BLUES FALLING DOWN LIKE RAIN

“Yessuh, I’s Mary Johnson. And Robert, he’s my baby son. But Little Robert, he dead.”*
That’s what Alan Lomax heard in 1938 when he made his way to meet and record Robert Johnson in Tunica County. I don’t know what I would have done if I heard those words, the expectancy of shaking hands with Robert Johnson still fresh in my heart. I think my whole world would have crumbled down and melted away, leaking through the cracks in the floorboards. Those must be some of the most heartbreaking words ever strung together.
Man, if you’ve sold your soul to the Devil to learn to play the blues, it’s a shameless sin to give it all up at age 27 because some asshole put poison in your drink. I don’t know what Robert Johnson did at the crossroads that night, but I don’t think he sold his soul, because I doubt that the Devil could teach him anything.
“...they tell me he played the first guitar he pick up; never did have to study it, just knew it.”*
And if Mrs. Johnson was right, then that proves my point– Robert was great long before the Devil even noticed him.
What I’d like to know is: how can someone tip poison into Robert Johnson’s drink? Wouldn’t it be easier to perform a liver transplant? How can someone watch him swallow it from across the room, knowing that this guy would never again stomp his foot onto the ground, strike a chord on his guitar, or howl into a hotel room microphone? Can you really sit back with satisfaction after having deposited a sledgehammer into the blues?
Yeah, sure: “What a glorious death for a great myth.” But I don’t think there’s anything particularly glorious in a death brought about by someone slicing off about 40 years from one of the most important artworks of a century.
I don’t care whose boring faces I pass in magazines, because what people consider so incredibly interesting and important is, for the most part, exceptionally irrelevant. And the only substance that is truly priceless– art– gets looked down upon as kind of cute, but not nearly as important as my SUV and “real” things, like the stock market, artillery, bombs, and plastic surgery.
Well, it just so happens that this country owes so much style, sincerity, power, and soul to the blues, that without it America would probably have a hard time trying to compete with Switzerland’s exciting heritage of cuckoo clocks.
We don’t remember the Italian Renaissance because of the banking systems of the time. We remember it because the rebirth of art pressed itself hard against history’s surface, and gave that period its soul.
As for Robert Johnson: I’m sure the Devil did follow that kid around. I just don’t think the Devil looks like we all imagine him to. And I guess that might be the reason why most of us look the wrong way when his shadow is hovering over us.
*Taken from THE LAND WHERE THE BLUES BEGAN by Alan Lomax, 1993, The New Press, New York.
PS: Read the above book if you’re at all interested in the story of the blues. Also, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, by David “Honeyboy” Edwards. This is a firsthand account of what it was like being a rambling Delta blues musician when it all began: knives, guns, women, whisky, suppression, humor, love, bad grammar, and some of the greatest music ever made.