1915 Melvin "Lil' Son" Jackson*
1923 Eddie Kirkland*
1925 Edna Hicks+
1935 Bobby Mitchell*
1938 Robert Johnson+
1951 Eric Bibb*
1967 Dan Pickett+
Happy Birthday
Bobby Mitchell *16.08.1935
Bobby Mitchell (16 August 1935 - March 17, 1989) was a New Orleans Rhythm & Blues singer and songwriter.
Mitchell was born in the Algiers section of New Orleans. He was a popular recording artist in the 1950s and early 1960s, making records for Imperial Records, Show Biz Records and Rip Records. He first recorded in his teens with the do-wop group "The Toppers", which was broken up as most of the members were drafted. Mitchell's single "Try Rock 'n Roll," hit the top 20 R&B charts 1956. Many of his sessions were arranged by Dave Bartholomew. His single I'm Gonna Be a Wheel Someday was a hit, predating the even more famous cover of the tune by Fats Domino and got Mitchell a spot on American Bandstand.
In the early 1980s he did radio shows at WWOZ.
BOBBY MITCHELL AND THE TOPPERS - I'M A YOUNG MAN / SHE COULDN'T BE FOUND - IMPERIAL 5309 - 1954
Eddie Kirkland *16.08.1923
Eddie Kirkland (* 16. August 1923 in Jamaika; † 27. Februar 2011 in Crystal River, Florida), war ein afroamerikanischer Bluesmusiker.
Er war als Sänger, Mundharmonikaspieler und Gitarrist ein Vertreter des Genres Electric Blues. Von 1949 bis 1962 war er Manager und Begleitmusiker von John Lee Hooker; er ist auf vielen seiner Aufnahmen aus dieser Zeit als zweiter Gitarrist zu hören. [1] 1962 und 1963 war er Gitarrist und Bandleader bei Otis Redding. [2] In der zweiten Hälfte der 1960er Jahre arbeitete er als Automechaniker. Ab 1970 wurde er als Bluesmusiker wiederentdeckt. Bis zu seinem Tod tourte er fast ununterbrochen und veröffentlichte zahlreiche Aufnahmen. Eddie Kirkland starb mit 87 Jahren bei einem Autounfall in Florida.
Eddie Kirkland (August 16, 1923 – February 27, 2011) was an American electric blues[1] guitarist, harmonicist, singer, and songwriter.
Kirkland, known as the "Gypsy of the Blues" for his rigorous touring schedules, played and toured with John Lee Hooker from 1949 to 1962. After his period of working in tandem with Hooker he pursued a successful solo career, recording for RPM Records, Fortune Records, Volt Records, and King Records, sometimes under the stage name Eddie Kirk. Kirkland continued to tour, write and record albums until his death in February 2011.
Biography
Kirkland was born in Jamaica to a mother, aged 11 (Kirkland was raised believing his mother was his sister), and first heard the blues from "field hollers",[2] and raised in Dothan, Alabama until 1935,[3] when he stowed away in the Sugar Girls Medicine Show tent truck and left town. Blind Blake was the one who influenced him the most in those early days.[4] He was placed on the chorus line with "Diamond Tooth Mary" McLean. When the show closed a year later, he was in Dunkirk, Indiana where he briefly returned to school.
He joined the United States Army during World War II. It was racism in the military, he said, that led him to seek out the devil.[5] After his discharge Kirkland traveled to Detroit where his mother had relocated. After a day's work at the Ford Rouge Plant, Kirkland played his guitar at house parties, and there he met John Lee Hooker. Kirkland, a frequent second guitarist in recordings from 1949–1962. "It was difficult playin' behind Hooker but I had a good ear and was able to move in behind him on anything he did."[6]
Kirkland fashioned his own style of playing open chords, and transformed the rough, porch style delta blues into the electric age by using his thumb, rather than a guitar pick. He secured his own series of recordings with Sid Nathan of King Records in 1953, at Fortune Records in 1958 and, by 1961, on his own album It's the Blues Man, with the King Curtis Band[3] for Prestige Records.
Kirkland became Hooker's road manager and the two traveled from Detroit to the Deep South on many tours, the last being in 1962 when Hooker abandoned Kirkland to go overseas. Kirkland found his way to Macon, Georgia and began performing with Otis Redding as his guitarist and band leader.[3] As Eddie Kirk, he released "The Hawg" as a single on Volt Records in 1963.[7] The record was overshadowed by Rufus Thomas's recordings, and Kirkland, discouraged by the music industry and his own lack of education to change the situation, turned to his other skill and sought work as an auto mechanic to earn a living for his growing family.[citation needed]
In 1970, one of the revivals of the blues was taking place. Peter B. Lowry found Kirkland in Macon and convinced him to record again. His first sessions were done in a motel room, resulting in the acoustic, solo LP Front and Center; his second was a studio-recorded band album, the funky The Devil... and other blues demons. Both were released on Lowry's Trix Records label. It was during the mid-1970s that Kirkland befriended the British blues-rock band, Foghat.[8] Kirkland remained with Lowry, Trix, and was based in the Hudson Valley for twelve years. It was during this period that Kirkland appeared on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert with Muddy Waters, Honeyboy Edwards, and Foghat. These were also the years that Kirkland again energized his sound. "Eddie's thumb pick and fingers style give him freedom to play powerful chord riffs rich in rhythms and harmonic tension. He plays like a funky pianist, simultaneously covering bass lines, chord kick, and counterpoint."[9]
The 1990s brought Randy Labbe as manager, booking agent and on his own record label, Deluge, recorded Kirkland. Three albums were produced during this Maine period, one live, one with a guest appearance from Hooker and one containing a duet with Christine Ohlman. By 2000, Kirkland was on his own again, always doing his own driving to concerts in his Ford County Squires, crossing the country several times a year. Labeled now as the Road Warrior, "A thickset, powerful man in the waistcoat and pants of a pin strip suit; red shirt, medallion, shades and a black leather cap over a bandanna, his heavy leather overcoat slung over his arm,.... he's already a Road Warrior par excellence."[10]
Well into his eighties Kirkland continued to drive himself to gigs along the coast and in Europe, frequently playing with the Wentus Blues Band from Finland.
A documentary short entitled PICK UP THE PIECES was made about a year in Eddie's life (2010) and it could be viewed on youtube.com up until Eddie's death when the family asked that it be removed. It followed Eddie's struggles as an uneducated African American trying to make it as a Blues musician and it chronicled his hard life that included taking three lives in self-defense, his stint in the armed forces resulting in an unfair discharge, his struggles with poverty, his many children ( he claimed 73), and his love of music.
Death
Kirkland died in a car accident on the morning of February 27, 2011 in Crystal River, Florida. At approximately 8:30 a.m. a bus hit Kirkland's car, a 1998 Ford Taurus wagon. Reportedly Kirkland attempted to make a U-turn on U.S. 98 and Oak Park Boulevard, putting him directly in the path of a Greyhound bus. The bus struck the vehicle on the right side and pushed it approximately 200 feet from the point of impact.[11] Kirkland suffered serious injuries and was transported by helicopter to Tampa General Hospital, where he died a short time later. The bus driver and 13 passengers on the bus were not hurt.[12]
Family
Kirkland was survived by his wife, Mary, and nine children.[2] He was predeceased by one child Betty, and his first wife Ida.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_KirklandKirkland, known as the "Gypsy of the Blues" for his rigorous touring schedules, played and toured with John Lee Hooker from 1949 to 1962. After his period of working in tandem with Hooker he pursued a successful solo career, recording for RPM Records, Fortune Records, Volt Records, and King Records, sometimes under the stage name Eddie Kirk. Kirkland continued to tour, write and record albums until his death in February 2011.
Biography
Kirkland was born in Jamaica to a mother, aged 11 (Kirkland was raised believing his mother was his sister), and first heard the blues from "field hollers",[2] and raised in Dothan, Alabama until 1935,[3] when he stowed away in the Sugar Girls Medicine Show tent truck and left town. Blind Blake was the one who influenced him the most in those early days.[4] He was placed on the chorus line with "Diamond Tooth Mary" McLean. When the show closed a year later, he was in Dunkirk, Indiana where he briefly returned to school.
He joined the United States Army during World War II. It was racism in the military, he said, that led him to seek out the devil.[5] After his discharge Kirkland traveled to Detroit where his mother had relocated. After a day's work at the Ford Rouge Plant, Kirkland played his guitar at house parties, and there he met John Lee Hooker. Kirkland, a frequent second guitarist in recordings from 1949–1962. "It was difficult playin' behind Hooker but I had a good ear and was able to move in behind him on anything he did."[6]
Kirkland fashioned his own style of playing open chords, and transformed the rough, porch style delta blues into the electric age by using his thumb, rather than a guitar pick. He secured his own series of recordings with Sid Nathan of King Records in 1953, at Fortune Records in 1958 and, by 1961, on his own album It's the Blues Man, with the King Curtis Band[3] for Prestige Records.
Kirkland became Hooker's road manager and the two traveled from Detroit to the Deep South on many tours, the last being in 1962 when Hooker abandoned Kirkland to go overseas. Kirkland found his way to Macon, Georgia and began performing with Otis Redding as his guitarist and band leader.[3] As Eddie Kirk, he released "The Hawg" as a single on Volt Records in 1963.[7] The record was overshadowed by Rufus Thomas's recordings, and Kirkland, discouraged by the music industry and his own lack of education to change the situation, turned to his other skill and sought work as an auto mechanic to earn a living for his growing family.[citation needed]
In 1970, one of the revivals of the blues was taking place. Peter B. Lowry found Kirkland in Macon and convinced him to record again. His first sessions were done in a motel room, resulting in the acoustic, solo LP Front and Center; his second was a studio-recorded band album, the funky The Devil... and other blues demons. Both were released on Lowry's Trix Records label. It was during the mid-1970s that Kirkland befriended the British blues-rock band, Foghat.[8] Kirkland remained with Lowry, Trix, and was based in the Hudson Valley for twelve years. It was during this period that Kirkland appeared on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert with Muddy Waters, Honeyboy Edwards, and Foghat. These were also the years that Kirkland again energized his sound. "Eddie's thumb pick and fingers style give him freedom to play powerful chord riffs rich in rhythms and harmonic tension. He plays like a funky pianist, simultaneously covering bass lines, chord kick, and counterpoint."[9]
The 1990s brought Randy Labbe as manager, booking agent and on his own record label, Deluge, recorded Kirkland. Three albums were produced during this Maine period, one live, one with a guest appearance from Hooker and one containing a duet with Christine Ohlman. By 2000, Kirkland was on his own again, always doing his own driving to concerts in his Ford County Squires, crossing the country several times a year. Labeled now as the Road Warrior, "A thickset, powerful man in the waistcoat and pants of a pin strip suit; red shirt, medallion, shades and a black leather cap over a bandanna, his heavy leather overcoat slung over his arm,.... he's already a Road Warrior par excellence."[10]
Well into his eighties Kirkland continued to drive himself to gigs along the coast and in Europe, frequently playing with the Wentus Blues Band from Finland.
A documentary short entitled PICK UP THE PIECES was made about a year in Eddie's life (2010) and it could be viewed on youtube.com up until Eddie's death when the family asked that it be removed. It followed Eddie's struggles as an uneducated African American trying to make it as a Blues musician and it chronicled his hard life that included taking three lives in self-defense, his stint in the armed forces resulting in an unfair discharge, his struggles with poverty, his many children ( he claimed 73), and his love of music.
Death
Kirkland died in a car accident on the morning of February 27, 2011 in Crystal River, Florida. At approximately 8:30 a.m. a bus hit Kirkland's car, a 1998 Ford Taurus wagon. Reportedly Kirkland attempted to make a U-turn on U.S. 98 and Oak Park Boulevard, putting him directly in the path of a Greyhound bus. The bus struck the vehicle on the right side and pushed it approximately 200 feet from the point of impact.[11] Kirkland suffered serious injuries and was transported by helicopter to Tampa General Hospital, where he died a short time later. The bus driver and 13 passengers on the bus were not hurt.[12]
Family
Kirkland was survived by his wife, Mary, and nine children.[2] He was predeceased by one child Betty, and his first wife Ida.
Eddie Kirkland & Wentus Blues Band live - Rainbow
Eddie Kirkland git, voc, harp, stories
Wentus Blues Band:
Niko Riipa - g
Juho Kinaret - voc, perc
Robban Hagnäs - b
Mikael Axelqvist - dr
recorded February 5, 2009 at
Kornbrennerei Broeleck, Germany
Wentus Blues Band:
Niko Riipa - g
Juho Kinaret - voc, perc
Robban Hagnäs - b
Mikael Axelqvist - dr
recorded February 5, 2009 at
Kornbrennerei Broeleck, Germany
Eddie Kirkland & Wentus Blues Band live - Honey Bee
Eddie Kirkland git, voc, harp, stories
Wentus Blues Band:
Niko Riipa - g
Juho Kinaret - voc, perc
Robban Hagnäs - b
Mikael Axelqvist - dr
recorded February 5, 2009 at
Kornbrennerei Broeleck, Germany
Wentus Blues Band:
Niko Riipa - g
Juho Kinaret - voc, perc
Robban Hagnäs - b
Mikael Axelqvist - dr
recorded February 5, 2009 at
Kornbrennerei Broeleck, Germany
Eric Bibb *16.08.1951
http://www.ericbibb.com/
Eric Bibb (* 16. August 1951 in New York City) ist ein US-amerikanischer Bluesmusiker und Singer-Songwriter, der fast ausschließlich mit akustischer Gitarre (und Hut) auftritt und mehrfach für den Handy bzw. Blues Music Award nominiert worden ist. Sein Musikstil, bei dem er häufig Fingerpicking-Techniken einsetzt, vermischt akustischen Blues mit Folk, Gospel, R&B und Soul. Er ist der Sohn des Folk-Sängers und Schauspielers Leon Bibb, mit dem er zusammen auch zwei Alben aufnahm.
Kindheit und Jugend
Als Sohn Leon Bibbs wuchs Eric in New York in einer musikalisch vor allem durch Folkmusik geprägten Umgebung auf, in der er unter anderem mit den Musikerfreunden seines Vaters – wie Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan und Odetta – und seinem Onkel, dem bekannten Jazz-Pianisten und Komponisten John Lewis, Kontakt hatte. Seinem Taufpaten, dem Künstler und Bürgerrechtler Paul Robeson, widmete Eric im Jahr 2006, zusammen mit seinem Vater, das Album Praising Peace - A Tribute To Paul Robeson. Nachdem er im Alter von 7 Jahren begonnen hatte, Folkgitarre zu spielen, lernte er ab dem 13. Lebensjahr auf einer High School mit künstlerischem und musikalischem Schwerpunkt auch Gesang und weitere Instrumente wie Kontrabass, Konzertgitarre und Klavier.
Bibb wurde in seiner Jugend stark durch die ausgeprägte Folkszene des Greenwich Village der damaligen Zeit geprägt und sieht sich noch heute nicht zwingend als Bluesmusiker, sondern betont, dass er keinen großen Unterschied zwischen Folk und Blues sehe.[1] Im Alter von 16 Jahren wurde er schließlich als Gitarrist in die ständige Begleitband der TV-Talentshow Someone New seines Vaters aufgenommen. [2][3] In dieser Zeit beeinflusste ihn musikalisch sein Onkel John Lewis, der als Jazz-Musiker mit Miles Davis zusammengearbeitet hatte und später lange im Modern Jazz Quartet spielen würde, und brachte ihm vor allem die Bluesmusik nahe.
Etwas später spielte er auch Gitarre für die Negro Ensemble Company und nahm zunächst ein Studium der Fächer Russisch und Psychologie an der Columbia University auf. [4]
Beginn der Solokarriere
Bibb verließ jedoch 1970 ohne Studienabschluss die Vereinigten Staaten und ging nach Europa, wo er heute noch überwiegend lebt. Über Paris, wo er in Kontakt mit Mickey Baker kam, der ihn für das Gitarrenspiel Robert Johnsons begeisterte, übersiedelte er nach Stockholm. Dort befasste er sich vor allem mit dem Blues aus der Zeit vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg und trat regelmäßig mit eigenen Kompositionen auf. Im Jahr 1972 erschien in Schweden seine erste LP namens Ain't It Grand. Im Jahr 1980 kehrte Bibb schließlich nach New York zurück, um dort seine Karriere als professioneller Blues- und Folkmusiker fortzusetzen. Nach mäßigem Erfolg kehrte er Mitte der 1980er Jahre nach Schweden zurück, wo er als Musiklehrer arbeitete, jedoch nebenbei weiterhin auftrat und in Stockholms Weltmusikszene involviert war. [5] Weitere seiner LPs erschienen von den 70er bis in die 90er Jahre bei verschiedenen schwedischen Musiklabels, meist beim Independent-Label Opus 3. Teilweise kooperierte Bibb dabei mit anderen in Schweden ansässigen amerikanischen Musikern wie dem Blues-Mandolinisten Bert Seivert oder der Gospelsängerin Cyndee Peters. Außerdem arbeitete er im Auftrag von BMG als Songschreiber für andere Künstler. [6]
Erste Erfolge und kommerzieller Durchbruch
Größere öffentliche Aufmerksamkeit bekam Bibb Mitte der 90er Jahre, unter anderem durch einen gemeinsamen Auftritt mit Corey Harris und Keb’ Mo’ beim London Blues Festival 1996. Seine Alben Spirit & The Blues von 1995 und Good Stuff von 1997, beide unter Mitwirkung der Needed Times-Band, wiesen erneut deutliche Gospel- und Folkeinflüsse auf.[7][8][9] Diese LPs waren seine ersten, die – mit Verzögerung – auch in den USA veröffentlicht wurden.
Seine Kooperation mit Taj Mahal und Linda Tillery auf der CD Shakin' A Tailfeather von 1997, einer Zusammenstellung von Liedern für Kinder, wurde mit einer Grammy-Nominierung belohnt.
In den folgenden Jahren tourte Bibb, der als hervorragender Live-Musiker gilt, regelmäßig durch Nordamerika, Australien, Europa und trat dort bspw. beim Glastonbury Festival, beim WOMAD und in der Royal Albert Hall auf; in Nordamerika tourte er u. a. mit Ray Charles, Etta James, Robert Cray, John Mayall und Robben Ford. Weitere CD-Veröffentlichungen, mit Gastmusikern wie Pops und Mavis Staples, Bonnie Raitt, Ruthie Foster, Odetta, Guy Davis, Charlie Musselwhite, Bill Lee, Mamadou Diabaté und Taj Mahal, folgten. [2] Live-Aufnahmen seiner Konzerte sind, in verschiedenen Bandbesetzungen, auf der CD An Evening with Eric Bibb und der Doppel-CD Live à FIP veröffentlicht worden. [3]
Ab 2005 gelang Bibb endgültig auch der kommerzielle Durchbruch in den USA. Die Studioalben A Ship Called Love (2005), Diamond Days (2007) und Get Onboard (2008) verkauften sich gut und erreichten jeweils vordere Platzierungen in der Kategorie Top Blues Albums der Billboard Charts.[10] Songs von diesen CDs wurden u. a. im Film Gospel Hill und in der TV-Serie The District verwendet.
Sein im Januar 2010 veröffentlichtes Album Booker's Guitar widmete er der Blueslegende Booker White, wobei der gleichnamige Titelsong des Albums auf einer Resonatorgitarre aus den 1930er Jahren eingespielt wurde, die White gehört haben soll.[11] Die 13 Eigenkompositionen des Albums, ergänzt durch eine Interpretation des Folk-Traditionals Wayfaring Stranger und die Coverversion von Blind Willie Johnsons Nobody's Fault But Mine, sind überwiegend durch den akustischen, klassischen Delta-Blues der Vorkriegszeit inspiriert, jedoch modern interpretiert im Stile Bibbs. [12] Sein Gesang und Gitarrenspiel wird – im Gegensatz zu seinem letzten Studioalbum Get Onboard, das mit einer Reihe verschiedener Musiker und Instrumente aufgenommen wurde[6] – lediglich auf einigen Songs durch das Mundharmonikaspiel von Grant Dermody ergänzt. Das Album erreichte Platz 1 in der Kategorie Top Blues Albums der Billboard Charts[13] und brachte ihm zahlreiche gute Kritiken und erneut zwei Nominierungen – in den Kategorien Best Acoustic Blues Album und Best Acoustic Blues Artist – der Blues Music Awards 2011 ein[14].
Eric Bibb ist mit einer Musikerin verheiratet und hat eine Tochter.
Eric Bibb (born 16 August 1951) is an American-born acoustic blues singer-songwriter. He moved to Europe in 1970 and currently resides in Helsinki, Finland, together with his Finnish wife and tour manager Sari Matinlassi-Bibb.[1]
Biography
Bibb's father, Leon,[2] was a musical theatre singer, who made a name for himself as part of the 1960s New York folk scene; his uncle was the jazz pianist and composer John Lewis, of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Family friends included Pete Seeger, and actor/singer/activist Paul Robeson, Bibb's godfather.[3]
He was given his first steel-string acoustic guitar aged seven. Growing up surrounded by talent, he recalls a childhood conversation with Bob Dylan, who, on the subject of guitar playing, advised the 11-year-old Bibb to "Keep it simple, forget all that fancy stuff" (as recounted in "The Transatlantic Sessions 5" program and DVD from the BBC).
Bibb remembers from his early teen years:
I would cut school and claim I was sick. When everyone would leave the house I would whip out all the records and do my own personal DJ thing all day long, playing Odetta, Joan Baez, the New Lost City Ramblers, Josh White.[4]
At 16 years old, his father invited him to play guitar in the house band for his TV talent show "Someone New". Bill Lee, who played bass in this band, was later to appear on Bibb's albums Me To You and Friends. In 1969, Bibb played guitar for the Negro Ensemble Company at St. Mark's Place in New York. He went on to study Psychology and Russian at Columbia University, but did not finish these studies. The next year, aged 19, he left for Paris, where he met guitarist Mickey Baker who focused his interest in blues guitar.[5][6][7]
Bibb moved to Stockholm, where he immersed himself in pre-war blues and the newly discovered world music scene, while he continued to write and perform. Good Stuff was released in 1997 on Opus 3 and American label Earthbeat. Bibb signed to the British-based Code Blue label, but only released one album, Me to You, featuring appearances from some of Bibb's personal heroes, Pops and Mavis Staples, and Taj Mahal. This was followed by tours of the UK, US, Canada, France, Sweden and Germany.
Eric Bibb at the Liri Blues Festival, Italy, in 2000.
In the late 1990s Bibb joined forces with his then manager Alan Robinson to form Manhaton Records in Britain. The albums Home to Me (1999), Roadworks (2000) and Painting Signs (2001) followed, as did the 2005 releases for Opus 3, Just Like Love and Spirit & the Blues (Hybrid SACD of 1999 Earthbeat release). He now plays all over the world on tour; see Eric's Website for details. After that, he made A Family Affair (2002) with his father, Leon Bibb. This was followed by Natural Light then Friends – 15 tracks featuring Bibb duetting with friends and musicians he had met on his travels such as Taj Mahal, Odetta, Charlie Musselwhite, Guy Davis, Mamadou Diabate and Djelimady Toukara.[8][9]
In 2004, Eric Bibb released "Friends" as his debut release under Telarc International Corporation. Bibb has remained with Telarc Records since 2004 releasing several additional albums including, "A Ship Called Love" in 2005, "Diamond Days" in 2007, and "Spirit I Am" in 2008. Bibb released Booker's Guitar in January 2010 with music channeled from the Delta Guitar Master himself, Booker White, also known as Bukka White. In November 2011, he signed to Stony Plain Records.[10]
In August 2011 he married his longtime partner and manager Sari Matinlassi-Bibb,[11] whom he met while touring in Australia.[1]
Awards
Bibb has received a Grammy nomination for Shakin' a Tailfeather.[12] He has been nominated for several W.C. Handy Awards. Nominated Acoustic Blues Album of the Year for Spirit and the Blues in 2000; for Home to Me in 2001; for Natural Light in 2004; for A Ship Called Love in 2006. Nominated Acoustic Blues Artist of the Year in 2002; 2004; 2005; 2006; 2008; and 2013.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_BibbBiography
Bibb's father, Leon,[2] was a musical theatre singer, who made a name for himself as part of the 1960s New York folk scene; his uncle was the jazz pianist and composer John Lewis, of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Family friends included Pete Seeger, and actor/singer/activist Paul Robeson, Bibb's godfather.[3]
He was given his first steel-string acoustic guitar aged seven. Growing up surrounded by talent, he recalls a childhood conversation with Bob Dylan, who, on the subject of guitar playing, advised the 11-year-old Bibb to "Keep it simple, forget all that fancy stuff" (as recounted in "The Transatlantic Sessions 5" program and DVD from the BBC).
Bibb remembers from his early teen years:
I would cut school and claim I was sick. When everyone would leave the house I would whip out all the records and do my own personal DJ thing all day long, playing Odetta, Joan Baez, the New Lost City Ramblers, Josh White.[4]
At 16 years old, his father invited him to play guitar in the house band for his TV talent show "Someone New". Bill Lee, who played bass in this band, was later to appear on Bibb's albums Me To You and Friends. In 1969, Bibb played guitar for the Negro Ensemble Company at St. Mark's Place in New York. He went on to study Psychology and Russian at Columbia University, but did not finish these studies. The next year, aged 19, he left for Paris, where he met guitarist Mickey Baker who focused his interest in blues guitar.[5][6][7]
Bibb moved to Stockholm, where he immersed himself in pre-war blues and the newly discovered world music scene, while he continued to write and perform. Good Stuff was released in 1997 on Opus 3 and American label Earthbeat. Bibb signed to the British-based Code Blue label, but only released one album, Me to You, featuring appearances from some of Bibb's personal heroes, Pops and Mavis Staples, and Taj Mahal. This was followed by tours of the UK, US, Canada, France, Sweden and Germany.
Eric Bibb at the Liri Blues Festival, Italy, in 2000.
In the late 1990s Bibb joined forces with his then manager Alan Robinson to form Manhaton Records in Britain. The albums Home to Me (1999), Roadworks (2000) and Painting Signs (2001) followed, as did the 2005 releases for Opus 3, Just Like Love and Spirit & the Blues (Hybrid SACD of 1999 Earthbeat release). He now plays all over the world on tour; see Eric's Website for details. After that, he made A Family Affair (2002) with his father, Leon Bibb. This was followed by Natural Light then Friends – 15 tracks featuring Bibb duetting with friends and musicians he had met on his travels such as Taj Mahal, Odetta, Charlie Musselwhite, Guy Davis, Mamadou Diabate and Djelimady Toukara.[8][9]
In 2004, Eric Bibb released "Friends" as his debut release under Telarc International Corporation. Bibb has remained with Telarc Records since 2004 releasing several additional albums including, "A Ship Called Love" in 2005, "Diamond Days" in 2007, and "Spirit I Am" in 2008. Bibb released Booker's Guitar in January 2010 with music channeled from the Delta Guitar Master himself, Booker White, also known as Bukka White. In November 2011, he signed to Stony Plain Records.[10]
In August 2011 he married his longtime partner and manager Sari Matinlassi-Bibb,[11] whom he met while touring in Australia.[1]
Awards
Bibb has received a Grammy nomination for Shakin' a Tailfeather.[12] He has been nominated for several W.C. Handy Awards. Nominated Acoustic Blues Album of the Year for Spirit and the Blues in 2000; for Home to Me in 2001; for Natural Light in 2004; for A Ship Called Love in 2006. Nominated Acoustic Blues Artist of the Year in 2002; 2004; 2005; 2006; 2008; and 2013.
Eric Bibb - Live At The Basement(DVD)
The songs are:
1. Good Stuff 0:45
2. Shingle By Shingle 3:55
3. Needed Time 8:00
4. Lonesome Valley 12:13
5. Don't Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down 15:48
6. Sebastian's Tune 19:32
7. Got To Do Better 22:14
8. Panama Hat 26:29
9. To Know You 30:08
10. No More Cane On The Brazos 36:12
11. Right On Time 42:25
12. For You 48:06
13. In My Father's House 54:14
14. I Heard The Angels Singin' 59:50
The songs are:
1. Good Stuff 0:45
2. Shingle By Shingle 3:55
3. Needed Time 8:00
4. Lonesome Valley 12:13
5. Don't Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down 15:48
6. Sebastian's Tune 19:32
7. Got To Do Better 22:14
8. Panama Hat 26:29
9. To Know You 30:08
10. No More Cane On The Brazos 36:12
11. Right On Time 42:25
12. For You 48:06
13. In My Father's House 54:14
14. I Heard The Angels Singin' 59:50
Melvin "Lil' Son" Jackson *26.08.1915
Melvin "Lil' Son" Jackson (August 16, 1915, Tyler, Texas - May 30, 1976, Dallas[1]) was an American blues guitarist. He was a contemporary of Lightnin' Hopkins.
Jackson's mother played gospel guitar, and he played early on in a gospel group called the Blue Eagle Four.[1] He trained to be a mechanic and did a stint in the Army during World War II, then decided to pursue a career in blues music.[1] He recorded a demo and sent it to Bill Quinn, the owner of Gold Star Records, in 1946.[2] Quinn signed him to a recording contract and released "Freedom Train Blues" in 1948, which became a nationwide hit in the U.S.[1] He recorded for Imperial Records between 1950 and 1954, both as a solo artist and with a backing band.[1] His 1950 tune "Rockin' and Rollin" was recast by later musicians as "Rock Me Baby".[1][3]
He was hurt in a car crash in the middle of the 1950s and gave up his music career, returning to work as a mechanic.[2] In 1960 he released albums for Arhoolie and Limelight Records, but he did not make a major comeback in the wake of the blues revival.[2] He died of cancer in 1976 in Dallas, at the age of 60.[1][4]
Legacy
B.B. King covered Jackson's "I Got to Leave This Woman", on his 2000 album, Makin' Love Is Good for You. Eric Clapton covered Jackson's "Travelin' Alone", on his 2010 album, Clapton.
Cairo Blues - Lil' Son Jackson
R.I.P.
Dan Pickett +16.08.1967
Only known photo of Dan Pickett
from left: Alex Griffen, Mary Griffen, Betty Jean Griffen, Dan Pickett, and Nancy Griffen
(ca. 1950), Albertville, Alabama. Collection of Axel Küstner, courtesy of Betty Jean Griffen
source: Oxford American Music Issue 71 (12th Annual Southern Music Issue: Music of Alabama) (2011), p. 67
from left: Alex Griffen, Mary Griffen, Betty Jean Griffen, Dan Pickett, and Nancy Griffen
(ca. 1950), Albertville, Alabama. Collection of Axel Küstner, courtesy of Betty Jean Griffen
source: Oxford American Music Issue 71 (12th Annual Southern Music Issue: Music of Alabama) (2011), p. 67
Dan Pickett, eigentlich James Founty (* 31. August 1907 in Pike County, Alabama; † 16. August 1967 in Boaz, Alabama), war ein US-amerikanischer Blues-Sänger und -Gitarrist.
Er nahm im Jahre 1949 insgesamt 20 Songs für das Plattenlabel Gotham in Philadelphia auf, von denen zehn im gleichen Jahr auf insgesamt fünf 78 rpm Schellackplatten von diesem Label herausgebracht wurden. Während des Blues-Revival der 1960er Jahre wurden zunächst einzelne seiner Songs auf Langspielplatten-Samplern wiederveröffentlicht, im Jahr 1987 erschien dann die erste LP nur mit Dan Pickett Titeln (Krazy Kat KK 811), die 1990 auch als CD herausgegeben wurde (Collectables VCL 5311). 2006 sind die 18 bislang aufgefundenen seiner Aufnahmen (2 sind bis heute nicht gefunden worden) vollständig auf einer CD Box des Labels JSP (7753) wiederveröffentlicht worden.
Über sein Leben ist wenig mehr als seine Geburts- und Sterbedaten bekannt, sein musikalisches Vermächtnis jedoch ist von Bruce Bastin, dem Experten für die Bluesstile und -interpreten der Ostküste der USA ("Piedmont Blues"), wie folgt beschrieben worden:
"... Dan Pickett, a superlative performer in the style of the Southeast and high on my list of most exciting bluesmen ever."
Reissuers have unearthed little information about Dan Pickett: He may have come from Alabama, he played a nice slide guitar in a Southeastern blues style, and he did one recording session for the Philadelphia-based Gotham label in 1949. That session produced five singles, all of which have now been compiled along with four previously unreleased sides on a reissue album that purports to contain Pickett's entire recorded output -- unless, of course, as some reviewers have speculated, Dan Pickett happens also to be Charlie Pickett, the Tennessee guitarist who recorded for Decca in 1937. As Tony Russell observed in Juke Blues, both Picketts recorded blues about lemon-squeezing, and Dan uses the name Charlie twice in the lyrics to "Decoration Day." 'Tis from such mystery and speculation that the minds of blues collectors do dissolve.
Edna Hicks +16.08.1925
Edna Hicks (October 14, 1895 – August 16, 1925)[1] was an American blues singer and musician.[2] She is best remembered for her recordings of "Hard Luck Blues" and "Poor Me Blues".[1]She also recorded "Down Hearted Blues",and "Gulf Coast Blues" on the Brunswick label in 1923.
Born Edna Landreaux in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, she was the half-sister of Lizzie Miles.[1] She is believed to have moved north in her mid-teens.[3] Popular in black vaudeville in the American midwest in the late 1910s and 1920s, she appeared often in Chicago and Cincinnati, and made recordings for seven different record labels in 1923 and 1924: Victor, Vocalion, Columbia, Gennett, Brunswick, Ajax, and Paramount Records. Her most frequent accompanist was Fletcher Henderson, although recordings also used Porter Grainger and Lemuel Fowler.[2]
In August 1925, while assisting her husband in filling their automobile's gasoline tank, she was burned after splashed gasoline was ignited by a candle she was holding. She died in a Chicago hospital two days later, on August 16,[4] at 29 years old.
Edna Hicks - Poor Me Blues
Robert Johnson +16.08.1938
Robert Lee Johnson (* 8. Mai 1911 in Hazlehurst, Mississippi; † 16. August 1938 in Greenwood, Mississippi) gilt als einer der bekanntesten Gitarristen, Sänger und Songwriter in der Geschichte des Blues. In Anspielung auf das Mississippi-Delta nennt man ihn auch den King of the Delta Blues.
Kindheit und Jugend
Robert Johnson wurde als Sohn von Julia Ann Dodds, geborene Majors, und ihrem Geliebten Noah Johnson in Hazlehurst als Robert Leroy Dodds geboren. Er hatte insgesamt elf ältere Halbgeschwister mütterlicherseits, darunter ein Zwillingspaar, das bereits bei der Geburt gestorben war. Seine Großeltern kamen noch als Sklavenkinder zur Welt.
Seine Mutter war eigentlich mit Charles Dodds verheiratet, der vor Roberts Geburt jedoch in einem Kampf einen Weißen verletzt hatte und vor einem Lynchmob nach Memphis floh, wo er seinen Namen von Dodds in Spencer änderte. Um 1914 zog Roberts Mutter dann mit ihrem Sohn nach Memphis zu ihrem Ehemann, wo sie dessen neuen Namen annahmen. Einige Jahre später verließ sie ihren Mann und ließ Robert bei ihm. Robert hatte kein allzu gutes Verhältnis zu seinem Stiefvater, der ihn oft geschlagen hat. Ungefähr 1918 schickte Dodds/Spencer ihn dann wieder zu seiner Mutter, die inzwischen Willie „Dusty“ Willis geheiratet hatte. Als seine Mutter ihm als Teenager erklärt hatte, wer sein leiblicher Vater sei, änderte Robert seinen bisherigen Nachnamen Spencer in Johnson.
Mit seiner Mutter und seinem Stiefvater zog Robert 1918 nach Robinsonville, etwa 30 Kilometer von Memphis, wo er bis 1927 auch zur Schule ging. Dort besuchte er von 1924 bis 1927 die Indian Creek School in Commerce, die er allerdings vorzeitig abbrach.
Es wird vermutet, dass sein Schulabbruch mit einem Augenleiden zusammenhing; womöglich hatte er im linken Auge einen Grauen Star. Seine Halbschwester Carrie berichtete, sie habe ihm eine Brille gekauft, die er aber selten getragen habe. Nach seiner Schulzeit arbeitete Johnson zunächst als Plantagenarbeiter.
Musikalische Anfänge
Robert Johnson spielte bereits seit seiner Kindheit Mundharmonika. Als Teenager erwarb er seine erste Gitarre und baute sich zusätzlich einen Ständer für die Mundharmonika, um beide Instrumente gleichzeitig spielen zu können. Eines der ersten Stücke, das er auf der Gitarre erlernte, war Leroy Carrs How Long – How Long Blues.
1928 lernte Johnson in Robinsonville den damals im Mississippi-Delta bekannten Bluesmusiker Willie Brown kennen, der zu dieser Zeit Sideman von Charley Patton war, dem „Vater des Delta-Blues“. Brown wurde Johnsons erster Gitarrenlehrer, und gelegentlich folgte Johnson Patton und Brown zu Auftritten, bei denen er durch Beobachtung sein Spiel zu verbessern suchte.
Im Februar 1929 heiratete Johnson Virginia Travis, die bereits am 19. April 1930 im Kindbett zusammen mit dem Kind starb. 1929 war auch der Bluesmusiker Son House in Robinsonville eingetroffen, er spielte bald häufig mit Patton und Brown. House’ schlichter, aber intensiver Stil beeindruckte Johnson, der jedoch keinen Anschluss an das Trio fand; überliefert ist eine Äußerung von Son House, nach der Johnson ein schlechter Gitarrist gewesen sei, aber ein passabler Bluesharp-Spieler. Oft war Johnson jedoch Zielscheibe des Spotts der drei. Zu dieser Zeit spielte Johnson gemeinsam mit Frank House (dem Bruder von Son House) und dem Pianisten Punk Taylor sowie mit Wash Hemp und Willie Moore. Er verließ Robinsonville 1931.
Er ging auf der Suche nach seinem Vater nach Hazlehurst und lernte auf der Reise neben seiner zweiten Ehefrau Caletta „Callie“ Craft, die er noch 1931 heiratete, auch den Bluesmusiker Ike Zinnermann kennen, der ein exzellenter Gitarrist war und ihn während des gemeinsamen Wanderjahres unterrichtete. 1932 kehrte Johnson nach Robinsonville zurück und überraschte mit einer exzellenten Gitarrentechnik, für die er später berühmt werden sollte.
Da Johnsons Gitarrenspiel sich innerhalb kurzer Zeit so stark verbessert hatte, erzählte man sich, er habe seine Seele an den Teufel verkauft und sei von diesem im Gegenzug in die Geheimnisse des Gitarrenspiels eingewiesen worden. Diese Aussage geht zurück auf eine Äußerung von Son House, der damit die ursprünglich Tommy Johnson zugeschriebene Legende auf seinen Namensvetter übertrug. Robert Johnson sollte diese Legende bereitwillig adaptieren und zu einer seiner zentralen Metaphern ausbauen.
Im Laufe der folgenden Jahre wurde Robert Johnson zu einem gefragten Musiker für Veranstaltungen in Mississippi an Samstagabenden.
Karriere als Musiker
1934 kam Johnson auf seinen mittlerweile vagabundenhaften Wanderschaften in die Stadt Helena in Arkansas und traf dort auf eine Reihe damals schon bekannter Bluesmusiker. Mit seinem Gitarrenspiel beeindruckte er dort Sonny Boy Williamson II., Robert Nighthawk, Howlin’ Wolf sowie Memphis Slim. 1936 kam es zu den ersten Aufnahmen für die American Record Company. Seine erste Veröffentlichung, der Terraplane Blues, verkaufte sich einigermaßen gut (etwa 500 Stück), so dass Johnson 1937 in einer zweiten Aufnahmesitzung weitere Lieder einspielen konnte. Allen weiteren Veröffentlichungen war jedoch kein kommerzieller Erfolg beschieden; teilweise wurden nur zweistellige Verkaufszahlen erzielt. Insgesamt nahm Johnson in seinen beiden Sessions 29 Songs in 41 Takes auf.
Tod
Im August 1938 starb Johnson im Alter von 27 Jahren an den Spätfolgen einer Syphilis connata. Die vielfach kolportierte und auf Sonny Boy Williamson II. zurückgehende Geschichte, er sei von einem eifersüchtigen Ehemann vergiftet worden, wurde 1998 anhand der Todesurkunde widerlegt. Begraben wurde Johnson wahrscheinlich auf einem kleinen Friedhof in dem Ort Three Forks; die genaue Grabstätte ist jedoch unbekannt. Außerdem wird er gelegentlich dem Klub 27 genannten Kreis bekannter Musiker, die mit 27 Jahren starben, zugerechnet. In Morgan City (Mississippi) findet sich ein Gedenkstein an Robert Johnson mit der folgenden Aufschrift:
„Robert Johnson. ‚King of the Delta Blues Singers.‘ His Music struck a Chord that continues to resonate. His Blues adressed Generations he would never know and made Poetry of his Visions and Fears.“
Werk
Johnsons Verdienst liegt vor allem in der Umwandlung der frühen Bluesmusik von Charlie Patton, Son House und Skip James (Delta Blues) zu einem neuen Stil, der dann von Musikern wie Muddy Waters und Elmore James aufgegriffen wurde. Anders als die Songs seiner Zeitgenossen zeichneten sich seine Kompositionen durch große Geschlossenheit aus. Diese Geschlossenheit ist eine Folge davon, dass Johnson seine Stücke speziell auf die Bedingungen der Schellackplatte hin komponierte, die pro Seite eine maximale Spieldauer von drei Minuten bot. Bisher hatten Country-Blues-Musiker Aufbau und Struktur ihrer Stücke an die Auftritte in Juke Joints und auf Festen angepasst, wo Lautstärke und Länge zählten; ihre Aufnahmen waren meist nur Ausschnitte daraus, die nach drei Minuten unterbrochen wurden.
Eine weitere Besonderheit der Lieder Johnsons besteht darin, dass er sich teilweise mit Gesang und Gitarrenspiel in verschiedenen Rhythmen bewegte. So entstand der Eindruck, als ob mehrere Personen spielten. Auch sein Gesangsstil, der manchmal fast weinend und manchmal jauchzend klingt, ist für die damalige Blues-Musik untypisch und macht seine Lieder unverwechselbar. Sein Gitarrenspiel war immer mit Gesang verknüpft, lediglich in seinem allerersten aufgenommenen Song Kind Hearted Woman Blues spielte er zu Beginn des Stücks ein kurzes Gitarrensolo. In der Standardstimmung der Gitarre bevorzugte er die Tonarten A und E; in offenen Stimmungen (Offene D-Stimmung, Offene G-Stimmung), auch open tunings genannt, nutzte er meist G und C. Die jeweilige Dominante oder Subdominante hielt er dabei entweder mit einem ausgestreckten Finger oder mit einem Glas oder Metallzylinder, das bzw. den er über einen Finger der linken Hand stülpte (Bottleneck-Technik).
Wie viele Bluesmusiker seiner Zeit verarbeitete er in seinen Kompositionen vor allem Alltagsbegebenheiten. Etliche Lieder handeln von seinen Wanderschaften, so auch der bekannte Walkin' Blues. Darin reflektiert Johnson seine musikalische Lehrzeit bei Son House, indem er zwischen einem ruhigen und gelehrigen Schülerspiel und dem aufsässigen eigenen Stil wechselt. Weitere Songs dieses Themas sind etwa der Travelling Riverside Blues und I’m a steady rollin' man. Seine Texte waren inspiriert von Frauen (Kind Hearted Woman Blues, Little Queen of Spades) und Geld (Sweet Home Chicago), aber auch von einer Handfeuerwaffe (32–20 Blues) und einem Automobil (Terraplane Blues, nach dem Hudson Terraplane).
Johnson gilt als originärer Songwriter, der durch ältere Musiker wie Kokomo Arnold, Skip James, Peetie Wheatstraw, Lonnie Johnson u. a. inspiriert wurde und eine Vielzahl an Blues-Klassikern hinterließ, die sich im Repertoire von so unterschiedlichen Musikern wie Eric Clapton, den Rolling Stones, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, aber auch dem älteren Big Bill Broonzy wiederfinden, der in den 1950er Jahren seine Version von Kind-hearted Woman – ebenso wie Waters vor ihm – aufnahm. So ist der 32–20 Blues eine Variation von Skip James' 22–20 Blues, Kokomo Arnolds Old Original Kokomo Blues und Milk Cow Blues wurden zu Sweet Home Chicago bzw. Milkcow’s Calf Blues, aus Peetie Wheatstraws King Of Spades wurde die Little Queen Of Spades, Lonnie Johnsons Life Saver Blues findet sich in Malted Milk und Drunken Hearted Man.
Wirkung
Robert Johnson gilt heute als eine der großen Ikonen der populären amerikanischen Kultur. Die Verbreitung seiner Songs und seine Wertschätzung begannen jedoch erst lange nach seinem Tod.
Zwar hatte Johnson sich während seiner aktiven Zeit einigen Respekt bei Musikern wie Howlin’ Wolf oder Sonny Boy Williamson II. erworben, sein Einfluss war jedoch gering und blieb beschränkt auf eher zweitrangige Musiker wie Junior Lockwood oder David „Honeyboy“ Edwards. Johnson war in der afro-amerikanischen Bevölkerung so gut wie niemandem ein Begriff und nur wenigen schwarzen Bluesmusikern bekannt. Die gegenwärtige Forschung schätzt ihn mittlerweile zu diesem Zeitpunkt als annähernd bedeutungslos ein, insbesondere verglichen mit Musikern wie Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson oder Son House. Elijah Wald formulierte es wie folgt: „Soweit es die Entwicklung der schwarzen Musik angeht, war Robert Johnson eine äußerst unbedeutende Gestalt, und nur sehr wenig von dem, was in den Jahrzehnten nach seinem Tod geschah, wäre anders verlaufen, wenn er nie auch nur eine Note gespielt hätte.“[1]
In der weißen amerikanischen Bevölkerung ist Johnson zu seinen Lebzeiten völlig unbekannt geblieben, nur sehr wenige Spezialisten kannten überhaupt seinen Namen. Als einer von ihnen, John Hammond, Robert Johnson für seine Konzertabende From Spirituals to Swing gewinnen wollte, musste er erfahren, dass dieser kurz zuvor bereits verstorben war. Die Person Robert Johnson und seine Musik waren nahezu vergessen. Erst ab den fünfziger Jahren begann sein Name unter Bluesliebhabern und Schellackplattensammlern allmählich bekannter zu werden.
Die erste Wiederveröffentlichung seiner Musik auf dem Album King of the Delta Blues Singers (Columbia) im Jahr 1961 führte schließlich zur Wiederentdeckung von Robert Johnson, wenngleich bei einem vorwiegend weißen Publikum; zu dieser Zeit wurden auch erstmals Umstände seines Lebens und Todes recherchiert. Zwar war das Album mit rund 25.000 verkauften Exemplaren kein allzu großer Publikumserfolg; es erreichte aber vor allem junge Bluesrockmusiker, die daraufhin einige von Johnsons Kompositionen in ihr Repertoire aufnahmen (oftmals allerdings, wie im Falle der Rolling Stones, ohne Angabe des Originalautors). So unterschiedliche Musiker wie Jimi Hendrix, Mike Bloomfield, John Fogerty und Bob Dylan gaben diese Songs als eine wichtige Inspiration an, Keith Richards nannte ihn „den größten Folk-Blues-Gitarristen, der jemals gelebt hat“ und für Eric Clapton ist Robert Johnson „der größte Sänger, der größte Songwriter“.
Als Columbia 1990 eine Sammlung der kompletten Aufnahmen Robert Johnsons veröffentlichte und eine Gesamtauflage von ungefähr 20 bis 30 Tausend Stück kalkulierte,[2] kam dessen Musik unerwarteterweise auch außerhalb des Fachpublikums an. Die Doppel-CD hatte sich 2006 über zwei Millionen mal weltweit verkauft. 1991 wurde sie als Best Historical Album mit einem Grammy ausgezeichnet.
Neben Eric Clapton und Bob Dylan inspirierte Robert Johnson eine Vielzahl von Musikgruppen, darunter Cream, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, die Rolling Stones, Keb’ Mo’ und andere. Dem Künstler wurden auch mehrere Tribute-Alben gewidmet, so Eric Clapton Me and Mr. Johnson; Peter Green Splinter Group – The Robert Johnson Songbook; John Hammond – At the Crossroads u. a.
Bereits bei ihrer Gründung wurde Johnson 1980 in die Blues Hall of Fame aufgenommen, seine Songs „Sweet Home Chicago“, „Cross Road Blues“ und „Come on in My Kitchen“ später ebenso. Als die Zeitschrift Rolling Stone im Jahr 2003 die „hundert größten Gitarristen aller Zeiten“ auflistete, wurde Robert Johnson an fünfter Stelle genannt. Selbst ein Technoclub nannte sich nach Johnson (siehe Robert Johnson (Club)).
Seine auf insgesamt zwölf Schellackplatten veröffentlichten und ursprünglich schlecht verkauften Aufnahmen avancierten zu äußerst seltenen Sammlerstücken, von denen heute meist nur noch eine zweistellige Zahl von Exemplaren existiert. Die Gesamtzahl aller noch existierenden Robert-Johnson-Schellackplatten wird auf nur 159 bis 229 geschätzt.[3] Für diese Originale werden von Sammlern mittlerweile mehr als 3.000 Dollar gezahlt, ein Exemplar von Love in vain Blues/Preaching Blues, von dem nur noch höchstens zehn Exemplare existieren, erzielte sogar einen Preis von 17.000 Dollar.
Es gibt nur drei Fotos, bei denen belegt ist, dass sie tatsächlich Robert Johnson darstellen; zwei von ihnen wurden 1986 bzw. 1989 erstmals veröffentlicht, ein weiteres, das Robert Johnson mit seinem Neffen in der Uniform der US-Navy zeigt, befindet sich unveröffentlicht im Privatbesitz von Mack McCormick. Im Januar 2007 wurde über eBay in den Vereinigten Staaten ein Foto für 795.000 Dollar angeboten, das angeblich Robert Johnson zeigen sollte, Fachkreise zeigten sich aber skeptisch bezüglich der Authentizität des Bildes.
Der amerikanische Hersteller von Westerngitarren, die Gibson Guitar Corporation, gab 2010 zu Ehren von Robert Johnson eine Signature-Gitarre heraus, die Robert Johnson L-1, eine Korpusform, die der Künstler zu Lebzeiten stets bevorzugte.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson_%28Blues-Musiker%29
Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938) was an American singer-songwriter and musician. His landmark recordings in 1936 and 1937 display a combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that has influenced later generations of musicians. Johnson's shadowy and poorly documented life and death at age 27 have given rise to much legend, including the Faustian myth that he sold his soul at a crossroads to achieve success. As an itinerant performer who played mostly on street corners, in juke joints, and at Saturday night dances, Johnson had little commercial success or public recognition in his lifetime.
It was only after the reissue of his recordings in 1961, on the LP King of the Delta Blues Singers that his work reached a wider audience. Johnson is now recognized as a master of the blues, particularly of the Mississippi Delta blues style. He is credited by many rock musicians as an important influence; Eric Clapton has called Johnson "the most important blues singer that ever lived."[1][2] Johnson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an early Influence in their first induction ceremony in 1986.[3] In 2010, David Fricke ranked Johnson fifth in Rolling Stone′s list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.[4]
Life and career
Early life
Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi possibly on May 8, 1911,[5] to Julia Major Dodds (born October 1874) and Noah Johnson (born December 1884). Julia was married to Charles Dodds (born February 1865), a relatively prosperous landowner and furniture maker with whom she had ten children. Charles Dodds had been forced by a mob to leave Hazlehurst following a dispute with white landowners. Julia left Hazlehurst with baby Robert but after some two years sent him to live in Memphis with her husband, who had changed his name to Charles Spencer.[6]
Circa 1919, Robert rejoined his mother in the Mississippi Delta area around Tunica and Robinsonville, Mississippi. Julia's new husband was known as Dusty Willis; he was 24 years her junior. Robert was remembered by some residents as "Little Robert Dusty,"[7] but he was registered at Tunica's Indian Creek School as Robert Spencer. In the 1920 census he is listed as Robert Spencer, living in Lucas, Arkansas, with Will and Julia Willis. Robert was at school in 1924 and 1927[8] and the quality of his signature on his marriage certificate[9] suggests that he was relatively well educated for a boy of his background. One school friend, Willie Coffee, has been discovered and filmed, recalling that Robert was already noted for playing the harmonica and jaw harp.[10] He also remembers that Robert was absent for long periods, which suggests that he may have been living and studying in Memphis.[11]
After school, Robert adopted the surname of his natural father, signing himself as Robert Johnson on the certificate of his marriage to sixteen-year-old Virginia Travis in February 1929. She died in childbirth shortly after.[12] Surviving relatives of Virginia told the blues researcher Robert "Mack" McCormick that this was a divine punishment for Robert's decision to sing secular songs, known as "selling your soul to the Devil". McCormick believes that Johnson himself accepted the phrase as a description of his resolve to abandon the settled life of a husband and farmer to become a full-time blues musician.[13]
Around this time, the blues musician Son House moved to Robinsonville where his musical partner, Willie Brown, lived. Late in life, House remembered Johnson as a "little boy" who was a competent harmonica player but an embarrassingly bad guitarist. Soon after, Johnson left Robinsonville for the area around Martinsville, close to his birthplace Hazlehurst, possibly searching for his natural father. Here he perfected the guitar style of Son House and learned other styles from Isaiah "Ike" Zinnerman.[14] Zinnerman was rumored to have learned supernaturally to play guitar by visiting graveyards at midnight.[15] When Johnson next appeared in Robinsonville, he had seemed to have acquired a miraculous guitar technique.[16] House was interviewed at a time when the legend of Johnson's pact with the Devil was well known among blues researchers. He was asked whether he attributed Johnson's technique to this pact, and his equivocal answers have been taken as confirmation.[5]
While living in Martinsville, Johnson fathered a child with Vergie Mae Smith. He also married Caletta Craft in May 1931. In 1932, the couple moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the Delta. Here Caletta died of childbirth and Johnson left for a career as a "walking" or itinerant musician.[14]
Itinerant musician
From 1932 until his death in 1938, Johnson moved frequently between large cities like Memphis, Tennessee, and Helena, Arkansas, and the smaller towns of the Mississippi Delta and neighboring regions of Mississippi and Arkansas.[17][18] On occasion, he traveled much farther. Fellow blues musician Johnny Shines accompanied him to Chicago, Texas, New York, Canada, Kentucky, and Indiana.[19] Henry Townsend shared a musical engagement with him in St. Louis.[20] In many places he stayed with members of his large extended family or with women friends.[21] He did not marry again but formed some long term relationships with women to whom he would return periodically. One was Estella Coleman, the mother of the blues musician Robert Lockwood, Jr. In other places he stayed with a woman seduced at his first performance.[22][23] In each location, Johnson's hosts were largely ignorant of his life elsewhere. He used different names in different places, employing at least eight distinct surnames.[24]
Biographers have looked for consistency from musicians who knew Johnson in different contexts: Shines, who traveled extensively with him; Lockwood who knew him as his mother's partner; David "Honeyboy" Edwards whose cousin Willie Mae Powell had a relationship with Johnson.[25] From a mass of partial, conflicting, and inconsistent eye-witness accounts,[26] biographers have attempted to summarize Johnson's character. "He was well mannered, he was soft spoken, he was indecipherable".[27] "As for his character, everyone seems to agree that, while he was pleasant and outgoing in public, in private he was reserved and liked to go his own way".[28] "Musicians who knew Johnson testified that he was a nice guy and fairly average—except, of course, for his musical talent, his weakness for whiskey and women, and his commitment to the road."[29]
When Johnson arrived in a new town, he would play for tips on street corners or in front of the local barbershop or a restaurant. Musical associates have said that in live performances Johnson often did not focus on his dark and complex original compositions, but instead pleased audiences by performing more well-known pop standards of the day[30] – and not necessarily blues. With an ability to pick up tunes at first hearing, Johnson had no trouble giving his audiences what they wanted, and certain of his contemporaries later remarked on Johnson's interest in jazz and country music. Johnson also had an uncanny ability to establish a rapport with his audience; in every town in which he stopped, Johnson would establish ties to the local community that would serve him well when he passed through again a month or a year later.
Fellow musician Shines was 17 when he met Johnson in 1933. He estimated Johnson was maybe a year older than himself. In Samuel Charters' Robert Johnson, Shines describes Johnson:
Robert was a very friendly person, even though he was sulky at times, you know. And I hung around Robert for quite a while. One evening he disappeared. He was kind of a peculiar fellow. Robert'd be standing up playing some place, playing like nobody's business. At about that time it was a hustle with him as well as a pleasure. And money'd be coming from all directions. But Robert'd just pick up and walk off and leave you standing there playing. And you wouldn't see Robert no more maybe in two or three weeks ... So Robert and I, we began journeying off. I was just, matter of fact, tagging along.[31]
During this time Johnson established what would be a relatively long-term relationship with Estella Coleman, a woman about 15 years his senior and the mother of musician Robert Lockwood, Jr. Johnson reportedly cultivated a woman to look after him in each town where he played. He supposedly asked homely young women living in the country with their families whether he could go home with them, and in most cases he was accepted, until a boyfriend arrived or Johnson was ready to move on.
In 1941, Alan Lomax learned from Muddy Waters that Johnson had performed in the Clarksdale, Mississippi area.[32] By 1959, historian Samuel Charters could only add that Will Shade of the Memphis Jug Band remembered Johnson had once briefly played with him in West Memphis, Arkansas.[33] In the last year of his life, Johnson is believed to have traveled to St. Louis and possibly Illinois, and then to some states in the East. In 1938, Columbia Records producer John H. Hammond, who owned some of Johnson's records, had record producer Don Law seek out Johnson to book him for the first "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. On learning of Johnson's death, Hammond replaced him with Big Bill Broonzy, but still played two of Johnson's records from the stage.
Recording sessions
In Jackson, Mississippi, around 1936, Johnson sought out H. C. Speir, who ran a general store and doubled as a talent scout. Speir put Johnson in touch with Ernie Oertle, who, as a salesman for the ARC group of labels, introduced Johnson to Don Law to record his first sessions in San Antonio, Texas. The recording session was held on November 23, 1936, in room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio,[34] which Brunswick Records had set up to be a temporary recording studio. In the ensuing three-day session, Johnson played 16 selections, and recorded alternate takes for most of these. Johnson reportedly performed facing the wall, which has been cited as evidence he was a shy man and reserved performer. This conclusion was played up in the inaccurate liner notes of the 1961 album King of the Delta Blues Singers. Slide guitarist Ry Cooder speculates that Johnson played facing a corner to enhance the sound of the guitar, a technique he calls "corner loading".[35]
Among the songs Johnson recorded in San Antonio were "Come On In My Kitchen", "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" and "Cross Road Blues". The first to be released were "Terraplane Blues" and "Last Fair Deal Gone Down", probably the only recordings of his that he would live to hear. "Terraplane Blues" became a moderate regional hit, selling 5,000 copies.
His first recorded song, "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", was part of a cycle of spin-offs and response songs that began with Leroy Carr's "Mean Mistreater Mama" (1934). According to Wald, it was "the most musically complex in the cycle"[36] and stood apart from most rural blues as a through-composed lyric, rather than an arbitrary collection of more-or-less unrelated verses.[37] In contrast to most Delta players, Johnson had absorbed the idea of fitting a composed song into the three minutes of a 78 rpm side.[38] Most of Johnson's "somber and introspective" songs and performances come from his second recording session.[39]
In 1937, Johnson traveled to Dallas, Texas, for another recording session with Don Law in a makeshift studio at the Vitagraph (Warner Brothers) Building, 508 Park Avenue,[40] where Brunswick Record Corporation was located on the third floor.[41] Eleven records from this session would be released within the following year. Johnson did two takes of most of these songs and recordings of those takes survived. Because of this, there is more opportunity to compare different performances of a single song by Johnson than for any other blues performer of his time and place.[42] Johnson recorded almost half of the 29 songs that make up his entire discography in Dallas.
Death
Johnson died on August 16, 1938, at the age of 27, near Greenwood, Mississippi. Although the cause of death is still unknown, there have been a number of theories offered, based on several differing accounts about the events preceding his death. Johnson had been playing for a few weeks at a country dance in a town about 15 miles (24 km) from Greenwood. According to one theory, Johnson was murdered by the jealous husband of a woman with whom he had flirted. In an account by fellow blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson, Johnson had been flirting with a married woman at a dance, where she gave him a bottle of whiskey poisoned by her husband. When Johnson took the bottle, Williamson knocked it out of his hand, admonishing him to never drink from a bottle that he had not personally seen opened. Johnson replied, "Don't ever knock a bottle out of my hand." Soon after, he was offered another (poisoned) bottle and accepted it. Johnson is reported to have begun feeling ill the evening after and had to be helped back to his room in the early morning hours. Over the next three days his condition steadily worsened and witnesses reported that he died in a convulsive state of severe pain. Musicologist Robert "Mack" McCormick claims to have tracked down the man who murdered Johnson, and to have obtained a confession from him in a personal interview, but has declined to reveal the man's name.[43]
While strychnine has been suggested as the poison that killed Johnson, at least one scholar has disputed the notion. Tom Graves, in his book Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson, relies on expert testimony from toxicologists to argue that strychnine has such a distinctive odor and taste that it cannot be disguised, even in strong liquor. Graves also claims that a significant amount of strychnine would have to be consumed in one sitting to be fatal, and that death from the poison would occur within hours, not days.[44] Contemporary David "Honeyboy" Edwards similarly noted that the poison couldn't have been strychnine, since Johnson would have died much more rapidly, instead of suffering for three days.
In addition, LeFlore County Registrar Cornelia Jordan, after conducting an investigation into Johnson's death for the state director of Vital Statistics, R.N. Whitfield, wrote on Johnson's death certificate, "I talked with the white man on whose place this negro died and I also talked with a negro woman on the place. The plantation owner said the negro man, seemingly about 26 years old, came from Tunica two or three weeks before he died to play banjo at a negro dance given there on the plantation. He stayed in the house with some of the negroes saying he wanted to pick cotton. The white man did not have a doctor for this negro as he had not worked for him. He was buried in a homemade coffin furnished by the county. The plantation owner said it was his opinion that the negro died of syphilis."[45]
Gravesite
The exact location of his grave is officially unknown; three different markers have been erected at possible church cemetery burial sites outside of Greenwood.
Research in the 1980s and 1990s strongly suggests Johnson was buried in the graveyard of the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church near Morgan City, Mississippi, not far from Greenwood, in an unmarked grave. A one-ton cenotaph in the shape of an obelisk, listing all of Johnson's song titles, with a central inscription by Peter Guralnick, was placed at this location in 1990, paid for by Columbia Records and numerous smaller contributions made through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund.
In 1990 a small marker with the epitaph "Resting in the Blues" was placed in the cemetery of Payne Chapel near Quito, Mississippi by an Atlanta rock group named the Tombstones, after they saw a photograph in Living Blues magazine of an unmarked spot alleged by one of Johnson's ex-girlfriends to be Johnson's burial site.[46]
More recent research by Stephen LaVere (including statements from Rosie Eskridge, the wife of the supposed gravedigger) indicates that the actual grave site is under a big pecan tree in the cemetery of the Little Zion Church, north of Greenwood along Money Road. Through Stephen LaVere Sony Music has placed a marker at this site which bears LaVere's name as well as Johnson's.
An interviewee in the documentary The Search for Robert Johnson (1991) suggests that owing to poverty and lack of transportation Johnson is most likely to have been buried in a pauper's grave (or "potter's field") very near where he died.
Devil legend
According to legend, as a young man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi, Robert Johnson had a tremendous desire to become a great blues musician. He was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight. There he was met by a large black man (actually the Devil) who took the guitar and tuned it. The Devil played a few songs and then returned the guitar to Johnson, giving him mastery of the instrument. This was in effect, a deal with the Devil mirroring the legend of Faust. In exchange for his soul, Robert Johnson was able to create the blues for which he became famous.
Various accounts
This legend was developed over time, and has been chronicled by Gayle Dean Wardlow,[47] Edward Komara[48] and Elijah Wald, who sees the legend as largely dating from Johnson's rediscovery by white fans more than two decades after his death.[49] Son House once told the story to Pete Welding as an explanation of Johnson's astonishingly rapid mastery of the guitar. Welding reported it as a serious belief in a widely read article in Down Beat in 1966.[50] Other interviewers failed to elicit any confirmation from House and there were fully two years between House's observation of Johnson as first a novice and then a master.
Further details were absorbed from the imaginative retellings by Greil Marcus[51] and Robert Palmer.[52] Most significantly, the detail was added that Johnson received his gift from a large black man at a crossroads. There is dispute as to how and when the crossroads detail was attached to the Robert Johnson story. All the published evidence, including a full chapter on the subject in the biography Crossroads by Tom Graves, suggests an origin in the story of blues musician Tommy Johnson. This story was collected from his musical associate Ishman Bracey and his elder brother Ledell in the 1960s.[53] One version of Ledell Johnson's account was published in David Evans's 1971 biography of Tommy,[54] and was repeated in print in 1982 alongside Son House's story in the widely read Searching for Robert Johnson.[55]
In another version, Ledell placed the meeting not at a crossroads but in a graveyard. This resembles the story told to Steve LaVere that Ike Zinnerman of Hazlehurst, Mississippi learned to play the guitar at midnight while sitting on tombstones. Zinnerman is believed to have influenced the playing of the young Robert Johnson.[56]
Recent research by blues scholar Bruce Conforth, in Living Blues magazine, makes the story clearer. Johnson and Ike Zimmerman did practice in a graveyard at night, because it was quiet and no one would disturb them, but it was not the Hazlehurst cemetery as had been believed. Zimmerman (his actual name as it was reportedly spelled on census records for the family going back into the early 1800s, his social security card, social security death notice, funeral program, and by his daughters) was not from Hazlehurst but nearby Beauregard, Mississippi. And he didn't practice in one graveyard, but in several in the area.[57] Johnson spent about a year living with and learning from Zimmerman, who ultimately accompanied Johnson back to the Delta to look after him.
While Dockery, Hazlehurst and Beauregard have each been claimed as the locations of the mythical crossroads, there are also tourist attractions claiming to be "The Crossroads" in both Clarksdale and Memphis.[58] Locals in Rosedale, Mississippi, claim Johnson sold his soul to the Devil at the intersection of highways 1 and 8 in their town, while the 1986 movie Crossroads was filmed in Beulah, Mississippi. Blues historian Steve Cheseborough writes that it may be impossible to discover the exact location of the mythical crossroads, because "Robert Johnson was a rambling guy".[59]
Interpretations
Some scholars have argued that the devil in these songs may not refer only to the Christian story of Satan, but also to the African trickster god Legba, himself associated with crossroads. Folklorist Harry M. Hyatt wrote that, during his research in the South from 1935–1939, when African-Americans born in the 19th or early-20th century said they or anyone else had "sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads," they had a different meaning in mind. Hyatt claimed there was evidence indicating African religious retentions surrounding Legba and the making of a "deal" (not selling the soul in the same sense as in the Faustian tradition cited by Graves) with this so-called "devil" at the crossroads.[60]
The Blues and the Blues singer has really special powers over women, especially. It is said that the Blues singer could possess women and have any woman they wanted. And so when Robert Johnson came back, having left his community as an apparently mediocre musician, with a clear genius in his guitar style and lyrics, people said he must have sold his soul to the devil. And that fits in with this old African association with the crossroads where you find wisdom: you go down to the crossroads to learn, and in his case to learn in a Faustian pact, with the devil. You sell your soul to become the greatest musician in history.[61]
This view that the devil in Johnson's songs is derived from an African deity was strenuously challenged by blues scholar David Evans. In an essay published in 1999, Demythologizing the Blues, Evans wrote:
There are ... several serious problems with this crossroads myth. The devil imagery found in the blues is thoroughly familiar from western folklore, and nowhere do blues singers ever mention Legba or any other African deity in their songs or other lore. The actual African music connected with cults of Legba and similar trickster deities sounds nothing like the blues, but rather features polyrhythmic percussion and choral call-and-response singing.[62]
Musicologist Alan Lomax dismissed the myth by stating "In fact, every blues fiddler, banjo picker, harp blower, piano strummer and guitar framer was, in the opinion of both himself and his peers, a child of the Devil, a consequence of the black view of the European dance embrace as sinful in the extreme".[63]
Musical style
Robert Johnson is today considered a master of the blues, particularly of the Delta blues style; Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones said in 1990, "You want to know how good the blues can get? Well, this is it." But according to Elijah Wald, in his book Escaping the Delta, Johnson in his own time was most respected for his ability to play in such a wide variety of styles—from raw country slide guitar to jazz and pop licks—and to pick up guitar parts almost instantly upon hearing a song.[64] His first recorded song, "Kind Hearted Woman Blues," in contrast to the prevailing Delta style of the time, more resembled the style of Chicago or St. Louis, with "a full-fledged, abundantly varied musical arrangement."[65] Unusual for a Delta player of the time, a recording exhibits what Johnson could do entirely outside of a blues style. "They're Red Hot," from his first recording session, shows that he was also comfortable with an "uptown" swing or ragtime sound similar to the Harlem Hamfats but, as Wald remarks, "no record company was heading to Mississippi in search of a down-home Ink Spots ... [H]e could undoubtedly have come up with a lot more songs in this style if the producers had wanted them."[66] Myers adds:
To the uninitiated, Johnson's recordings may sound like just another dusty Delta blues musician wailing away. But a careful listen reveals that Johnson was a revisionist in his time... Johnson's tortured soul vocals and anxiety-ridden guitar playing aren't found in the cotton-field blues of his contemporaries.[67]
Voice
An important aspect of Johnson's singing was his use of microtonality. These subtle inflections of pitch help explain why his singing conveys such powerful emotion. Eric Clapton described Johnson's music as "the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice." In two takes of "Me and the Devil Blues" he shows a high degree of precision in the complex vocal delivery of the last verse: "The range of tone he can pack into a few lines is astonishing."[68] The song's "hip humor and sophistication" is often overlooked. "[G]enerations of blues writers in search of wild Delta primitivism," writes Wald, have been inclined to overlook or undervalue aspects that show Johnson as a polished professional performer.[69]
Johnson is also known for using the guitar as 'the other vocalist in the song', a technique later perfected by B. B. King and his personified guitar known as 'Lucille': "In Africa and in Afro-American tradition, there is the tradition of the talking instrument, beginning with the drums ... the one-strand and then the six-strings with bottleneck-style performance; it becomes a competing voice ...or a complementary voice ... in the performance."[61]
Bob Dylan wrote that "When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard. The songs weren't customary blues songs. They were so utterly fluid. At first they went by quick, too quick to even get. They jumped all over the place in range and subject matter, short punchy verses that resulted in some panoramic story-fires of mankind blasting off the surface of this spinning piece of plastic."[70]
Instrument
Johnson mastered the guitar, being considered today one of the all-time greats on the instrument. His approach was highly complex and extremely advanced musically. When Keith Richards was first introduced to Johnson's music by his bandmate Brian Jones, he replied, "Who is the other guy playing with him?", not realizing it was Johnson playing on one guitar. "I was hearing two guitars, and it took a long time to actually realise he was doing it all by himself,"[71] said Richards, who would later add "Robert Johnson was like an orchestra all by himself."[67] "As for his guitar technique, it's politely reedy but ambitiously eclectic—moving effortlessly from hen-picking and bottleneck slides to a full deck of chucka-chucka rhythm figures."[67]
Lyrics
In The Story with Dick Gordon, Bill Ferris of American Public Media said: "Robert Johnson I think of in the same way I think of the British Romantic poets, Keats and Shelley, who burned out early, who were geniuses at wordsmithing poetry ... The Blues, if anything, are deeply sexual. You know, 'my car doesn't run, I'm gonna check my oil' ... 'if you don't like my apples, don't shake my tree'. Every verse has sexuality associated with it."[61]
Influences
Johnson fused approaches specific to Delta blues to those from the broader music world. The slide guitar work on "Rambling on My Mind" is pure Delta and Johnson's vocal there has "a touch of ... Son House rawness," but the train imitation on the bridge is not at all typical of Delta blues, and is more like something out of minstrel show music or vaudeville.[72] Johnson did record versions of "Preaching the Blues" and "Walking Blues" in the older bluesman's vocal and guitar style (House's chronology is questioned by Guralnick). As with the first take of "Come On In My Kitchen," the influence of Skip James is evident in James's "Devil Got My Woman", but the lyrics rise to the level of first-rate poetry, and Johnson sings with a strained voice found nowhere else in his recorded output.[73]
The sad, romantic "Love in Vain" successfully blends several of Johnson's disparate influences. The form, including the wordless last verse, follows Leroy Carr's last hit "When the Sun Goes Down"; the words of the last sung verse come directly from a song Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded in 1926.[74] Johnson's last-ever recording, "Milkcow's Calf Blues" is his most direct tribute to Kokomo Arnold, who wrote "Milkcow Blues" and who influenced Johnson's vocal style.[75]
"From Four Until Late" shows Johnson's mastery of a blues style not usually associated with the Delta. He croons the lyrics in a manner reminiscent of Lonnie Johnson, and his guitar style is more that of a ragtime-influenced player like Blind Blake.[76] Lonnie Johnson's influence on Robert Johnson is even clearer in two other departures from the usual Delta style: "Malted Milk" and "Drunken Hearted Man". Both copy the arrangement of Lonnie Johnson's "Life Saver Blues".[77] The two takes of "Me and the Devil Blues" show the influence of Peetie Wheatstraw, calling into question the interpretation of this piece as "the spontaneous heart-cry of a demon-driven folk artist."[69]
Legacy
Robert Johnson has had enormous impact on music and musicians—but outside his own time, place, and even genre for which he was famous. His influence on contemporaries was much smaller, due in part to the fact that he was an itinerant performer—playing mostly on street corners, in juke joints, and at Saturday night dances—who worked in a then undervalued style of music. He also died young after recording only a handful of songs. Johnson, though well-traveled and admired in his performances, was little noted in his lifetime, his records even less so. "Terraplane Blues", sometimes described as Johnson's only hit record, outsold his others, but was still only a minor success.
If one had asked black blues fans about Robert Johnson in the first twenty years after his death, writes Elijah Wald, "the response in the vast majority of cases would have been a puzzled 'Robert who?'" This lack of recognition extended to black musicians: "As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note".[78] With the album King of the Delta Blues Singers, a compilation of Johnson's recordings released in 1961, Columbia Records introduced his work to a much wider audience—fame and recognition he only received long after his death.
Rock and roll
Johnson's major influence has been on genres of music that weren’t recognized as such until long after his death: rock and roll and rock. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included four of his songs in a set of 500[79] they deemed to have shaped the genre:
“Sweet Home Chicago” (1936)
“Cross Road Blues” (1936)
“Hellhound on My Trail” (1937)
“Love in Vain” (1937)
Johnson recorded these songs a decade and a half before the recognized advent of rock and roll, dying a year or two later. The Museum inducted him as an early influence in their first induction ceremony in 1986, almost a half century after his death. Marc Meyers of the Wall Street Journal wrote that, "His 'Stop Breakin' Down Blues' from 1937 is so far ahead of its time that the song could easily have been a rock demo cut in 1954."[67]
Rock music and related genres
Many of the artists who claim to have been influenced by Johnson the most, injecting his revolutionary stylings into their work and recording tribute songs and collections, are prominent rock musicians from the United Kingdom. His impact and influence on these future star musicians from England—who would then come to develop and define both the rock and roll and rock music eras—resulted not from personal appearances or direct fraternization. Instead, the artistic power of his exceptional talents and original compositions would be relayed across the Atlantic many years after his death through the compilation of his works released in 1961 by Columbia Records (King of the Delta Blues Singers).
Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones introduced bandmate Keith Richards to his first Robert Johnson album. The blues master's recordings would have as much impact on him as on Mick Jagger. The group performed his "Walkin' Blues" at the Rock and Roll Circus in 1968. They arranged their own version of "Love in Vain" for their album Let It Bleed and recorded "Stop Breakin' Down Blues" for Exile on Main Street. In addition, Mick Jagger, in his role as Turner in the 1970 film Performance, performs solo excerpts from "Come On In My Kitchen" and "Me and the Devil Blues."
Alexis Korner, referred to as "the Founding Father of British Blues", co-wrote and recorded a song entitled "Robert Johnson" on his The Party Album released in 1978. Other examples of the influence he had on English blues and blues-rock musicians and musical groups include:
Eric Clapton, founder and member of many legendary groups, considered Johnson "the most important blues musician who ever lived."[71] He recorded enough of his songs to make Me and Mr. Johnson, a blues-rock album released in 2004 as a tribute to the legendary bluesman (also made into the film Sessions for Robert J). He'd earlier recorded "Crossroads", an arrangement of "Cross Road Blues", with Cream in 1968, leading some to consider him "the man largely responsible for making Robert Johnson a household name."[80]
Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin referred to him on NPR's Fresh Air (recorded in 2004) as “Robert Johnson, to whom we all owed our existence, in some way.” His group recorded "Traveling Riverside Blues", a song that drew from Johnson's original and quoted a number of Johnson's songs in the lyrics. Not only the lyrics, but the music video was influenced as well—taking images of the 'Delta' that Johnson often wrote about in his own music.
Fleetwood Mac were strongly influenced by Johnson in the group's early years as a British blues band. Guitarist Jeremy Spencer contributed two covers of Johnson-derived songs to the group's early albums, and lead guitarist Peter Green would later go on to record Johnson's entire catalog over the course of two albums, The Robert Johnson Songbook and Hot Foot Powder.
Sam Dunn's documentary Metal Evolution cites that Robert Johnson was the "great grandfather to all things heavy metal" with members of Rush and Slipknot agreeing that he played a major role in the future of rock music.
Bob Dylan wrote of Johnson in his 2004 autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, "If I hadn't heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn't have felt free enough or upraised enough to write."[70]
Guitar technique
His revolutionary guitar playing has led contemporary experts, assessing his talents through the handful of old recordings available, to rate him among the greatest guitar players of all time:
In 1990 Spin magazine rated him first in its 35 Guitar Gods listing—on the 52nd anniversary of his death.[81]
In 2008 Rolling Stone magazine ranked him fifth on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time—70 years after he died.[4]
In 2010 Guitar.com ranked him ninth in its list of Gibson.com’s Top 50 Guitarists of All Time—72 years after he died.[82]
Musicians who proclaim his profound impact on them, including Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton, all rated in the top ten with him on each of these lists. The boogie bass line he fashioned for "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" has now passed into the standard guitar repertoire. At the time it was completely new, a guitarist's version of something people would only ever have heard on a piano.[83]
Lifetime achievement
The Complete Recordings, a double-disc box set released by Sony/Columbia Legacy on August 28, 1990, containing almost everything Robert Johnson ever recorded, with all 29 recordings (and 12 alternate takes) won a Grammy Award for “Best Historical Album” that year. In 2006 he was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (accepted by his son Claud).
It was only after the reissue of his recordings in 1961, on the LP King of the Delta Blues Singers that his work reached a wider audience. Johnson is now recognized as a master of the blues, particularly of the Mississippi Delta blues style. He is credited by many rock musicians as an important influence; Eric Clapton has called Johnson "the most important blues singer that ever lived."[1][2] Johnson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an early Influence in their first induction ceremony in 1986.[3] In 2010, David Fricke ranked Johnson fifth in Rolling Stone′s list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.[4]
Life and career
Early life
Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi possibly on May 8, 1911,[5] to Julia Major Dodds (born October 1874) and Noah Johnson (born December 1884). Julia was married to Charles Dodds (born February 1865), a relatively prosperous landowner and furniture maker with whom she had ten children. Charles Dodds had been forced by a mob to leave Hazlehurst following a dispute with white landowners. Julia left Hazlehurst with baby Robert but after some two years sent him to live in Memphis with her husband, who had changed his name to Charles Spencer.[6]
Circa 1919, Robert rejoined his mother in the Mississippi Delta area around Tunica and Robinsonville, Mississippi. Julia's new husband was known as Dusty Willis; he was 24 years her junior. Robert was remembered by some residents as "Little Robert Dusty,"[7] but he was registered at Tunica's Indian Creek School as Robert Spencer. In the 1920 census he is listed as Robert Spencer, living in Lucas, Arkansas, with Will and Julia Willis. Robert was at school in 1924 and 1927[8] and the quality of his signature on his marriage certificate[9] suggests that he was relatively well educated for a boy of his background. One school friend, Willie Coffee, has been discovered and filmed, recalling that Robert was already noted for playing the harmonica and jaw harp.[10] He also remembers that Robert was absent for long periods, which suggests that he may have been living and studying in Memphis.[11]
After school, Robert adopted the surname of his natural father, signing himself as Robert Johnson on the certificate of his marriage to sixteen-year-old Virginia Travis in February 1929. She died in childbirth shortly after.[12] Surviving relatives of Virginia told the blues researcher Robert "Mack" McCormick that this was a divine punishment for Robert's decision to sing secular songs, known as "selling your soul to the Devil". McCormick believes that Johnson himself accepted the phrase as a description of his resolve to abandon the settled life of a husband and farmer to become a full-time blues musician.[13]
Around this time, the blues musician Son House moved to Robinsonville where his musical partner, Willie Brown, lived. Late in life, House remembered Johnson as a "little boy" who was a competent harmonica player but an embarrassingly bad guitarist. Soon after, Johnson left Robinsonville for the area around Martinsville, close to his birthplace Hazlehurst, possibly searching for his natural father. Here he perfected the guitar style of Son House and learned other styles from Isaiah "Ike" Zinnerman.[14] Zinnerman was rumored to have learned supernaturally to play guitar by visiting graveyards at midnight.[15] When Johnson next appeared in Robinsonville, he had seemed to have acquired a miraculous guitar technique.[16] House was interviewed at a time when the legend of Johnson's pact with the Devil was well known among blues researchers. He was asked whether he attributed Johnson's technique to this pact, and his equivocal answers have been taken as confirmation.[5]
While living in Martinsville, Johnson fathered a child with Vergie Mae Smith. He also married Caletta Craft in May 1931. In 1932, the couple moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the Delta. Here Caletta died of childbirth and Johnson left for a career as a "walking" or itinerant musician.[14]
Itinerant musician
From 1932 until his death in 1938, Johnson moved frequently between large cities like Memphis, Tennessee, and Helena, Arkansas, and the smaller towns of the Mississippi Delta and neighboring regions of Mississippi and Arkansas.[17][18] On occasion, he traveled much farther. Fellow blues musician Johnny Shines accompanied him to Chicago, Texas, New York, Canada, Kentucky, and Indiana.[19] Henry Townsend shared a musical engagement with him in St. Louis.[20] In many places he stayed with members of his large extended family or with women friends.[21] He did not marry again but formed some long term relationships with women to whom he would return periodically. One was Estella Coleman, the mother of the blues musician Robert Lockwood, Jr. In other places he stayed with a woman seduced at his first performance.[22][23] In each location, Johnson's hosts were largely ignorant of his life elsewhere. He used different names in different places, employing at least eight distinct surnames.[24]
Biographers have looked for consistency from musicians who knew Johnson in different contexts: Shines, who traveled extensively with him; Lockwood who knew him as his mother's partner; David "Honeyboy" Edwards whose cousin Willie Mae Powell had a relationship with Johnson.[25] From a mass of partial, conflicting, and inconsistent eye-witness accounts,[26] biographers have attempted to summarize Johnson's character. "He was well mannered, he was soft spoken, he was indecipherable".[27] "As for his character, everyone seems to agree that, while he was pleasant and outgoing in public, in private he was reserved and liked to go his own way".[28] "Musicians who knew Johnson testified that he was a nice guy and fairly average—except, of course, for his musical talent, his weakness for whiskey and women, and his commitment to the road."[29]
When Johnson arrived in a new town, he would play for tips on street corners or in front of the local barbershop or a restaurant. Musical associates have said that in live performances Johnson often did not focus on his dark and complex original compositions, but instead pleased audiences by performing more well-known pop standards of the day[30] – and not necessarily blues. With an ability to pick up tunes at first hearing, Johnson had no trouble giving his audiences what they wanted, and certain of his contemporaries later remarked on Johnson's interest in jazz and country music. Johnson also had an uncanny ability to establish a rapport with his audience; in every town in which he stopped, Johnson would establish ties to the local community that would serve him well when he passed through again a month or a year later.
Fellow musician Shines was 17 when he met Johnson in 1933. He estimated Johnson was maybe a year older than himself. In Samuel Charters' Robert Johnson, Shines describes Johnson:
Robert was a very friendly person, even though he was sulky at times, you know. And I hung around Robert for quite a while. One evening he disappeared. He was kind of a peculiar fellow. Robert'd be standing up playing some place, playing like nobody's business. At about that time it was a hustle with him as well as a pleasure. And money'd be coming from all directions. But Robert'd just pick up and walk off and leave you standing there playing. And you wouldn't see Robert no more maybe in two or three weeks ... So Robert and I, we began journeying off. I was just, matter of fact, tagging along.[31]
During this time Johnson established what would be a relatively long-term relationship with Estella Coleman, a woman about 15 years his senior and the mother of musician Robert Lockwood, Jr. Johnson reportedly cultivated a woman to look after him in each town where he played. He supposedly asked homely young women living in the country with their families whether he could go home with them, and in most cases he was accepted, until a boyfriend arrived or Johnson was ready to move on.
In 1941, Alan Lomax learned from Muddy Waters that Johnson had performed in the Clarksdale, Mississippi area.[32] By 1959, historian Samuel Charters could only add that Will Shade of the Memphis Jug Band remembered Johnson had once briefly played with him in West Memphis, Arkansas.[33] In the last year of his life, Johnson is believed to have traveled to St. Louis and possibly Illinois, and then to some states in the East. In 1938, Columbia Records producer John H. Hammond, who owned some of Johnson's records, had record producer Don Law seek out Johnson to book him for the first "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. On learning of Johnson's death, Hammond replaced him with Big Bill Broonzy, but still played two of Johnson's records from the stage.
Recording sessions
In Jackson, Mississippi, around 1936, Johnson sought out H. C. Speir, who ran a general store and doubled as a talent scout. Speir put Johnson in touch with Ernie Oertle, who, as a salesman for the ARC group of labels, introduced Johnson to Don Law to record his first sessions in San Antonio, Texas. The recording session was held on November 23, 1936, in room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio,[34] which Brunswick Records had set up to be a temporary recording studio. In the ensuing three-day session, Johnson played 16 selections, and recorded alternate takes for most of these. Johnson reportedly performed facing the wall, which has been cited as evidence he was a shy man and reserved performer. This conclusion was played up in the inaccurate liner notes of the 1961 album King of the Delta Blues Singers. Slide guitarist Ry Cooder speculates that Johnson played facing a corner to enhance the sound of the guitar, a technique he calls "corner loading".[35]
Among the songs Johnson recorded in San Antonio were "Come On In My Kitchen", "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" and "Cross Road Blues". The first to be released were "Terraplane Blues" and "Last Fair Deal Gone Down", probably the only recordings of his that he would live to hear. "Terraplane Blues" became a moderate regional hit, selling 5,000 copies.
His first recorded song, "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", was part of a cycle of spin-offs and response songs that began with Leroy Carr's "Mean Mistreater Mama" (1934). According to Wald, it was "the most musically complex in the cycle"[36] and stood apart from most rural blues as a through-composed lyric, rather than an arbitrary collection of more-or-less unrelated verses.[37] In contrast to most Delta players, Johnson had absorbed the idea of fitting a composed song into the three minutes of a 78 rpm side.[38] Most of Johnson's "somber and introspective" songs and performances come from his second recording session.[39]
In 1937, Johnson traveled to Dallas, Texas, for another recording session with Don Law in a makeshift studio at the Vitagraph (Warner Brothers) Building, 508 Park Avenue,[40] where Brunswick Record Corporation was located on the third floor.[41] Eleven records from this session would be released within the following year. Johnson did two takes of most of these songs and recordings of those takes survived. Because of this, there is more opportunity to compare different performances of a single song by Johnson than for any other blues performer of his time and place.[42] Johnson recorded almost half of the 29 songs that make up his entire discography in Dallas.
Death
Johnson died on August 16, 1938, at the age of 27, near Greenwood, Mississippi. Although the cause of death is still unknown, there have been a number of theories offered, based on several differing accounts about the events preceding his death. Johnson had been playing for a few weeks at a country dance in a town about 15 miles (24 km) from Greenwood. According to one theory, Johnson was murdered by the jealous husband of a woman with whom he had flirted. In an account by fellow blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson, Johnson had been flirting with a married woman at a dance, where she gave him a bottle of whiskey poisoned by her husband. When Johnson took the bottle, Williamson knocked it out of his hand, admonishing him to never drink from a bottle that he had not personally seen opened. Johnson replied, "Don't ever knock a bottle out of my hand." Soon after, he was offered another (poisoned) bottle and accepted it. Johnson is reported to have begun feeling ill the evening after and had to be helped back to his room in the early morning hours. Over the next three days his condition steadily worsened and witnesses reported that he died in a convulsive state of severe pain. Musicologist Robert "Mack" McCormick claims to have tracked down the man who murdered Johnson, and to have obtained a confession from him in a personal interview, but has declined to reveal the man's name.[43]
While strychnine has been suggested as the poison that killed Johnson, at least one scholar has disputed the notion. Tom Graves, in his book Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson, relies on expert testimony from toxicologists to argue that strychnine has such a distinctive odor and taste that it cannot be disguised, even in strong liquor. Graves also claims that a significant amount of strychnine would have to be consumed in one sitting to be fatal, and that death from the poison would occur within hours, not days.[44] Contemporary David "Honeyboy" Edwards similarly noted that the poison couldn't have been strychnine, since Johnson would have died much more rapidly, instead of suffering for three days.
In addition, LeFlore County Registrar Cornelia Jordan, after conducting an investigation into Johnson's death for the state director of Vital Statistics, R.N. Whitfield, wrote on Johnson's death certificate, "I talked with the white man on whose place this negro died and I also talked with a negro woman on the place. The plantation owner said the negro man, seemingly about 26 years old, came from Tunica two or three weeks before he died to play banjo at a negro dance given there on the plantation. He stayed in the house with some of the negroes saying he wanted to pick cotton. The white man did not have a doctor for this negro as he had not worked for him. He was buried in a homemade coffin furnished by the county. The plantation owner said it was his opinion that the negro died of syphilis."[45]
Gravesite
The exact location of his grave is officially unknown; three different markers have been erected at possible church cemetery burial sites outside of Greenwood.
Research in the 1980s and 1990s strongly suggests Johnson was buried in the graveyard of the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church near Morgan City, Mississippi, not far from Greenwood, in an unmarked grave. A one-ton cenotaph in the shape of an obelisk, listing all of Johnson's song titles, with a central inscription by Peter Guralnick, was placed at this location in 1990, paid for by Columbia Records and numerous smaller contributions made through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund.
In 1990 a small marker with the epitaph "Resting in the Blues" was placed in the cemetery of Payne Chapel near Quito, Mississippi by an Atlanta rock group named the Tombstones, after they saw a photograph in Living Blues magazine of an unmarked spot alleged by one of Johnson's ex-girlfriends to be Johnson's burial site.[46]
More recent research by Stephen LaVere (including statements from Rosie Eskridge, the wife of the supposed gravedigger) indicates that the actual grave site is under a big pecan tree in the cemetery of the Little Zion Church, north of Greenwood along Money Road. Through Stephen LaVere Sony Music has placed a marker at this site which bears LaVere's name as well as Johnson's.
An interviewee in the documentary The Search for Robert Johnson (1991) suggests that owing to poverty and lack of transportation Johnson is most likely to have been buried in a pauper's grave (or "potter's field") very near where he died.
Devil legend
According to legend, as a young man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi, Robert Johnson had a tremendous desire to become a great blues musician. He was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight. There he was met by a large black man (actually the Devil) who took the guitar and tuned it. The Devil played a few songs and then returned the guitar to Johnson, giving him mastery of the instrument. This was in effect, a deal with the Devil mirroring the legend of Faust. In exchange for his soul, Robert Johnson was able to create the blues for which he became famous.
Various accounts
This legend was developed over time, and has been chronicled by Gayle Dean Wardlow,[47] Edward Komara[48] and Elijah Wald, who sees the legend as largely dating from Johnson's rediscovery by white fans more than two decades after his death.[49] Son House once told the story to Pete Welding as an explanation of Johnson's astonishingly rapid mastery of the guitar. Welding reported it as a serious belief in a widely read article in Down Beat in 1966.[50] Other interviewers failed to elicit any confirmation from House and there were fully two years between House's observation of Johnson as first a novice and then a master.
Further details were absorbed from the imaginative retellings by Greil Marcus[51] and Robert Palmer.[52] Most significantly, the detail was added that Johnson received his gift from a large black man at a crossroads. There is dispute as to how and when the crossroads detail was attached to the Robert Johnson story. All the published evidence, including a full chapter on the subject in the biography Crossroads by Tom Graves, suggests an origin in the story of blues musician Tommy Johnson. This story was collected from his musical associate Ishman Bracey and his elder brother Ledell in the 1960s.[53] One version of Ledell Johnson's account was published in David Evans's 1971 biography of Tommy,[54] and was repeated in print in 1982 alongside Son House's story in the widely read Searching for Robert Johnson.[55]
In another version, Ledell placed the meeting not at a crossroads but in a graveyard. This resembles the story told to Steve LaVere that Ike Zinnerman of Hazlehurst, Mississippi learned to play the guitar at midnight while sitting on tombstones. Zinnerman is believed to have influenced the playing of the young Robert Johnson.[56]
Recent research by blues scholar Bruce Conforth, in Living Blues magazine, makes the story clearer. Johnson and Ike Zimmerman did practice in a graveyard at night, because it was quiet and no one would disturb them, but it was not the Hazlehurst cemetery as had been believed. Zimmerman (his actual name as it was reportedly spelled on census records for the family going back into the early 1800s, his social security card, social security death notice, funeral program, and by his daughters) was not from Hazlehurst but nearby Beauregard, Mississippi. And he didn't practice in one graveyard, but in several in the area.[57] Johnson spent about a year living with and learning from Zimmerman, who ultimately accompanied Johnson back to the Delta to look after him.
While Dockery, Hazlehurst and Beauregard have each been claimed as the locations of the mythical crossroads, there are also tourist attractions claiming to be "The Crossroads" in both Clarksdale and Memphis.[58] Locals in Rosedale, Mississippi, claim Johnson sold his soul to the Devil at the intersection of highways 1 and 8 in their town, while the 1986 movie Crossroads was filmed in Beulah, Mississippi. Blues historian Steve Cheseborough writes that it may be impossible to discover the exact location of the mythical crossroads, because "Robert Johnson was a rambling guy".[59]
Interpretations
Some scholars have argued that the devil in these songs may not refer only to the Christian story of Satan, but also to the African trickster god Legba, himself associated with crossroads. Folklorist Harry M. Hyatt wrote that, during his research in the South from 1935–1939, when African-Americans born in the 19th or early-20th century said they or anyone else had "sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads," they had a different meaning in mind. Hyatt claimed there was evidence indicating African religious retentions surrounding Legba and the making of a "deal" (not selling the soul in the same sense as in the Faustian tradition cited by Graves) with this so-called "devil" at the crossroads.[60]
The Blues and the Blues singer has really special powers over women, especially. It is said that the Blues singer could possess women and have any woman they wanted. And so when Robert Johnson came back, having left his community as an apparently mediocre musician, with a clear genius in his guitar style and lyrics, people said he must have sold his soul to the devil. And that fits in with this old African association with the crossroads where you find wisdom: you go down to the crossroads to learn, and in his case to learn in a Faustian pact, with the devil. You sell your soul to become the greatest musician in history.[61]
This view that the devil in Johnson's songs is derived from an African deity was strenuously challenged by blues scholar David Evans. In an essay published in 1999, Demythologizing the Blues, Evans wrote:
There are ... several serious problems with this crossroads myth. The devil imagery found in the blues is thoroughly familiar from western folklore, and nowhere do blues singers ever mention Legba or any other African deity in their songs or other lore. The actual African music connected with cults of Legba and similar trickster deities sounds nothing like the blues, but rather features polyrhythmic percussion and choral call-and-response singing.[62]
Musicologist Alan Lomax dismissed the myth by stating "In fact, every blues fiddler, banjo picker, harp blower, piano strummer and guitar framer was, in the opinion of both himself and his peers, a child of the Devil, a consequence of the black view of the European dance embrace as sinful in the extreme".[63]
Musical style
Robert Johnson is today considered a master of the blues, particularly of the Delta blues style; Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones said in 1990, "You want to know how good the blues can get? Well, this is it." But according to Elijah Wald, in his book Escaping the Delta, Johnson in his own time was most respected for his ability to play in such a wide variety of styles—from raw country slide guitar to jazz and pop licks—and to pick up guitar parts almost instantly upon hearing a song.[64] His first recorded song, "Kind Hearted Woman Blues," in contrast to the prevailing Delta style of the time, more resembled the style of Chicago or St. Louis, with "a full-fledged, abundantly varied musical arrangement."[65] Unusual for a Delta player of the time, a recording exhibits what Johnson could do entirely outside of a blues style. "They're Red Hot," from his first recording session, shows that he was also comfortable with an "uptown" swing or ragtime sound similar to the Harlem Hamfats but, as Wald remarks, "no record company was heading to Mississippi in search of a down-home Ink Spots ... [H]e could undoubtedly have come up with a lot more songs in this style if the producers had wanted them."[66] Myers adds:
To the uninitiated, Johnson's recordings may sound like just another dusty Delta blues musician wailing away. But a careful listen reveals that Johnson was a revisionist in his time... Johnson's tortured soul vocals and anxiety-ridden guitar playing aren't found in the cotton-field blues of his contemporaries.[67]
Voice
An important aspect of Johnson's singing was his use of microtonality. These subtle inflections of pitch help explain why his singing conveys such powerful emotion. Eric Clapton described Johnson's music as "the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice." In two takes of "Me and the Devil Blues" he shows a high degree of precision in the complex vocal delivery of the last verse: "The range of tone he can pack into a few lines is astonishing."[68] The song's "hip humor and sophistication" is often overlooked. "[G]enerations of blues writers in search of wild Delta primitivism," writes Wald, have been inclined to overlook or undervalue aspects that show Johnson as a polished professional performer.[69]
Johnson is also known for using the guitar as 'the other vocalist in the song', a technique later perfected by B. B. King and his personified guitar known as 'Lucille': "In Africa and in Afro-American tradition, there is the tradition of the talking instrument, beginning with the drums ... the one-strand and then the six-strings with bottleneck-style performance; it becomes a competing voice ...or a complementary voice ... in the performance."[61]
Bob Dylan wrote that "When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard. The songs weren't customary blues songs. They were so utterly fluid. At first they went by quick, too quick to even get. They jumped all over the place in range and subject matter, short punchy verses that resulted in some panoramic story-fires of mankind blasting off the surface of this spinning piece of plastic."[70]
Instrument
Johnson mastered the guitar, being considered today one of the all-time greats on the instrument. His approach was highly complex and extremely advanced musically. When Keith Richards was first introduced to Johnson's music by his bandmate Brian Jones, he replied, "Who is the other guy playing with him?", not realizing it was Johnson playing on one guitar. "I was hearing two guitars, and it took a long time to actually realise he was doing it all by himself,"[71] said Richards, who would later add "Robert Johnson was like an orchestra all by himself."[67] "As for his guitar technique, it's politely reedy but ambitiously eclectic—moving effortlessly from hen-picking and bottleneck slides to a full deck of chucka-chucka rhythm figures."[67]
Lyrics
In The Story with Dick Gordon, Bill Ferris of American Public Media said: "Robert Johnson I think of in the same way I think of the British Romantic poets, Keats and Shelley, who burned out early, who were geniuses at wordsmithing poetry ... The Blues, if anything, are deeply sexual. You know, 'my car doesn't run, I'm gonna check my oil' ... 'if you don't like my apples, don't shake my tree'. Every verse has sexuality associated with it."[61]
Influences
Johnson fused approaches specific to Delta blues to those from the broader music world. The slide guitar work on "Rambling on My Mind" is pure Delta and Johnson's vocal there has "a touch of ... Son House rawness," but the train imitation on the bridge is not at all typical of Delta blues, and is more like something out of minstrel show music or vaudeville.[72] Johnson did record versions of "Preaching the Blues" and "Walking Blues" in the older bluesman's vocal and guitar style (House's chronology is questioned by Guralnick). As with the first take of "Come On In My Kitchen," the influence of Skip James is evident in James's "Devil Got My Woman", but the lyrics rise to the level of first-rate poetry, and Johnson sings with a strained voice found nowhere else in his recorded output.[73]
The sad, romantic "Love in Vain" successfully blends several of Johnson's disparate influences. The form, including the wordless last verse, follows Leroy Carr's last hit "When the Sun Goes Down"; the words of the last sung verse come directly from a song Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded in 1926.[74] Johnson's last-ever recording, "Milkcow's Calf Blues" is his most direct tribute to Kokomo Arnold, who wrote "Milkcow Blues" and who influenced Johnson's vocal style.[75]
"From Four Until Late" shows Johnson's mastery of a blues style not usually associated with the Delta. He croons the lyrics in a manner reminiscent of Lonnie Johnson, and his guitar style is more that of a ragtime-influenced player like Blind Blake.[76] Lonnie Johnson's influence on Robert Johnson is even clearer in two other departures from the usual Delta style: "Malted Milk" and "Drunken Hearted Man". Both copy the arrangement of Lonnie Johnson's "Life Saver Blues".[77] The two takes of "Me and the Devil Blues" show the influence of Peetie Wheatstraw, calling into question the interpretation of this piece as "the spontaneous heart-cry of a demon-driven folk artist."[69]
Legacy
Robert Johnson has had enormous impact on music and musicians—but outside his own time, place, and even genre for which he was famous. His influence on contemporaries was much smaller, due in part to the fact that he was an itinerant performer—playing mostly on street corners, in juke joints, and at Saturday night dances—who worked in a then undervalued style of music. He also died young after recording only a handful of songs. Johnson, though well-traveled and admired in his performances, was little noted in his lifetime, his records even less so. "Terraplane Blues", sometimes described as Johnson's only hit record, outsold his others, but was still only a minor success.
If one had asked black blues fans about Robert Johnson in the first twenty years after his death, writes Elijah Wald, "the response in the vast majority of cases would have been a puzzled 'Robert who?'" This lack of recognition extended to black musicians: "As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note".[78] With the album King of the Delta Blues Singers, a compilation of Johnson's recordings released in 1961, Columbia Records introduced his work to a much wider audience—fame and recognition he only received long after his death.
Rock and roll
Johnson's major influence has been on genres of music that weren’t recognized as such until long after his death: rock and roll and rock. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included four of his songs in a set of 500[79] they deemed to have shaped the genre:
“Sweet Home Chicago” (1936)
“Cross Road Blues” (1936)
“Hellhound on My Trail” (1937)
“Love in Vain” (1937)
Johnson recorded these songs a decade and a half before the recognized advent of rock and roll, dying a year or two later. The Museum inducted him as an early influence in their first induction ceremony in 1986, almost a half century after his death. Marc Meyers of the Wall Street Journal wrote that, "His 'Stop Breakin' Down Blues' from 1937 is so far ahead of its time that the song could easily have been a rock demo cut in 1954."[67]
Rock music and related genres
Many of the artists who claim to have been influenced by Johnson the most, injecting his revolutionary stylings into their work and recording tribute songs and collections, are prominent rock musicians from the United Kingdom. His impact and influence on these future star musicians from England—who would then come to develop and define both the rock and roll and rock music eras—resulted not from personal appearances or direct fraternization. Instead, the artistic power of his exceptional talents and original compositions would be relayed across the Atlantic many years after his death through the compilation of his works released in 1961 by Columbia Records (King of the Delta Blues Singers).
Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones introduced bandmate Keith Richards to his first Robert Johnson album. The blues master's recordings would have as much impact on him as on Mick Jagger. The group performed his "Walkin' Blues" at the Rock and Roll Circus in 1968. They arranged their own version of "Love in Vain" for their album Let It Bleed and recorded "Stop Breakin' Down Blues" for Exile on Main Street. In addition, Mick Jagger, in his role as Turner in the 1970 film Performance, performs solo excerpts from "Come On In My Kitchen" and "Me and the Devil Blues."
Alexis Korner, referred to as "the Founding Father of British Blues", co-wrote and recorded a song entitled "Robert Johnson" on his The Party Album released in 1978. Other examples of the influence he had on English blues and blues-rock musicians and musical groups include:
Eric Clapton, founder and member of many legendary groups, considered Johnson "the most important blues musician who ever lived."[71] He recorded enough of his songs to make Me and Mr. Johnson, a blues-rock album released in 2004 as a tribute to the legendary bluesman (also made into the film Sessions for Robert J). He'd earlier recorded "Crossroads", an arrangement of "Cross Road Blues", with Cream in 1968, leading some to consider him "the man largely responsible for making Robert Johnson a household name."[80]
Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin referred to him on NPR's Fresh Air (recorded in 2004) as “Robert Johnson, to whom we all owed our existence, in some way.” His group recorded "Traveling Riverside Blues", a song that drew from Johnson's original and quoted a number of Johnson's songs in the lyrics. Not only the lyrics, but the music video was influenced as well—taking images of the 'Delta' that Johnson often wrote about in his own music.
Fleetwood Mac were strongly influenced by Johnson in the group's early years as a British blues band. Guitarist Jeremy Spencer contributed two covers of Johnson-derived songs to the group's early albums, and lead guitarist Peter Green would later go on to record Johnson's entire catalog over the course of two albums, The Robert Johnson Songbook and Hot Foot Powder.
Sam Dunn's documentary Metal Evolution cites that Robert Johnson was the "great grandfather to all things heavy metal" with members of Rush and Slipknot agreeing that he played a major role in the future of rock music.
Bob Dylan wrote of Johnson in his 2004 autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, "If I hadn't heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut down—that I wouldn't have felt free enough or upraised enough to write."[70]
Guitar technique
His revolutionary guitar playing has led contemporary experts, assessing his talents through the handful of old recordings available, to rate him among the greatest guitar players of all time:
In 1990 Spin magazine rated him first in its 35 Guitar Gods listing—on the 52nd anniversary of his death.[81]
In 2008 Rolling Stone magazine ranked him fifth on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time—70 years after he died.[4]
In 2010 Guitar.com ranked him ninth in its list of Gibson.com’s Top 50 Guitarists of All Time—72 years after he died.[82]
Musicians who proclaim his profound impact on them, including Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton, all rated in the top ten with him on each of these lists. The boogie bass line he fashioned for "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" has now passed into the standard guitar repertoire. At the time it was completely new, a guitarist's version of something people would only ever have heard on a piano.[83]
Lifetime achievement
The Complete Recordings, a double-disc box set released by Sony/Columbia Legacy on August 28, 1990, containing almost everything Robert Johnson ever recorded, with all 29 recordings (and 12 alternate takes) won a Grammy Award for “Best Historical Album” that year. In 2006 he was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (accepted by his son Claud).
Robert Johnson - Robert Johnson's Cross Road Blues
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