Personal rambling on Robert Johnson (don't feel you have to read this)
Since last night's song was a Robert Johnson song, I feel like mentioning that I always find it stomach churning how his musical legacy was talked about a large part of the music community.
His name was the subject of two complexly fabricated stories designed to cast him in a musical light that was comfortable to white musicians and writers.
The first one was silliness about him selling his soul to the devil so he could play guitar. It was such an incredibly popular myth (they made movies about it) and when I was a kid it seemed harmless enough until I realized it was to fuel the idea that white culture had about black artists. To whites, black musicians could never be scholarly and learned, doing the difficult task of mastering a musical instrument. Even though so many back musicians were highly educated the trope of the "natural black musician" that didn't have to learn it because they were part of a primitive culture and they were born into music, is a destructive stereotype that lives on today. It's adjacent to the racist "Black people have rhythm" stereotype.
Black people invented so much of American music but it's always been criticized until it is popular enough to be coopted by white artists. I'm not suggesting that white artists refrain from playing and adapting any sort of music, only that there's a lineage from "Jazz is not music" to "Rock and Roll is not music" to "Hip-Hop is not music." I wonder what all these kinds of music have in common!
Fewer people know the more recent Johnson myth that started on the internet, that his recordings were sped up and that's how he sang so high and played difficult things so fast. This had no basis in fact, it was an internet rumor. I felt it was also based on an ingrained racist idea about blues. White musicians had decided it sounded more "Authentic slower despite the fact that Johnson was only 25 years old when he recorded his first records and had ever right to sound like the young man he was. I have been over the "evidence" of this speed changing conspiracy and it was no basis in fact for about 10 reasons I wont bore you with. I just feel it's a lingering and unfortunate cultural picture of the blues that it's a bunch of uneducated black people getting drunk and singing that their baby left them. It can be extremely sophisticated and lyrical music.
I am not accusing everyone of being a racist. Many white musicians genuinely adored, shared the music of and credited Johnson for his genius. Keith Richards famously said when he first heard a record of Johnson paying solo he asked "Who's the guy playing with him?"
The thing I find unfortunate is that endless parade of Blues Hammer bands (Terry Zwigoff KNEW) that have systematically dismantled the elegance of the early rural music. The culture makes it hard for anyone to listen to Johnson and not think of some white hat mustached bar band who thinks they are covering Eric Clapton. And it's just a shame that, in a sense, he will remain this cliche of the guy selling his soul to the devil (so he could play hot licks!) instead of the graceful writer and musician he really was.
And to the poets and writers out there who analyze song lyrics, for me Johnson has some tremendously wry and dense allusions.
I recall reading Stephen Calt (I think) saying that in Johnson's song "Dead Shrimp Blues" "Shrimp" was a 19th century French slang term for a sex worker, long outmoded when he used it. I find these coded aspects to the music really interesting.
In the song last night "Come on in my kitchen" which is all at once mournful and salacious, there's one of Johnson's references to Hoodoo culture:
"Oh, she's gone, I know she won't come back
I've taken the last nickel out of her nation sack
You better come on in my kitchen
It's goin' to be rainin' outdoors"
ethnographer and folklorist Tony Kail writes:
During the 1930’s Anglican minister Harry Middleton Hyatt traveled the United States performing interviews with numerous devotees of Hoodoo and African-American spiritualism. During his stay in Memphis Tennessee Hyatt encountered an informant who shared about a curious artifact known as the ‘nations sack’. Other local terms used for the sack included ‘nations bag’ and probably the most used term the ‘nation sack’.
Hyatt’s informant shared that the sack was worn by females typically around their waist. The sack contained money and objects considered to be ‘lucky’. One practitioner shared with Hyatt that some nation sack owners would place parts of a chicken egg inside the bag while others spoke of adding objects such as roots, snuffboxes and silver dimes. One informant shared that some women utilize materials such as a dollar bill covered in their mate’s urine inside of their nation sacks. Some were used in conjunction with a string that could be tied to ‘tie’ up a man’s ‘nature’ or sexual prowess. The magical principal that appeared frequently was that the ingredients in the nation sack could keep a man faithful and a woman protected. Hyatt’s informant he nicknames the ‘Nation Sack Woman’ advises the minister that the bag is off limits to men and should never be touched by a man.
But a favorite Johnson lyric for me is positively psychedelic for 1937 and is from "Love in vain" which perhaps is popularly known from being covered by The Rolling Stones .
"When the train, it left the station, with two lights on behind
the blue light was my blues, and the red light was my mind."
