Robert Johnson - Classic or Dud?

Wuhan!! Got You All in Check (Camaraderie at Arms Length) at 7:00 21 May 20
xp Just been listening to '26-'29 recordings of much less filtered blues / roots recordings and now I've got to the mid '30s, and the lomaxes have arrived and this astonishing variety of music has turned into capital-B Blues, as filtered through the prism of the taste of a couple of white guys with well-meaning but ultimately racist ideas about noble savages and the like. Lots of this music is good! but also it is much more uniform than before. I worry that RJ's music will be much the same as Kokomo Arnold or Big Bill Broonzy, just with a mythology added which I don't care about. But maybe I'll be wrong, who knows. Will know in a couple of months

Zep's "Traveling Riverside Blues,"

This one is convoluted. LZ's "Traveling Riverside Blues" has no musical connection with RJ's "Traveling Riverside Blues" (tho Plant quotes a few lyrics from OTHER RJ songs a couple times), the music seems original to my ears.

Should be noted that "The Lemon Song" borrows lyrics from RJ's "Traveling Riverside Blues" (whose music is inspired by Howling Wolf's "Killing Floor".)

Robert Johnson's music was only quoted by LZ in "Custard Pie" (via RJ's version of "Shake 'Em On Down") & "Trampled Underfoot" ("Terraplane Blues") afaik.

So RJ as part of the um folk process, v good carry on (and be ready to explain and demonstrate in court, as John Fogerty and Charlie Daniels did, successfully enough)

Never found the mythical, supernatural claims made by Clapton et al to be true as far as RJs music, but maybe I had to hear it in the 60s, but he has a lot of good songs. I've read interviews with guys like muddy waters saying RJ scared them when they saw him play, but I wonder sometimes if that's to please rock writers interviewing them. Did read the good anti revisionist Elijah Wald book on RJ a long time ago and have recently been thinking of revisiting it.

I think there might be a bit of the ‘magical negro ‘ concept in claptons reverence for RJ

xxxp What I meant was, I'm so glad I got to hear and hear of him first of all in the 60s and 70s, cresting in that first (?) legit LP, before alll the hype peaked, before the floatation of takes on the CD set, and then the revisionism leading to anti-hype as another form of hype, aside from expectations too high maybe., which is certainly understandable and balanced view than kneejerk clickbait anti-hype of some.

Stevolende mentions the jukebox aspect---and as I put it on the Harry Smith vs. Alan Lomax thread, re Johnson and Jimmie Rodgers as traveling performers (RJ by reputation, JR also as recording artist)
... up-to-date and golden-oldies human jukebox sense: you better be ready with that stuff if the audience, esp. the drinking-dancing one, gets enough of the sensitive folk ballads and originals. Which is why I kept the bit about kid Robert and his sister listening to the radio in the above quote re her memoir.

The Cream version of "Crossroads" (also cut in the studio by Clapton as part of his 'Powerhouse' w/Stevie Winwood singing) is a lyrical mashup of "Crossroads Blues" and "Traveling Riverside Blues".

Dylan writes in Chronicles about getting his mind blown by hearing an advance acetate of King of... around the time of his own debut.

"Crossroads" also works as an old tymey/early bluegrass/folk stomp reimagining by the Turtle Island String Quartet, recorded in 1989.

The one Robert Johnson song that really strikes me as extraordinary is "Preaching Blues", which despite the downcast lyrics seems a lot more high-spirited and rhythmically startling than a lot of his other stuff.

Because John Hammond, no?

That was xpost to Dylan comment

I believe so.

parts of this have been discussed already in this and other threads and i haven't read that elijah wald book which probably has some answers but... taking for granted that so much received mythology about "The Blues" comes from the 60s folk and rock scenes- why was this specific style already, decades earlier, considered the only thing worth documenting from the musicians who have come to be known as bluesmen? (and women but it seems they were written out of the story almost as soon as it became a story) - since we know basically all of them had far more diverse repertoires? it's tragic how such a huge part of their music- and of pop/folk history- has been lost for commercial? or ideological? reasons (did "the blues" sell better than anything else at the time? or was it considered the only authentic black folk style by archivists?)

"Trampled Underfoot" ("Terraplane Blues")

Where is this quoted? I can see more of a connection to Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" tbh.

Left: blues singers were discouraged from recording pop or Tin Pan Alley songs at the time for publishing/copyright reasons. The record companies weren't giving publishing royalties to the blues songwriters, of course, but if their artists were recording published songs, the onus would have been on the companies to pay royalties to the songwriters. They preferred to encourage the blues singers to perform "original" songs, so the paying of royalties was irrelevant (most were just paid flat fees per song recorded).
There may well have been questions about whether the audience for blues records at the time would have bought songs in other styles, as well.

it's tragic how such a huge part of their music- and of pop/folk history- has been lost for commercial? or ideological? reasons (did "the blues" sell better than anything else at the time? or was it considered the only authentic black folk style by archivists?)

without being too presumptuous, I'd suggest you look into the work of the alan and john lomax or this collection of books:
https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Contributors/A/Abbott-Lynn

"They're Red Hot" seems like the one surviving recording of the other side of Johnson's repertoire

One of the worst things about the Lomaxes is how they claimed publishing credit on songs they recorded. Pretty fucked up.

But didnt leadbelly record a lot of non blues songs? I can't be sure if they were written by others or his own, but theres def a lot he recorded that wasnt blues.

I guess I don't really think of Leadbelly as a blues musician, he's more folk to me

Obv, not trying to downplay the focus on 'authenticity' by those marketing and selling the blues. As well as a kind of 'purity' that presumably means anything not done sufficiently authentic would get nixed.

*not deemed

I guess for many of these artists you need to weigh up what they recorded vs what they performed or had in their repertoire.

I can't remember the book, driving me nuts but can't place the name right now, but it dealt with a lot of those issues, but also acknowledged that the old bluesmen were canny themselves and they instinctively knew what an audience wanted, so they played up the aspects of their work they knew the white guys from New York wanted, just like when they played a bar where everyone was partying they didn't play the doomy stuff they played fun music

Right, yeah. Same way I'm sure when muddy or whoever is being asked about RJ for the umpteenth time, he prob knows what they want to hear. But... who knows, with a diff audience, how it might have gone. But i tend to think that most of these artists who got a second life in the 60s had already had one career life, and if you're looking for something resembling "authenticity", that would prob the period to look at.

is it the elijah wald book mentioned upthread? the abbott & seroff books on that link also look v informative

There's a book called Fakin it from 10 or 15 years ago that looks into various forms of authenticity probabl includingthe area of lomax and the definition of blues .

Interesting

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/apr/15/music

this was the book I was talking about

https://www.dacapopress.com/titles/francis-davis/the-history-of-the-blues/9780306812965/

Interesting to think that the blues in the Mississippi Delta were actually pretty massively hip at teh time they were being recorded. Since they are seen as this archaic embodiment of ancient soul and history and all like that

folk prob also had something to do with the premium being placed on authenticity as being a guy with his guitar in overalls/sharecropping clothes, rather than urban guys using amps, etc.

not trying to be a jerk here but a lot of these questions about authenticity were simply not relevant/obviated by larger inequities in their time

as are questions of genre, which were much muddier waters (so to speak) in the year before this music had radio airplay

(and if you wanna hear musical diversity, search the Document label catalog - which is blessedly available on streaming services - and just click around)

have been doing a bit of reading lately about how many of those early delta slide guitar guys likely picked up their slide techniques from touring Hawaiian players. there was a massive fad for hawaiian slide guitar music in the late teens, in 1916 it was the #1 selling genre of record, and hawaiian slide players were touring all over the south in those years. a lot of the midcentury scholarship that ties those delta slide techniques back to west african instruments is actually thinner than you'd think, and likely influenced by popular received ideas about the primal, ancient folk-culture Authenticity of those delta blues guys. when in reality there are interviews with a bunch of them where they plainly describe themselves as playing 'hawaiian style' or mention getting the idea from seeing touring hawaiian guitarists, and never refer to things like the diddley-bow or other african folk instruments or styles.

Cool. Did you read the John W. Troutman book?

not yet but i ordered it! he seems like the authority on it

Even today people place great worth in 'pure' black genres, undiluted by outside influence, and following a clear 'untampered with' lineage.

Right just noting not sure what I was saying got across. When I say massively hip I was thinking in terms of trendy cutting edge new thing as opposed to what it came to mean to later often white students.
Guitar was apparently something that popularised thanks to widespread use of Sears mailorder too. & it's portability.

the vinyl box of the RJ centennial collection looks incredible btw. also looks incredibly expensive. supposedly was mastered separately from the CD/digital too.

https://www.discogs.com/Robert-Johnson-The-Complete-Original-Masters-Centennial-Edition/release/3701379

for those of you not on the deepfake thread, this one fucked with me quite a bit

Robert Johnson pic.twitter.com/re2gjgyFit

— SoulstationZebra (@SoulstationZeb2) March 1, 2021

Oh right, the anniversary set illustrating where the word album came from in terms of long playing sets.
Inherited one of those of Voice of the Xtabay fro my grandfather when he died.
Surprsed taht somebody would mass produce a set of Shellac discs when this set came out thoiugh. Obviously not going to be a reproduction of an existing set or is it?
Would anybody have been buying things like thsi in the wake of John Hammond trying to include Johnson in his big production at Carnegie Hall.

The Netflix doc on RJ is worth a look, really just to see his grand kids (cool to see Taj Mahal in it too), and a fresher look at the mythology around him. Might be as it's only 45 mins but its very scant on his actual recording career, more interesting on his life, before the inevitable clips of Clapton, dylan, the stones, etc at the end zzzz

Books, going into particulars while contextualizing in history etc: haven't read Peter Guralnick's Searching For Robert Johnson, but I'm told it's good (first published in 1989, don't know if he's updated it w some of the discoveries sense), I have read his Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues, Country, and Rock 'n' Roll, which provides really good perspective on interrelation of genres and subgenres (he's written a lot more, of course, but those might be most relevant to this discussion).
Also! Leroi Jones's Blues People: Negro Music In White America(1963) really broke ground on deep trans-genre, bluesoid studies:

1 Content
1.1 "The Negro as Non-American: Some Backgrounds"
1.2 "The Negro as Property"
1.3 "African Slaves / American Slaves: Their Music"
1.4 "Afro-Christian Music and Religion"
1.5 "Slave and Post-Slave"
1.6 "Primitive Blues and Primitive Jazz"
1.7 "Classic Blues"
1.8 "The City"
1.9 "Enter the Middle Class"
1.10 "Swing—From Verb to Noun"
1.11 "The Blues Continuum"
1.12 "The Modern Scene"
2 References
And Deep Blues, by Robert Palmer (the one in Insect Trust, not Power Station).
And Charles Keil's Urban Blues, travels with blues in the Southern Migration to Chicago etc. (Paul Oliver's The Story of the Blues is good on this, but he's more limited in taste than these others, like he doesn't approve of Buddy Guy).

https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/mack-mccormick-quest-to-find-real-robert-johnson/

Took me a few hours to read that whilst in the midst of doing some other stuff but well worth it.

that is a wild fuckin' article

It was incredible, even if you went in with a vague sense of where it was going, where it had to go. Reminded me of that one scene in Crumb where his brother shows the sketch book and it’s all one big blurry scrawl line for pages and pages.

That story broke my brane.

Crazy, and ultimately disappointing. I vaguely knew about McCormick and was under the impression that the manuscript would be the definitive record, so it's a shame how much of it is apparently garbage and moreso that McCormick more or less self-destructed. Hopefully the research related to Johnson's late sisters will see the light of day soon - crazy how McCormick ultimately did Johnson a huge disservice by obstructing so much that could've been released earlier.