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7. Myth Eclipses Reality
- University of Illinois Press
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46 7 Myth Eclipses Reality Robert was a nice-lookin man. Sort of brown skin. Sort of medium height, and got good hair. —Muddy Waters, quoted in Paul Oliver, Conversations with the Blues The first publication of a Johnson photograph came fortyeight years after the artist’s death. The photo proved that Johnson’s image could be recorded by conventional means, unlike, say, a vampire, whose body cannot be reflected in a mirror. More significantly, the photo showed that Johnson’s face revealed no evidence of the anguish and inner torment that critics professed to hear in Johnson’s music. Rumors concerning the existence of Johnson photographs had circulated for years, and fans had become desperate for some likeness other than the drawings on Columbia ’s record jackets. The demand for a picture—any picture—was initially addressed in 1971 when Living Blues, America’s first and foremost blues journal, commissioned a police artist to sketch a likeness of Johnson based on the recollections of two musicians who knew him, Eddie Taylor and Floyd Jones. A second drawing, based on the memory of Johnny Shines, also was published. The sketches , neither of which looked very human, served only to deepen the mystery and speculation about Johnson’s appearance .1 Myth Eclipses Reality 47 In 1972 the blues researcher Mack McCormick supposedly located three photos. Two years later Stephen LaVere, the first researcher to gauge the Johnson mystique’s full business potential, bought two of the photos from Johnson’s sister.2 Although some people were allowed to see the photos, neither was published until February 13, 1986, when the rock magazine Rolling Stone included a photo portrait of a youthful Robert Johnson, cigarette dangling from the left corner of his mouth, as part of an article on the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. Johnson was one of three artists inducted that year in a special early-influence category. So there it was, the first published photo of our hero. But it wasn’t on the cover, which carried pictures of the hall’s first ten rock and roll musician inductees (eleven if you count the Everly Brothers as two). The Johnson photo was buried on page 48, along with the other early-in- fluence inductees, pianist JimmyYancy, blue yodeler Jimmie Rodgers, and two nonmusician inductees, disc jockey Alan Freed and record-company owner Sam Phillips. John H. Hammond Jr. was also inducted that year, honored for lifetime achievement. Arguably Hammond was also the person most responsible for Johnson’s inclusion. But Hammond wasn’t even mentioned in the magazine.3 The Hammond snub went largely unnoticed in the blues community , which was more miffed by what it saw as the cavalier treatment accorded Johnson. The Chicago writer Justin O’Brien criticized the magazine ’s iconoclasm in a Living Blues essay, grumbling that a culturally important photograph had been “handled casually, if not disrespectfully .” The essay, however, was more significant for what it revealed about the way young fans had been affected by the overblown romanticism of material written about Johnson in the sixties and seventies. O’Brien specifically recalled the liner notes published as part of Columbia’s reissue project: “My teenaged friends and I read and re-read the album notes, repeating the information to each other, marveling at the implications of the strange stories and haunting lyrics. Not knowing others with our interests, we became the cognoscenti, sharing a fascination in this mysterious man and equally mysterious music. It seemed it was ours to mythologize.” Even O’Brien, though, couldn’t help but notice that the newly pub- [3.131.110.169] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 01:10 GMT) 48 Robert Johnson: Lost and Found lished photographic evidence of Johnson’s human existence had the potential to destabilize the myth: “The serene, unblemished young face belies all the rumors of dark doings. It gives no suggestion of the obsessive fears and solitariness he felt and sang about.”4 Alas, the liner-note mythology proved too durable to surrender in the face of hard evidence; ultimately it was the rumored dark doings that overshadowed the serene photographic image. The 1986 film Crossroads was the first pop-culture document to incorporate those dark doings. In it Johnson’s art and the crossroads legend were fused in a fictional format aimed mainly at a rock-oriented youth market. The plot runs as follows: A boy (played by...