Robert Johnson: Lost and Found (review)

The designation of blues as devil's music remains deeply rooted in the American imagination. In "Devil's Fire," the fourth installment in Martin Scorcese's documentary series on blues, director Charles Burnett explores the complex relationship between "Devil's music" and American churches by examining the association of blues with the supernatural. The most pregnant aspect of this theme is the mysterious legend surrounding Robert Johnson's life and music. According to the myth, Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for prodigious musical skills. In Robert Johnson: Lost and Found, Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch deconstruct this legend and explore significant written accounts of Johnson's life and music. These accounts range from record notes to scholarly books. Pearson and McCulloch analyze the inventions and extrapolations that Johnson, his music, and his legend have inspired among critics and scholars. In their effort to debunk the romantic images of Johnson as a profoundly disturbed and mysterious loner driven by dark fears, the authors examine a paper trail that spans more than sixty years. This trail, as they convincingly demonstrate, is tarnished with examples of questionable research, farfetched interpretations, and unsupported assumptions.

Pearson and McCulloch reveal how legend has overshadowed reality. Johnson, described reliably by his contemporaries as a "blues musician—Just like the rest of us" has been turned into a unique figure haunted by the supernatural. The authors analyze the emergence and evolution of various images of Johnson and reveal how these moved progressively into romantic fantasy, even as the published body of factual information grew. According to Pearson and McCulloch, a recycling of misinterpretations partly accounts for published biographical images that are clearly at odds with Johnson's tangible persona and music and with the recollections of fellow musicians. The authors explain that legend became accepted as fact because chroniclers neither checked nor challenged the information they collected and frequently shaped or invented facts for their own purposes. As a result, the best-known images of Johnson are products of ignorance about African-American traditions and culture, of unrestrained prose, and of a desire to find ways to market Johnson's music. For example, the authors reveal how Johnson was constantly glamorized by commercially motivated writers who searched for evidence and for testimonies that supported the Faustian angle. This motif turned out to be a powerful marketing strategy.

Pearson and McCulloch demonstrate methodically that critics' analyses of Johnson's lyrics aimed at constructing a psychoanalytic portrait had disastrous results because there was a considerable cultural gap between the etic perspective of most of the critics and the emic frame of reference of Johnson's African American fans. Many scholars and critics who wrote "authoritatively" about Johnson had only trivial knowledge of the cultural matrix that had produced the blues. They completely divorced Johnson from his cultural roots, portraying him as a unique artist outside the blues tradition.

Lost and Found, while debunking the legend surrounding Johnson's life and music, most importantly addresses issues of methodology, analytical rigor, and objectivity in scholarly works. Pearson and McCulloch provide a useful handbook for fieldwork and research methods. They emphasize, sometimes ironically, highly speculative assumptions and fabrications presented by a succession of myopic researchers who let romantic imagery take precedence over objectivity. To restore a more objective image of Johnson, Pearson and McCulloch uncompromisingly demonstrate that his music bears no evidence of Faustian angst and is incontestably consistent with the traditional and secular themes found in blues.

It may have been beyond the scope of Pearson and McCulloch's research to examine in detail the characteristics of the racial discourse that prevailed at the time of Johnson's recordings; such an examination might have shed light on the misinterpretations of his behavior around the white A&R men sent to scout out new artists and repertoire for recording companies and would have been a valuable complement to this rigorous study. By exposing popular but farfetched interpretations, Pearson and McCulloch...