KING OF THE DELTA BLUES

Robert Johnson recorded twenty-nine songs in two hotel rooms, in Dallas and San
Antonio, in 1936 and 1937. These went largely unheard until 1961, when John Hammond
produced the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers. Hearing that album changed the
lives of Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, and scores of others...

Without fanfare or publicity, his first album appeared in 1961. The music was strikingly
out of place and out of time, particularly in a year when the best-selling album in
America was Elvis Presley's Blue Hawaii. Still, as one critic has aptly remarked, King of
the Delta Blues Singers turned Robert Johnson into "a sort of invisible pop star...

After the appearance of King of the Blues Singers, Johnson's reputation steadily grew. .
His music was heard, and imitated, by a coterie of prominent young musicians. Among
the cognoscenti, his album became a badge of hip taste: in the photo on the cover of Bob
Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home (1965), the Johnson album is prominent among the
emblematic pieces of bohemian bric-a-brac on display. What people like Dylan took
away from Johnson's life and work became the source of a tacit ethos, silently
transmitted, internationally shared, creating a new mythic measure of what rock and roll
could be, quite apart from the example of Elvis Presley...

For almost everyone who bought King of the Delta Blues Singers ---the point needs
stressing --- this was new music. In some ways, it was more novel, because more exotic,
than anything else readily available in record stores around the world. There had been
folk song reissues before, of course, on small American labels like Folkways and RBF,
but one had to make a special effort to search them out. There had similarly been blues
reissues before, but nothing as raw as King of the Delta Blues Singers --- and certaonly
nothing as drenched in romance and mystery...

For want of a photograph, the album's cover was a painting. It showed an isolated,
featureless black man hunched over his guitar, casting a long shadow over an equally
featureless ground the color of parched sand. "Robert Johnson is little, very little more
than a name on aging index cards and a few dusty master records n the files of a
phonograph company that no longer exists," the album’s liner notes began. "A country
blues singer from the Mississippi Delta... Robert Johnson appeared and disappeared, in
much the same fashion as a sheet of newspaper twisting and twirling down a dark and
windy midnight street."

Once music has been preserved on recordings, the sounds become available, in principle,
to any listener anywhere. When the music thus preserved represents the orally transmitted
heritage of an otherwise inaccessible milieu, the effect, paradoxically, is to open up for
cosmopolitan appreciation, and imitation, what had been previously segregated, what had
been self-contained: the legacy of an organic community of musical craftsmanship...

What Johnson represented to art school students like Clapton and Keith Richards was, to
start, a matter of music: a complexity of affect conveyed by guttural vocals, kinetic
countermelodies, and a rhythmic attack so relentlessly choppy that, on a recording like
"Walkin' Blues," the singer and his guitar achieve a feeling of raw urgency rarely
matched by later bands playing with amplified instruments. A model of impassioned
artistry, a song like "Walkin' Blues" was also a perfect expression of (among other
sentiments) unrequited love; desolation and abandonment; and the untrammeled freedom
of a young man unafraid to leave his "lonesome home." For a generation bored by the
complacency and comfort of middle-class life, Johnson's songs held out the image of
another world --- one that was liberated; fearful; thrilling...

There was, finally, a certain Gothic beauty about Johnson's legend, which insured that the
legend itself became an influence in its own right. By reputation a diabolical and doomed
figure, he had died for his art. That creative freedom required a pact with the devil was,
of course, a romantic clich6, as well as a major theme in Goethe's Faust, Nietzsche's
philosophy, and Baudelaire's poetry. But with Johnson's example in mind, the mystique
surrounding evil in modern thought acquired a concrete new meaning, transforming the
significance of blues borrowings within rock culture...

For Keith Richards and Bran Jones, by contrast, the blues had now to be visibly rooted in
"Sympathy for the Devil." Thus was born what has become one of the corniest motifs in
subsequent blues-oriented rock and roll, a fascination with evil routinely exploited by so-
called heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath in the 1970s, Van Halen in the 1980s, and
Metailica in the 1990s. As one academic has solemnly summed up the "discursive
practice" of these latter-day rock and ro!l bands, "Running with the Devil means living in
the present, and the music helps us experience the pleasure of the moment ... Freedom is
presented as a lack of s6cial ties: no love, no law, no responsibility, no delayed
gratification.”

That such sentiments almost certainly travesty Robert Johnson's life and work does not
change the lines of cultural descent connecting Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail"
(recorded in 1937) with Van Halen's "Runnin' With the Devil" (1978); or, for that matter,
the parallel lines of cultural descent connecting the gangster folk music of Leadbelly with
the gangsta rap of N.W.A. (for "Niggers With Attitude"---compare "Bad Nigger Makes
Good Minstrel").

Thanks to the growing influence of country blues, and specifically of Johnson*s example,
unruliness, already a key component of the rock ethos, acquired the kind of cultural
legitimacy Norman Mailer had prophesied in his essay "The White Negro": the cachet of
frankly expressing raw desires, deep emotional truths, specifically those too violent for
civil society, too ugly for fine art--too dangerous to be condoned.

[ by James Miller, excerpted from Rock and Roll is Here to Stay edited by William
McKeen]