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9. A Myth of the Twenty-first Century
- University of Illinois Press
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62 9 A Myth to the Twenty-first Century “My name’s Johnson,” the black man said. “Robert Johnson.” “It’s good to meet you, Mr. Johnson. Who’s your traveling partner?” Johnson picked up his guitar, held it close to his body. “My best friend,” Johnson said.“But I ain’t gonna tell y’all his name. The Gentleman might hear and come runnin’. He gets into the strings, you hear?” —Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues By the start of the new millennium, the Johnson legend had shown up in two novels, three documentary films, advertising , journalism, and popular music. It had also shown up in two screenplays: Crossroads, the Ralph Macchio vehicle that was produced as a movie in 1986; and Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson, which, at this writing, remains an unproduced script. Written by Alan Greenberg and originally published in the early eighties, Love in Vain was reprinted in 1994 with a new foreword by movie director Martin Scorsese , who likened Greenberg’s version of Johnson to a “haunted prophet who must go into the desert to find his voice, and who plays his music not out of choice but because he has no choice; he has become possessed by the spirit of the blues.”1 While following the general contours of Johnson’s biography in the context of the Great Depression, Greenberg ’s script offered a surrealistic compilation of blues he- A Myth to the Twenty-first Century 63 roes, song and sermon fragments, and African American folk beliefs cast against an alternately forbidding and comic backdrop in which the dead speak and musicians strum stringless guitars. The screenplay, like Sherman Alexie’s 1995 novel Reservation Blues, treated Johnson’s life in terms of myth and ritual and read like a morality play—or perhaps a morality musical . Reservation Blues was obviously a work of fiction. Love in Vain was labeled a “vision.” These two works stood apart from the less-clearly-labeled visions that had gained legitimacy in scholarly discourse and documentary film. Labeling hardly mattered by that time, though, because the crossroads legend had metastasized into popular culture, becoming so widely known and so casually accepted that it no longer required attribution, skepticism, or scholarly trappings. In 1995 The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll confidently asserted in its entry on Johnson: “He often claimed he learned to play guitar from the Devil himself and many of his recordings evince a haunting, otherworldly inspiration.”2 Soon afterward Sandra B. Tooze, in her 1997 book on Muddy Waters, first alluded to Johnson’s unholy trade with a prudent disclaimer:“Then, as the legend goes, Johnson made a date with the devil.” In her truncated summary of Johnson’s life and death, however , Tooze let romantic imagery take precedence over objectivity:“Johnson fought off the devil’s final grip for several days, until Satan claimed his own on 16 August, 1938. He died with his guitar across his heart.”3 (We are struck by this last touching detail. The only similar account of Johnson’s death is the rather dubious one found in Alan Lomax’s Land Where the Blues Began, but recall that in his version Johnson’s mother removed the guitar from her son’s chest and hung it on the wall just as the artist expired .) As we near the end of our journey along the Johnson paper trail and prepare to take a fresh look at Johnson’s music and life, here are some examples of the way the artist is most often portrayed in contemporary writing. It would be possible, we suspect, to fill several pages with this sort of thing, but five brief examples will drive the point home. In 1999 the musicologist Gerhard Kubik joked about how difficult it had been to finish his book Africa and the Blues: “Robert Johnson appeared to me . . . and proposed a simple solution to my problem: I had [3.81.222.152] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:35 GMT) 64 Robert Johnson: Lost and Found better sign up with the devil and I would finish the work successfully.”4 Also in 1999, the cultural critic and hip-hop guru Nelson George mentioned “Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at midnight in Mississippi ” in the context of writing about heroes and antiheroes in his 1999 book Hip Hop America.5 How about a sports reference? In late 1999 Tennis magazine ran an article suggesting...