Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, and: Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture (review)

"Suddenly Robert Johnson is everywhere," declares Patricia R. Schroeder in Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture (p. 2). A survey of the American landscape in its many permutations—academic, popular, official, and literary—supports Schroeder's assessment. Whether speaking of films, literature, government-issued stamps, or tribute albums, Robert Johnson is certainly rambling across the American stage in ways that suggest he is on our minds. But why? Coming on the heels of Pearson and McCulloch's Robert Johnson: Lost and Found (reviewed by David Diallo in the Journal of American Folklore 118(470):505-6, 2005), Schroeder's work, as well as Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, examines the recent swell of interest in Johnson. Both authors unravel the romantic discourse that has enshrouded Johnson since the folk revival. Together, they illuminate how white fans have retroactively constructed the dominant understanding of Robert Johnson, why they have done so, and what this says about twenty-first-century America.

Addressing a general audience, Elijah Wald challenges canonical blues history in general and, more specifically, the importance of Johnson in that history. Since the folk revival, white blues fans have considered Johnson to be the apotheosis of the folk blues tradition. Wald examines the record charts, sales of sheet music, black newspaper advertisements, and records of jukeboxes from the perspective of Johnson's contemporaries and argues that Johnson's white fans have rewritten the history of African American music. In the process, he continually demonstrates the ways in which genres are distinguished to meet audience tastes, not to reflect the diverse styles that constitute individual musical practice.

The first section of Wald's book establishes the social and historical context in which Robert Johnson matured as a musician. Going against the grain of established blues history—which is the book's defining quality—Wald presents the blues not as a folk tradition but as a popular style, whose audience was working-class blacks drawn to the image of well-dressed, professional performers who had made it out of places like Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Blues performers had extremely sophisticated styles. Blues queens like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Mamie Smith and guitar-piano duos such as Tampa Red and Georgia Tom were the stars among their contemporaries, but Johnson was not. In what is one of his most powerful attacks on the conventional appreciation of black musical history, Wald decries the recording practices of talent scouts and folklorists: "Black performers were ghettoized, and their access to the recording world was dependent on their singing 'black' music" (p. 22). Thus, black performers and audiences enjoyed not only blues but also a wide range of musical styles, including even music performed on instruments such as the banjo and fiddle, which had long been associated with minstrelsy. Recordings from this era, however, do not reflect these tastes.

In the book's second section, Wald moves chronologically through each track recorded during the two sessions that Johnson made, and he analyzes them for stylistic influences. He identifies Leroy Carr, Kokomo Arnold, Peetie Wheatstraw, and Lonnie Johnson as the popular musicians on whom Johnson drew. He also notes two Mississippi influences, Son House and Skip James, but Wald is careful to distinguish the impact of each. Whereas Johnson seems powerfully drawn to James, House's impact appeared only toward the close of the first session. Since similar styles were absent from the second session, Wald concludes that House's style appeared because Johnson had not prepared enough material and had to improvise with local sounds to complete the first session. Aspiring to be the consummate professional, Johnson returned to the studio with plenty of polished material—material whose...