Robert Johnson: Lost and Found

4. Early Notices

18 4 Early Notices Watch your close friend, baby, then your enemies can’t do you no wrong. —Robert Johnson,“When You Got a Good Friend” (1936) The first extended print reference to Robert Johnson outside of music industry communications appeared in the March 2, 1937, issue of The New Masses, a left-wing periodical based in New York.1 Following notices for two plays, titled Chains and Marching Song, a lecture on “The Moscow Treason Trial,” a fund-raiser to aid leftist opposition in Spain, and ads for tours of the Soviet Union, a column by Henry Johnson—possibly a pen name for the jazz record producer and critic John H. Hammond Jr.—heralded the arrival of a new blues voice: “We cannot help but call your attention to the greatest Negro blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us in the tunes ‘Last Fair Deal Gone Down’ and ‘Terraplane Blues’ to mention only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur.”2 The notice launched three themes that would be repeated in criticism of Johnson’s work and attempts to construct his biography for the rest of the century. First, the Early Notices 19 notice contained a factual error—in this case, the location of Johnson’s recording session. Second, the notice indicated that Johnson was somehow unique among blues artists, more authentic than even the betterknown Leadbelly. And third, the notice contained strong hints that the northern literary establishment heard Johnson’s music in a frame of reference that would have been alien to the artist’s southern audience. Note, for example, that the song “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” was mentioned first, privileged perhaps because it was a composition based on a work song and contained the line “My captain’s so mean to me,” a reference that clearly dovetailed with the left-wing affinity for songs of social and political protest. On the other hand, “Terraplane Blues,” with its risqué double entendre, was far more appealing to Johnson’s African American audience in the South and was his biggest selling record. It is particularly interesting that Johnson was compared to Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter), the only other down-home musician whose name was likely to ring a bell with many New Masses readers. Leadbelly had been released three years earlier from a Louisiana prison through the intercession of folklorists John and Alan Lomax, and by the late thirties he was closely associated with proletarian and leftist politics. The comparison to Leadbelly buttressed the columnist’s contention that Robert Johnson was the “greatest Negro blues singer” to emerge in many years— after all, he made the old master sound like a phony by comparison. These two ideas—that Johnson was the greatest and that his voice was the most authentic—would carry first into the sixties, when Johnson was crowned the king of the Delta blues singers and the very sound of his recorded voice caused critics to experience panic attacks and other creepy feelings, and then into the seventies, eighties, and nineties, when Johnson, still the king of delta blues, was also declared an originator of rock and roll. As to the factual error, it probably made Johnson’s records more exotic to say they were made in “deepest Mississippi,” which is, after all, a far piece from Manhattan and Brooklyn, but as the reader already knows, the sides were cut in San Antonio. In the following issue of New Masses, the same two Johnson titles were mentioned again among recommended recordings. And in the June 8 issue, just days before the start of Johnson’s final recording sessions in 20 Robert Johnson: Lost and Found Texas, a second extended reference was published, this time with the byline of John Hammond, who would become Johnson’s initial promoter and a key informant in Johnson’s early biography. The belief that John Hammond and Henry Johnson were one and the same rests on three pieces of evidence. First, the writing styles were similar. Second, the initials were the same, albeit transposed. And third, Hammond’s middle name was Henry, making him the junior John Henry, John’s son. There is not very much to grow excited about in the jazz world. Vocalion is doing some interesting...