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King Of The Delta Blues
_______________________________________________________________
Robert Johnson
King of the Delta Blues Singers
Columbia/Legacy/Roots ‘n’ Blues
CK 65746
_______________________________________________________________
I. Cross Road Blues (2:29)**
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/27/1936
2. Terraplane Blues (3:01)
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/23/1936
3. Come On In My Kitchen (2:52)
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/23/1936
4. Walkin' Blues (2:30)**
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/27/1936
5. Last Fair Deal Gone Down (2:39)
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/27/1936
6. 32-20 Blues (2:50)
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/26/1936
7. Kind Hearted Woman Blues (2:51)*
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/23/1936
8. If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day (2:36)
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/27/1936
9. Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped The Devil) (2:52)**
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/27/1936
10. When You Got A Good Friend (2:38)
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/23/1936
11. Ramblin' On My Mind (2:52)**
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/23/1936
12. Stones In My Passway (2:28)
R. Johnson - Recorded 6/19/1937
13. Traveling Riverside Blues (2:47)
R. Johnson - Recorded 6/20/1937
14. Milkcow's Calf Blues (2:17)
R. Johnson - Recorded 6/20/1937
15. Me And The Devil Blues (2:34)
R. Johnson - Recorded 6/20/1937
16. Hell Hound On My Trail (2:37)**
R. Johnson - Recorded 6/20/1937
17. Traveling Riverside Blues (2:39)*
R. Johnson - Recorded 6/20/1937
(Previously Unreleased Alternate Take)
All songs Published by King of Spades Music, BMI.
All songs originally released 1961 Sony Music Entertainment, Inc., except *Originally recorded 1937 Sony Music Entertainment, Inc.
**Changes in song titles reflect revisions to publishing information.
_______________________________________________________________
King of the Delta Blues Singers
By Peter Guralnick
Coming across this album when it was first released in 1961 was perhaps one of the more dramatic events of my life. It came at a time when there was little in the way of blues documentation and the quest for authenticity in any form seemed like a romantic voyage. That was why it was so astonishing to walk into a midtown Manhattan record store without any preparation whatsoever and discover a record by an artist who was little more than a name to me, whose haunted, poetic lyrics had been quoted at length in Sam Charters’ 1959 book, The Country Blues, but whose work was unavailable on LP save for one or two cuts.
Probably every music lover has had a similar type of experience. To turn over an album in one’s hands, as if by touching it one can somehow draw out the music from its grooves. To pore over the liner notes, study the cover art (which in this case was almost certainly intended to evoke a tormented, isolated genius who it might be presumed not only had never been photographed but never lifted up his head), to study the song titles which were redolent of a life and a world that even in 1961 seemed to have all but vanished. “Cross Road Blues.” “Last Fair Deal Gone Down.” “Me And The Devil Blues.” “Hell Hound On My Trail.” I had heard none of these songs – and yet as I carried the album back to my college dorm room, I could almost hear them echoing in my head.
It would have meant nothing, of course, if the music had not borne out the expectations. But it did. I have never experienced such a thrill of discovery as I did listening to the album again and again, heedless of audiophile warnings that vinyl can be worn out, almost holding my breath at the sheer, unexpectedly dazzling surface of the music and what I took to be the elegiac profundity that lay just underneath.
My feelings about Robert Johnson have never changed. Back when the album first came out, a great deal of the ethnomusicological emphasis was on the lyrics; whole books were devoted to lyrics analysis, and blues was frequently regarded as a forum for direct personal expression or veiled social reference when in fact many of the songs derived almost haphazardly from a common pool of verses and were reflective less of a quest for originality than of a rich, shared tradition. With Robert Johnson, on the other hand, there was little question of the individuality of the work, even if direct antecedents could be discovered for many of his songs. With Johnson's blues there was a coherence to the compositions - music and lyrics, both - a deliberately artistic approach that is rare in any genre, let alone one that had frequently been consigned to the category of "folk art." There was in addition a whiff of danger, a distinctive edge that more than anything else may have come to render Robert Johnson existentially at home in times and cultures not his own.
There is no explanation for genius. Robert Johnson created music of the highest sophistication, music in which not a single note is misplaced, in which metaphor can become meaning without the need for explanation. Where is that crossroads, for example? Is it figurative or real? It doesn't matter. The structure of the song, like that of "Kind Hearted Woman," "Stones In My Passway," and half a dozen other titles included here, can withstand any meaning assigned to it. The music grows out of a tradition, to be sure, but it constructs a fresh vision, startling and unimaginable without the context it supplies.
In many ways everything that we have learned about Robert Johnson since the release of this album is, if not irrelevant, unnecessary. The few photographs, into which volumes can be read, show us a slick "jitterbug" whom we might not have imagined from the original liner notes. The reminiscences of friends and family and contemporaries like Honeyboy Edwards, Johnny Shines, and Robert Jr. Lockwood create more of a mystery than they dispel. The picture of a man who lived inside an intricate web of identities, who sang pop songs and polkas along with "Hell Hound On My Trail" and showed the protean adaptability of revolutionary artists down through the ages, does not illuminate so much as confirm our sense that art is its own identity. Even the myth which has virtually overtaken the music that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his extraordinary gifts; a story that appears to have first surfaced in an interview with Son House in the mid-'60s - does not seem anywhere near as mysterious as the music itself.
To me this album is even more astonishing today than it was when it first came out, but perhaps for different reasons. Robert Johnson has survived the mass popularity that came to him fifty years after his death in much the same manner that he endured the obscurity that attended him throughout his brief lifetime: he lived, and lives, within his art. In one sense there was never any question that his music would survive. You can hear it all through the work of Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Baby Boy Warren, Johnny Shines, and the whole school of Chicago blues that came to influence latter-day disciples like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. But this album, too, survives, unequaled and uneclipsed you have only to give yourself over to it as art, not as cultural artifact, to discover - music of the most direct emotional power, music that requires no knowledge, no translation to draw you into its spell. There are only a few albums I can think of that I would include in any catalogue of "desert island discs." Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers would be at the top of the list. There is not a note wasted, not a moment that one would choose to be without. The music is open-ended; it changes with your mood. It is alive.
- Peter Guralnick
July 1998
_______________________________________________________________
Original Liner Notes for Robert Johnson
King of the Delta Blues Singers (CL 1654)
Robert Johnson is little, very little more than a name on aging index cards and a few dusty master records in the files of a phonograph company that no longer exists. A country1 blues singer from the Mississippi Delta that brought forth Son House, Charlie Patton, Bukka White, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, 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. First, he was brought to a makeshift recording studio in a San Antonio hotel room. A year later, he was recorded again, this time in the back of a Dallas office building. Then he was gone, dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend.
Robert Johnson sang primitive blues about women. His references were earthy and only thinly disguised. He lived the life he sang about and which ultimately killed him. He was not unique in that respect. We can point to Sonny Boy Williamson, who was stabbed to death with an ice pick, or Charlie Christian, Bix Beiderbecke, Jimmy Blanton, Billie Holiday, Bunny Berigan, Fats Waller and many other jazz immortals whose lives were snubbed out prematurely. They all died because they did not eat or sleep, because their systems couldn’t weather physical adversities, and, often because they were Negroes and unable to get proper medical care.
Robert Johnson was already a legend in 1938 when John Hammond was planning his "Spirituals To Swing" concert for presentation in Carnegie Hall. Thoroughly convinced that Johnson was the greatest primitive blues singer of all time, Hammond had gone south to purchase his recordings of "Terraplane Blues" and "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" (such so-called "race" records were only sold in the South at the time2). Hammond also wonted Johnson to play in the concert. To locate him, Hammond enlisted the aid of the American Record Corporation's roving A&R man, Don Low, who had recorded Johnson for Vocalion in 1936 and 1937. Low searched throughout the deep South for Johnson, only to learn of his death a few weeks before the concert was scheduled to take place.
Johnson's recordings become collectors' items almost as soon as they were released. Their distribution was limited, and only one, "Terraplane Blues," sold really well, almost exclusively in the deep South.
Efforts on the port of the world's foremost blues research specialists to trace Johnson's career and substantiate details of his life have provided only meager information. Sam Charters, in his book, The Country Blues (Rhinehart, 1959), states that Johnson was about thirty when he recorded. Sources for this information are blues singer Muddy Waters, who never saw or knew Johnson, and the Memphis Jug Band's Will Shade, who saw him in action for only a few moments in 1937. Don Law, who actually recorded Johnson, remembers him as being seventeen or eighteen years old at the time. Until his recording debut, Johnson had seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsonville, Mississippi where he was born and raised. ARC salesman Ernie Gertie, who had heard about Johnson, brought him to Law, fresh from the plantation. Don Law remembers him as slender, handsome, of medium height, with beautiful hands and a remarkable ability to project while he was singing or playing guitar.
Law also recalls that Johnson was an extremely shy young man. He asked him to play guitar for a group of Mexican musicians gathered in a hotel room where the recording equipment had been set up. Embarrassed and suffering from a bad case of stage fright, Johnson turned his face to the wall, his back to the Mexican musicians. Eventually, he calmed down sufficiently to play, but he never faced his audience.
Robert Johnson showed up at the ARC field studios five times. At these five sessions, three in November, 1936, and two in June, 1937, he recorded a total of twenty-nine sides. He earned several hundred dollars from his records, which at that depression time in back-country Mississippi was big money.
Although little is known about Johnson, there is much circumstantial evidence that he liked wine and women as well as song. This was evident on his first recording trip to San Antonio. A country boy in a moderately big town, Johnson found trouble within hours after he arrived. Don Law considered himself responsible for Johnson, found him in a room in a boarding house and told him to get some sleep so he would be ready to begin recording at ten the following morning. Law then joined his wife and some friends for dinner at the Gunter Hotel. He had scarcely begun dinner when he was summoned to the phone. A policeman was calling from the city jail. Johnson had been picked up on a vagrancy charge. Law rushed down to the jail, found Johnson beaten up, his guitar smashed; the cops had not only picked him up but had worked him over. With some difficulty, Law managed to get Johnson freed in his custody, whisked him bock to the boarding house, gave him forty-five cents for breakfast, and told him to stay in the house and not to go out for the rest of the evening. Law returned to the hotel, only to be called to the phone again. This time it was Johnson.
Fearing the worst, Law asked, "What's the matter now?" Johnson replied, "I'm lonesome." Puzzled, Law said "You're lonesome? What do you mean, you're lonesome?" Johnson.replied, ''I'm lonesome and there's a lady here. She wants fifty cents and I lacks a nickel..."
Another lady proved to be Johnson's undoing. Perhaps it was one of the girls he mentions in a blues refrain. In any event, Johnson died of poison, administered by an unknown woman, most likely in a drink. He left only his songs to tell about the anxieties that hounded him, the fears that gripped him, and a few things he wonted from life. He seemed constantly trapped:
"I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees (repeat)
Ask the Lord above for mercy, say boy, if you please
Mmm - standing at the crossroads, I tried to flag a ride (repeat)
Ain't nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by."
- Cross Road Blues
It was obvious that he wanted to get away, but he never could. He was tormented by phantoms and weird, threatening monsters:
"Early this morning when you knocked upon my door (repeat)
I said 'Hello Satan, I believe it’s time to go.'
Me and the Devil was walking side by side (repeat)
I' m going to beat my woman until I get satisfied."
- Me And The Devil Blues
Symbolic beasts seemed to give him a great deal of trouble:
"I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving,
Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail.
I can't keep no money, Hellhound on my trail,
Hellhound on my trail, Hellhound on my trail."
- Hell Hound On My Trail
His most aggravating problem was evidently unrequited love:
“I got kindhearted women, do most anything in this world for me (repeat)
But these evilhearted women, man, they will not let me be.
I love my baby, my baby don’t love me (repeat)
But I really love that woman, can’t stand to leave her be.”
- Kind Hearted Woman Blues
With a fairly large bank roll for that time and place, naïve Johnson was probably fair game for smart connivers. More than one sank her claws into Johnson, only to ditch him when the money ran out:
“I woke up this morning, feeling around for my shoes (repeat)
But you know about it, I’ve got these old walking blues.
Lord, I feel like blowing my old lonesome home,
Got up this morning to find it was gone (repeat)
I got up this morning all I had was gone.
Well, leaving this morning if I have to,
Goin’ to ride the blinds* (repeat).”
- Walkin’ Blues
*riding the blinds – hopping a freight, to hitch a ride, etc. on a railroad train.
Johnson was young and impressionable, he seemed to fall hard, compelled somehow to give his all to predatory women:
“Oh Babe, my life feels all the same,
You breaks my heart when you call Mr. So-and-so’s name.”
- Kind Hearted Woman Blues
“The woman I love took up with my best friend,
Some joker got lucky, stole her back again.”
- Come On In My Kitchen
“I’m going to stay around Jonesboro until my teeth is crowned with gold (repeat)
She’s got a mortgage on my body, a lien on my soul.”
- Traveling Riverside Blues
There is no doubt that Johnson had women as well as trouble in mind:
“She’s got Elgin movements from her head down to her toes (repeat)
She breaks in on a dollar most anywhere she goes.”
- Walkin’ Blues
Women in his case meant only trouble:
“You may bury my body down by the highway side
Babe, I don't care where you bury my body when I'm dead and gone
You may bury my body, ooh, down by the highway side,
So my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride."
- Me And The Devil Blues
_______________________________________________________________
Produced and edited by Frank Driggs
All Songs © (l978) 1990, 1991 King of Spades Music. BMI.
International Copyright Secured.
All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
1Country blues artists are usually distinguished from city blues artists by almost exclusive use of guitar accompaniment or other semi-legitimate instruments like kazoos, harmonica, jugs, slide whistles, washboards and washtub basses. City blues artists are generally accompanied by piano, and guitar, bass, drums and occasionally one or more brass and reed instruments. The style of a country blues artist is generally more primitive and direct than that of a city blues performer.
2It is important to note the distinction between race records, which sold exclusively to a Negro audience chiefly in the rural South, and pop or popular records which were distributed throughout the country to a primarily white audience. Race records were difficult, even impossible, to obtain in northern urban areas like Harlem or Chicago’s South Side. Hundreds of obscure Negro artists made records during the thirties, and the average sales of such records were in the low thousands, often only in the high hundreds. A record that sole five or ten thousand was definitely a hit.
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Reference sources: The Country Blues by Sam Charters (Rhinehart 1959) and Blues Fell This Morning by Paul Oliver (Cassell, Ltd., 1960) and published in the USA by Horizon Press).
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Recordings were taken from available metal masters at Columbia’s Bridgeport factory and from the following collectors: John Hammond, Bernard Klatzko, Henry B. Backey, Robert Stendahl and Peter Whelan.
_______________________________________________________________
The following have given much of their time and consideration in the preparation of this album: Helene Chmura, John Hammond, John Kelly and Don Law.
Original Mastering: Stanley Weiss
Original Cover Painting by Burt Goldblatt
All Other Artwork Courtesy of Lawrence Cohn
Original Record Producer: Don Law, American Record Company
Original Recording Engineer: Vincent Leibler
Original Recording Supervisor: Art Satherly
1961 Reissue Album Producer: Frank Driggs, Columbia Records
Digital Transfer Producer: Stephen C. LaVere, The Estate of Robert Johnson
Original source material provided by Stephen C. LaVere, Richard Nevins (track 14), and Alan Jabbour, Library of Congress, Archive of Folk Song (track 17)
Disc to Digital Transfers: Steven Lasker, Michael Donaldson (track 17)
CEDAR Restoration: Steven Lasker, Venice, CA
Sonic Advice: John R.T. Davies
Digital Masters by Robert Vosgien, CMS Digital, Pasadena, CA
Roots ‘n’ Blues Series Producer: Lawrence Cohn
Project Direction: Adam Block, John Johnson
Legacy A&R: Steve Berkowitz
A&R Coordinator: Patti Matheny
Art Director: Carol Grobe
Packaging Manager: Ari Kast
This title contains previously released material.
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Thanks to: Jeff Jones, Tom Cording, Randy Hoecker, Darren Salmieri
Steve LaVere’s special thanks to:
Steven Lasker for his tireless efforts in transferring these performances so the world-at-large can hear Robert Johnson the way we 78-collectors do.
Alan Jabbour for being so forthcoming in regard to a previously unknown alternate take of “Traveling Riverside Blues.”
Lawrence Cohn for being so instrumental in the Robert Johnson phenomenon we are all presently enjoying.
John Hammond and Frank Driggs for reissuing Robert Johnson’s recordings in the 1960s, and Art Satherly, Don Law, and Vinnie Liebler for recording Robert Johnson in the first place.
Producer’s Note: If you know the location and/or present owner of the original Burt Goldblatt painting used for the cover of this classic reissue, please contact Stephen C. LaVere, in care of the Estate of Robert Johnson, Greenwood, Mississippi.
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© 1998 Sony Music Entertainment Inc./Originally Recorded 1937, Originally Released 1961 Sony Music Entertainment./Manufactured by Columbia Records/550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022-3211/”Columbia,” “Legacy,” Logo and “Roots ‘n’ Blues” Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. Marca Registrada/ Logo is a registered trademark of Sony Music Entertainment Inc./ WARNING: All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.
Robert Johnson
King of the Delta Blues Singers
Columbia/Legacy/Roots ‘n’ Blues
CK 65746
_______________________________________________________________
I. Cross Road Blues (2:29)**
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/27/1936
2. Terraplane Blues (3:01)
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/23/1936
3. Come On In My Kitchen (2:52)
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/23/1936
4. Walkin' Blues (2:30)**
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/27/1936
5. Last Fair Deal Gone Down (2:39)
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/27/1936
6. 32-20 Blues (2:50)
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/26/1936
7. Kind Hearted Woman Blues (2:51)*
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/23/1936
8. If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day (2:36)
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/27/1936
9. Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped The Devil) (2:52)**
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/27/1936
10. When You Got A Good Friend (2:38)
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/23/1936
11. Ramblin' On My Mind (2:52)**
R. Johnson - Recorded 11/23/1936
12. Stones In My Passway (2:28)
R. Johnson - Recorded 6/19/1937
13. Traveling Riverside Blues (2:47)
R. Johnson - Recorded 6/20/1937
14. Milkcow's Calf Blues (2:17)
R. Johnson - Recorded 6/20/1937
15. Me And The Devil Blues (2:34)
R. Johnson - Recorded 6/20/1937
16. Hell Hound On My Trail (2:37)**
R. Johnson - Recorded 6/20/1937
17. Traveling Riverside Blues (2:39)*
R. Johnson - Recorded 6/20/1937
(Previously Unreleased Alternate Take)
All songs Published by King of Spades Music, BMI.
All songs originally released 1961 Sony Music Entertainment, Inc., except *Originally recorded 1937 Sony Music Entertainment, Inc.
**Changes in song titles reflect revisions to publishing information.
_______________________________________________________________
King of the Delta Blues Singers
By Peter Guralnick
Coming across this album when it was first released in 1961 was perhaps one of the more dramatic events of my life. It came at a time when there was little in the way of blues documentation and the quest for authenticity in any form seemed like a romantic voyage. That was why it was so astonishing to walk into a midtown Manhattan record store without any preparation whatsoever and discover a record by an artist who was little more than a name to me, whose haunted, poetic lyrics had been quoted at length in Sam Charters’ 1959 book, The Country Blues, but whose work was unavailable on LP save for one or two cuts.
Probably every music lover has had a similar type of experience. To turn over an album in one’s hands, as if by touching it one can somehow draw out the music from its grooves. To pore over the liner notes, study the cover art (which in this case was almost certainly intended to evoke a tormented, isolated genius who it might be presumed not only had never been photographed but never lifted up his head), to study the song titles which were redolent of a life and a world that even in 1961 seemed to have all but vanished. “Cross Road Blues.” “Last Fair Deal Gone Down.” “Me And The Devil Blues.” “Hell Hound On My Trail.” I had heard none of these songs – and yet as I carried the album back to my college dorm room, I could almost hear them echoing in my head.
It would have meant nothing, of course, if the music had not borne out the expectations. But it did. I have never experienced such a thrill of discovery as I did listening to the album again and again, heedless of audiophile warnings that vinyl can be worn out, almost holding my breath at the sheer, unexpectedly dazzling surface of the music and what I took to be the elegiac profundity that lay just underneath.
My feelings about Robert Johnson have never changed. Back when the album first came out, a great deal of the ethnomusicological emphasis was on the lyrics; whole books were devoted to lyrics analysis, and blues was frequently regarded as a forum for direct personal expression or veiled social reference when in fact many of the songs derived almost haphazardly from a common pool of verses and were reflective less of a quest for originality than of a rich, shared tradition. With Robert Johnson, on the other hand, there was little question of the individuality of the work, even if direct antecedents could be discovered for many of his songs. With Johnson's blues there was a coherence to the compositions - music and lyrics, both - a deliberately artistic approach that is rare in any genre, let alone one that had frequently been consigned to the category of "folk art." There was in addition a whiff of danger, a distinctive edge that more than anything else may have come to render Robert Johnson existentially at home in times and cultures not his own.
There is no explanation for genius. Robert Johnson created music of the highest sophistication, music in which not a single note is misplaced, in which metaphor can become meaning without the need for explanation. Where is that crossroads, for example? Is it figurative or real? It doesn't matter. The structure of the song, like that of "Kind Hearted Woman," "Stones In My Passway," and half a dozen other titles included here, can withstand any meaning assigned to it. The music grows out of a tradition, to be sure, but it constructs a fresh vision, startling and unimaginable without the context it supplies.
In many ways everything that we have learned about Robert Johnson since the release of this album is, if not irrelevant, unnecessary. The few photographs, into which volumes can be read, show us a slick "jitterbug" whom we might not have imagined from the original liner notes. The reminiscences of friends and family and contemporaries like Honeyboy Edwards, Johnny Shines, and Robert Jr. Lockwood create more of a mystery than they dispel. The picture of a man who lived inside an intricate web of identities, who sang pop songs and polkas along with "Hell Hound On My Trail" and showed the protean adaptability of revolutionary artists down through the ages, does not illuminate so much as confirm our sense that art is its own identity. Even the myth which has virtually overtaken the music that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his extraordinary gifts; a story that appears to have first surfaced in an interview with Son House in the mid-'60s - does not seem anywhere near as mysterious as the music itself.
To me this album is even more astonishing today than it was when it first came out, but perhaps for different reasons. Robert Johnson has survived the mass popularity that came to him fifty years after his death in much the same manner that he endured the obscurity that attended him throughout his brief lifetime: he lived, and lives, within his art. In one sense there was never any question that his music would survive. You can hear it all through the work of Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Baby Boy Warren, Johnny Shines, and the whole school of Chicago blues that came to influence latter-day disciples like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. But this album, too, survives, unequaled and uneclipsed you have only to give yourself over to it as art, not as cultural artifact, to discover - music of the most direct emotional power, music that requires no knowledge, no translation to draw you into its spell. There are only a few albums I can think of that I would include in any catalogue of "desert island discs." Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers would be at the top of the list. There is not a note wasted, not a moment that one would choose to be without. The music is open-ended; it changes with your mood. It is alive.
- Peter Guralnick
July 1998
_______________________________________________________________
Original Liner Notes for Robert Johnson
King of the Delta Blues Singers (CL 1654)
Robert Johnson is little, very little more than a name on aging index cards and a few dusty master records in the files of a phonograph company that no longer exists. A country1 blues singer from the Mississippi Delta that brought forth Son House, Charlie Patton, Bukka White, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, 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. First, he was brought to a makeshift recording studio in a San Antonio hotel room. A year later, he was recorded again, this time in the back of a Dallas office building. Then he was gone, dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend.
Robert Johnson sang primitive blues about women. His references were earthy and only thinly disguised. He lived the life he sang about and which ultimately killed him. He was not unique in that respect. We can point to Sonny Boy Williamson, who was stabbed to death with an ice pick, or Charlie Christian, Bix Beiderbecke, Jimmy Blanton, Billie Holiday, Bunny Berigan, Fats Waller and many other jazz immortals whose lives were snubbed out prematurely. They all died because they did not eat or sleep, because their systems couldn’t weather physical adversities, and, often because they were Negroes and unable to get proper medical care.
Robert Johnson was already a legend in 1938 when John Hammond was planning his "Spirituals To Swing" concert for presentation in Carnegie Hall. Thoroughly convinced that Johnson was the greatest primitive blues singer of all time, Hammond had gone south to purchase his recordings of "Terraplane Blues" and "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" (such so-called "race" records were only sold in the South at the time2). Hammond also wonted Johnson to play in the concert. To locate him, Hammond enlisted the aid of the American Record Corporation's roving A&R man, Don Low, who had recorded Johnson for Vocalion in 1936 and 1937. Low searched throughout the deep South for Johnson, only to learn of his death a few weeks before the concert was scheduled to take place.
Johnson's recordings become collectors' items almost as soon as they were released. Their distribution was limited, and only one, "Terraplane Blues," sold really well, almost exclusively in the deep South.
Efforts on the port of the world's foremost blues research specialists to trace Johnson's career and substantiate details of his life have provided only meager information. Sam Charters, in his book, The Country Blues (Rhinehart, 1959), states that Johnson was about thirty when he recorded. Sources for this information are blues singer Muddy Waters, who never saw or knew Johnson, and the Memphis Jug Band's Will Shade, who saw him in action for only a few moments in 1937. Don Law, who actually recorded Johnson, remembers him as being seventeen or eighteen years old at the time. Until his recording debut, Johnson had seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsonville, Mississippi where he was born and raised. ARC salesman Ernie Gertie, who had heard about Johnson, brought him to Law, fresh from the plantation. Don Law remembers him as slender, handsome, of medium height, with beautiful hands and a remarkable ability to project while he was singing or playing guitar.
Law also recalls that Johnson was an extremely shy young man. He asked him to play guitar for a group of Mexican musicians gathered in a hotel room where the recording equipment had been set up. Embarrassed and suffering from a bad case of stage fright, Johnson turned his face to the wall, his back to the Mexican musicians. Eventually, he calmed down sufficiently to play, but he never faced his audience.
Robert Johnson showed up at the ARC field studios five times. At these five sessions, three in November, 1936, and two in June, 1937, he recorded a total of twenty-nine sides. He earned several hundred dollars from his records, which at that depression time in back-country Mississippi was big money.
Although little is known about Johnson, there is much circumstantial evidence that he liked wine and women as well as song. This was evident on his first recording trip to San Antonio. A country boy in a moderately big town, Johnson found trouble within hours after he arrived. Don Law considered himself responsible for Johnson, found him in a room in a boarding house and told him to get some sleep so he would be ready to begin recording at ten the following morning. Law then joined his wife and some friends for dinner at the Gunter Hotel. He had scarcely begun dinner when he was summoned to the phone. A policeman was calling from the city jail. Johnson had been picked up on a vagrancy charge. Law rushed down to the jail, found Johnson beaten up, his guitar smashed; the cops had not only picked him up but had worked him over. With some difficulty, Law managed to get Johnson freed in his custody, whisked him bock to the boarding house, gave him forty-five cents for breakfast, and told him to stay in the house and not to go out for the rest of the evening. Law returned to the hotel, only to be called to the phone again. This time it was Johnson.
Fearing the worst, Law asked, "What's the matter now?" Johnson replied, "I'm lonesome." Puzzled, Law said "You're lonesome? What do you mean, you're lonesome?" Johnson.replied, ''I'm lonesome and there's a lady here. She wants fifty cents and I lacks a nickel..."
Another lady proved to be Johnson's undoing. Perhaps it was one of the girls he mentions in a blues refrain. In any event, Johnson died of poison, administered by an unknown woman, most likely in a drink. He left only his songs to tell about the anxieties that hounded him, the fears that gripped him, and a few things he wonted from life. He seemed constantly trapped:
"I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees (repeat)
Ask the Lord above for mercy, say boy, if you please
Mmm - standing at the crossroads, I tried to flag a ride (repeat)
Ain't nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by."
- Cross Road Blues
It was obvious that he wanted to get away, but he never could. He was tormented by phantoms and weird, threatening monsters:
"Early this morning when you knocked upon my door (repeat)
I said 'Hello Satan, I believe it’s time to go.'
Me and the Devil was walking side by side (repeat)
I' m going to beat my woman until I get satisfied."
- Me And The Devil Blues
Symbolic beasts seemed to give him a great deal of trouble:
"I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving,
Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail.
I can't keep no money, Hellhound on my trail,
Hellhound on my trail, Hellhound on my trail."
- Hell Hound On My Trail
His most aggravating problem was evidently unrequited love:
“I got kindhearted women, do most anything in this world for me (repeat)
But these evilhearted women, man, they will not let me be.
I love my baby, my baby don’t love me (repeat)
But I really love that woman, can’t stand to leave her be.”
- Kind Hearted Woman Blues
With a fairly large bank roll for that time and place, naïve Johnson was probably fair game for smart connivers. More than one sank her claws into Johnson, only to ditch him when the money ran out:
“I woke up this morning, feeling around for my shoes (repeat)
But you know about it, I’ve got these old walking blues.
Lord, I feel like blowing my old lonesome home,
Got up this morning to find it was gone (repeat)
I got up this morning all I had was gone.
Well, leaving this morning if I have to,
Goin’ to ride the blinds* (repeat).”
- Walkin’ Blues
*riding the blinds – hopping a freight, to hitch a ride, etc. on a railroad train.
Johnson was young and impressionable, he seemed to fall hard, compelled somehow to give his all to predatory women:
“Oh Babe, my life feels all the same,
You breaks my heart when you call Mr. So-and-so’s name.”
- Kind Hearted Woman Blues
“The woman I love took up with my best friend,
Some joker got lucky, stole her back again.”
- Come On In My Kitchen
“I’m going to stay around Jonesboro until my teeth is crowned with gold (repeat)
She’s got a mortgage on my body, a lien on my soul.”
- Traveling Riverside Blues
There is no doubt that Johnson had women as well as trouble in mind:
“She’s got Elgin movements from her head down to her toes (repeat)
She breaks in on a dollar most anywhere she goes.”
- Walkin’ Blues
Women in his case meant only trouble:
“You may bury my body down by the highway side
Babe, I don't care where you bury my body when I'm dead and gone
You may bury my body, ooh, down by the highway side,
So my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride."
- Me And The Devil Blues
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Produced and edited by Frank Driggs
All Songs © (l978) 1990, 1991 King of Spades Music. BMI.
International Copyright Secured.
All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
1Country blues artists are usually distinguished from city blues artists by almost exclusive use of guitar accompaniment or other semi-legitimate instruments like kazoos, harmonica, jugs, slide whistles, washboards and washtub basses. City blues artists are generally accompanied by piano, and guitar, bass, drums and occasionally one or more brass and reed instruments. The style of a country blues artist is generally more primitive and direct than that of a city blues performer.
2It is important to note the distinction between race records, which sold exclusively to a Negro audience chiefly in the rural South, and pop or popular records which were distributed throughout the country to a primarily white audience. Race records were difficult, even impossible, to obtain in northern urban areas like Harlem or Chicago’s South Side. Hundreds of obscure Negro artists made records during the thirties, and the average sales of such records were in the low thousands, often only in the high hundreds. A record that sole five or ten thousand was definitely a hit.
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Reference sources: The Country Blues by Sam Charters (Rhinehart 1959) and Blues Fell This Morning by Paul Oliver (Cassell, Ltd., 1960) and published in the USA by Horizon Press).
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Recordings were taken from available metal masters at Columbia’s Bridgeport factory and from the following collectors: John Hammond, Bernard Klatzko, Henry B. Backey, Robert Stendahl and Peter Whelan.
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The following have given much of their time and consideration in the preparation of this album: Helene Chmura, John Hammond, John Kelly and Don Law.
Original Mastering: Stanley Weiss
Original Cover Painting by Burt Goldblatt
All Other Artwork Courtesy of Lawrence Cohn
Original Record Producer: Don Law, American Record Company
Original Recording Engineer: Vincent Leibler
Original Recording Supervisor: Art Satherly
1961 Reissue Album Producer: Frank Driggs, Columbia Records
Digital Transfer Producer: Stephen C. LaVere, The Estate of Robert Johnson
Original source material provided by Stephen C. LaVere, Richard Nevins (track 14), and Alan Jabbour, Library of Congress, Archive of Folk Song (track 17)
Disc to Digital Transfers: Steven Lasker, Michael Donaldson (track 17)
CEDAR Restoration: Steven Lasker, Venice, CA
Sonic Advice: John R.T. Davies
Digital Masters by Robert Vosgien, CMS Digital, Pasadena, CA
Roots ‘n’ Blues Series Producer: Lawrence Cohn
Project Direction: Adam Block, John Johnson
Legacy A&R: Steve Berkowitz
A&R Coordinator: Patti Matheny
Art Director: Carol Grobe
Packaging Manager: Ari Kast
This title contains previously released material.
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Thanks to: Jeff Jones, Tom Cording, Randy Hoecker, Darren Salmieri
Steve LaVere’s special thanks to:
Steven Lasker for his tireless efforts in transferring these performances so the world-at-large can hear Robert Johnson the way we 78-collectors do.
Alan Jabbour for being so forthcoming in regard to a previously unknown alternate take of “Traveling Riverside Blues.”
Lawrence Cohn for being so instrumental in the Robert Johnson phenomenon we are all presently enjoying.
John Hammond and Frank Driggs for reissuing Robert Johnson’s recordings in the 1960s, and Art Satherly, Don Law, and Vinnie Liebler for recording Robert Johnson in the first place.
Producer’s Note: If you know the location and/or present owner of the original Burt Goldblatt painting used for the cover of this classic reissue, please contact Stephen C. LaVere, in care of the Estate of Robert Johnson, Greenwood, Mississippi.
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© 1998 Sony Music Entertainment Inc./Originally Recorded 1937, Originally Released 1961 Sony Music Entertainment./Manufactured by Columbia Records/550 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022-3211/”Columbia,” “Legacy,” Logo and “Roots ‘n’ Blues” Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. Marca Registrada/ Logo is a registered trademark of Sony Music Entertainment Inc./ WARNING: All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.
