In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

any reference to the legend in any of the published Robert Johnson lore until 1966, where it ‹rst appears in Pete Welding’s article in Down Beat, the source of the testimony of Son House.45 David Evans’s study of Tommy Johnson (again, no relation to Robert) is the source of the LeDell Johnson quotation about Tommy’s deal.46 These elements were then combined and ampli‹ed by Marcus, Guralnick, and other enthusiasts during the 1960s blues revival period and its aftermath.47 One wonders whether the story of Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil might be nothing more than an overheated “urban legend” fabricated and sustained primarily to serve the personal, social, and commercial agendas of latter day enthusiasts and other latecomers. Indeed, this is the persuasively argued thesis of three recent books that have altered the landscape of blues scholarship: Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta; Robert Johnson Lost and Found, by Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch; and In Search of the Blues, by Marybeth Hamilton. Each of these books in its own way argues that not only the legend but the accumulated conventional wisdom about Robert Johnson and the blues is unreliable . Because it derives from sources that cannot be adequately documented , because it is often generated or at least ‹ltered and ampli‹ed through media (such as album liner notes and entertainment journalism ) with commercial and other con›icting interests, and because even the academic scholarship is methodologically questionable, everything we think we know as a culture about Robert Johnson is suspect. This raises the question of the complex relationship between culture and history. Pearson and McCulloch concede that the Johnson legend “belongs to the people now, and the fact that the people embrace it as a part of American music history is as important as the question of whether it is true.”48 But they also note how the legend makes it “dif‹cult for us to accept Johnson’s simple humanity and artistic quality at face value.”49 And Wald stresses the point that the legend says less about its hero than about the culture that perpetuates it. Every culture has its legends—one could argue that this is what makes for a culture. The legend of Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads is one of ours. The “us” being present-day, urban, literate, mostly white music fans. . . . It is a potent and intriguing legend, and says a great deal about our yearnings and dreams. . . . We are all romantics in our fashion.50 In an important sense, the question really goes to how authentic our collective cultural self-understanding is, a topic to which we shall return in chapter 6. The “Devil’s Music” 45 The Karate Kid Gets the Blues An interesting example illustrating this position and reinforcing these arguments is presented in the 1986 feature ‹lm Crossroads, written by John Fusco and directed by Walter Hill. The movie tells a coming-of-age story about a white, teenage, classical guitar prodigy named Eugene Martone, played by Ralph Macchio. In many ways it is a simple variant of the story told in the Karate Kid series, for which Macchio is better known. As a student at the Juilliard School of Music, Eugene is nursing an interest, in spite of the active discouragement of his instructors, in modern rock guitar and its mysterious musical antecedent roots. We see him in his dormitory room poring over blues books and liner notes and listening to Robert Johnson’s posthumously released recorded works. Already we recognize a story we have heard before. It is the story of Eric Clapton, the story of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the story of “our” generation in the history of popular music. Eugene is fascinated by the hints and indications in what he is studying of the existence of an as yet unrecorded Robert Johnson song—the legendary lost thirtieth blues song of Robert Johnson. If only he could track this song down, Eugene could record it, and this could put him in the company and position of the musicians he admires most, the guitar heroes of his age—the rock era. After a bit more research Eugene stumbles upon information leading him to an eightyyear -old Willie Brown, a contemporary and former road-dog buddy of Robert Johnson (“You can run, you can run, Tell my friend poor Willie Brown”), presently serving out a prison sentence in a minimum-security nursing home. Eugene manages...

Share