Robert Johnson: Lost and Found

5. The Reissue Project, Phase One

27 5 The Reissue Project, Phase One The stuff I got’ll bust your brains out, baby. . . it’ll make you lose your mind. —Robert Johnson,“Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” (1937) The Johnson legend was greatly influenced by Columbia’s two-stage reissue of the artist’s recordings in 1961 and 1970. The first of these two albums, King of the Delta Blues Singers (CL 1654), was released during a wave of popular interest in American folk music. The folk revival, as it was called, started in the late fifties and peaked in the early sixties, bringing new recognition and in some cases new careers to dozens of artists who performed old-time music , including a number of “rediscovered” blues artists from the twenties and thirties. Spurred by the revival, the acoustic guitar became the instrument of choice for the counterculture generation that came of age in the sixties. The word hootenanny entered the popular lexicon. Millions of middle-class Americans sang ballads, blues, and other traditional songs at parties, coffeehouses, festivals, concerts, and rallies. It is no surprise, then, that Robert Johnson was marketed as a folk blues artist in the counterculture mold. The first reissue album emphasized the artist’s image as an outsider, a mysterious loner driven by dark fears and anx- 28 Robert Johnson: Lost and Found ieties—an image that was reflected in the album’s cover, the choice of cuts, and the liner notes. The cover featured Burt Goldblatt’s stylized painting of a lone guitarist as seen from above, seated in a chair, head averted, and staring down at his guitar. The figure is balanced by its shadow, producing a dualism between physical and shadowy presence and an effect of solitude. The album began with “Cross Road Blues” and ended with “Hellhound on My Trail.” The fourteen cuts in between included “If I Had Possession over Judgment Day,” “Preaching Blues,” and “Me and the Devil Blues.” The titles conjured images of religion and the supernatural and supported the perception of Johnson as an artist who was troubled by psychological demons. The song selection, particularly the first and final cuts, also supplied fodder for the Faustian story line that would soon be linked to Johnson . Almost as telling was what Columbia left off the reissue. The missing cuts included “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Dust My Broom,” traditional pieces that would have connected Johnson to the rightful inheritors of his musical ideas—big-city African American artists whose high-powered, electrically amplified blues remained solidly in touch with Johnson’s musical legacy. The album’s producer and editor was Frank Driggs, a jazz promoter who at one time was said to have the world’s most extensive collection of jazz-related photos and memorabilia. According to most sources, John H. Hammond Jr., who was then an executive at Columbia Records, also had a hand in producing the album as part of the label’s Thesaurus of Classic Jazz series. While Hammond still believed that Johnson’s music exemplified the “primitive” origins of jazz, there was no hint of that view in the album’s liner notes. The notes, written by Driggs, introduced the blues artist this way:“Robert Johnson is little, very little more than a name on aging index cards and a few dusty master records in the files of a phonograph company that no longer exists. A country blues singer from the Mississippi Delta that brought forth Son House, Charlie Patton, Bukka White, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson appeared and disappeared, in much the same fashion as a sheet of newspaper twisting and twirling down a dark and windy midnight street.” Visually evocative but uninformative, Driggs’s fervid prose dehumanized Johnson and underscored the man-of-mystery theme. The liner notes The Reissue Project, Phase One 29 passed along a few choice bits from Samuel Charters’s book The Country Blues but omitted the pool-hall recording anecdote. Driggs, who had spoken to Don Law, the producer of Johnson’s recording sessions in the thirties, recounted Law’s impressions of Johnson—that he was fresh off the plantation, painfully shy, and so on—and retold the Law anecdotes about Johnson, including the legend of the Mexican musicians. Having exhausted what then passed for biographical data, Driggs resorted to the standard procedure of analyzing song lyrics to construct a picture of Johnson. Driggs’s impressions...