Robert Johnson: Lost and Found

12. A House of Cards

87 12 A House of Cards It’s so stupid to sit and talk about these things—white people don’t know a fucking thing. —Ry Cooder, quoted in Tony Scherman,“The Hellhound’s Trail” Because Johnson’s own songs inspired so much speculation about a supernatural connection, legend sleuths have always been on the lookout for hard historical evidence of a link between the artist and old folk beliefs about voodoo, hoodoo, and “the devil’s music.” Such evidence, while not abundant, does exist in the “oral histories” of people such as Willie Mae Powell, Queen Elizabeth, and David “Honeyboy ” Edwards, as we have seen. But have the legend sleuths been constructing a case based on evidence or constructing evidence based on a case? The answer will be clear, we believe, if we go back and trace the historical development. This path leads back to a single essay,“Hell Hound on His Trail: Robert Johnson,” written by the jazz critic Pete Welding, published in 1966 by Down Beat magazine, and later reprinted in the British journal Blues Unlimited. In the book Chasin’That Devil Music the researchers Gayle Dean Wardlow and Edward Komara identify the Welding essay as the start of all the Faustian mythology ; they pinpoint a partial quote attributed to Johnson’s early mentor Son House as the first explicit suggestion of a 88 Robert Johnson: Lost and Found deal between Johnson and Satan.1 From House’s quote, the trail of incriminating references leads to a David Evans interview with the brother of the blues artist Tommy Johnson and then to a Greil Marcus commentary in the book Mystery Train, Peter Guralnick’s short biography Searching for Robert Johnson, Robert Palmer’s book Deep Blues, and the Hollywood feature film Crossroads. Wardlow and Komara do a fine job of exposing these references as leaps of faith, speculation, insinuation, obliging responses to leading questions, or pure fiction.2 To the Wardlow-Komara list we suggest adding at least two other references that have been used to bolster the supernatural case against Johnson: first, Johnny Shines’s statement that he heard “black arts” might have been involved in Johnson’s death, and second, the full telling of Son House’s colorful but inaccurate recollection regarding how quickly Johnson mastered blues guitar. The House recollection helped set the stage for all the legend making that came afterward. It first appeared as part of a lengthy interview done by Julius Lester and published in Sing Out! magazine in 1965. As noted in chapter 7, House’s story, in the version told to Lester, provided indirect corroboration to the dark side of the Johnson legend through a link to old folk beliefs about secular music—specifically the belief that you could become a blues musician, virtually overnight, if you were willing to relinquish your soul to the devil. The key phrase there is “indirect corroboration,” as we will soon show. Samuel Charters and Peter Guralnick were among the blues researchers who later incorporated portions of House’s story into their biographies of Johnson. Pete Welding also quoted the House recollection in his 1966 essay, although his version differs— slightly yet significantly—from the one that appeared in Sing Out! magazine . More recently a portion of Son House’s story turned up in Sherman Alexie’s novel Reservation Blues. Because of the centrality of the devil deal in Johnson’s biographical reconstruction, let’s revisit the case made by Wardlow. And let’s begin with the 1966 Welding essay. As a prelude to the dark suggestion of a devil deal, Welding offered a version of Son House’s recollection of the speed with which young Johnson advanced from bad to brilliant as a guitar player. In the familiar story line Robert annoys people at parties by trying to play guitars that belong to House and Willie Brown; then, after Robert runs A House of Cards 89 away from home, he returns just “six or seven months later,” confronts House and Brown at a dance, and asks them to let him play. As quoted in the Welding essay, House recalled: “We gets up, you know—laughs at him. So he sets down and he starts playing, and when he got through, all our mouths was open. . . . yeah, what happened was a big surprise—how he did it that fast.” . . . House suggested in all seriousness that Johnson, in his months...