say, 'ah, there's somebody who wants this chaos.' And one of the things I love about, about Elegua is that Elegua is really a way of saying, 'yeah, but chaos is gonna happen anyway, so why don't you make friends with it, maybe even learn to talk to it.' And I think Robert, I think Robert did that.
The god of the crossroads is an agent of destabilization and it’s a god that has everything to do with pathways and direction.
Chris Smith: I think that's a really good insight. To me, there's a kind of spiritual eloquence about understanding a change agent, the embodied deity of change, as not malicious, but simply as a personification, a deification of the way that the world actually is. The world is full of chance. The world is full of accidents, which are either horrible or happy, and a religion that accepts that, that says, 'yes, the world is full of chance and bad things happen for no reason, no appreciable, no seemingly visible reason. Just as sometimes good things do.'
Chris Smith: …there were moments in the history of this country in North America, in which it became theologically important to find, accident or change, to be evil, to be malicious, to attach malice to it, to perceive a malicious intelligence behind it.
Chris Smith: There's a great book by, uh, the journalist Michael Herr who's now dead. He, he was writing about the Vietnam War. He was one of the, Correspondence writing about that war and what it was like to be there as a young American. He wrote beautifully and, and very starkly and very sadly about Vietnam. And there's one point in the book where he says something like... he's having a conversation with somebody and they're trying to trace, when did the US involvement in Vietnam happen? Was it in 1965 when they faked the Tonkan bay explosion? or was it in 1962 when they sent advisors or you know, when did it happen? When, you know, when did it all begin? And he said, well, you know, you know, the really long historical view was, oh, it was when the French tried to hold onto it in the fifties. But Herr said, you know,
Chris Smith: (paraphrasing Michael Herr)”…maybe you just have to think back to those first English Protestants coming to North America and finding the woods of North America so deep and vast and scary that they filled up those spaces with their own devils…”
