Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture (review)

The posthumous career of the Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson has been well chronicled. For the twenty-odd years following his death in 1938, Johnson was all but forgotten, but in the early 1960s, when Columbia records released a sample of his work on the King of the Delta Blues Singers LP, he became an open secret amongst blues musicians and aficionados. The 1990 issue of his Complete Recordings brought his work to the attention of a far larger audience: the double CD sold over 400 000 copies in six months and 900 000 within six years.¹ Since the mid 1990s there has been, according to Patricia Schroeder's new book, an ever expanding discursive industry surrounding the ghostly Johnson: "Robert Johnson is showing up in novels, plays, poems, films, short stories, and art installations; on T-shirts, posters and calendars; in college syllabi; and on web sites with startling frequency . . . he may yet become the Elvis Presley of the new millennium" (2).

Schroeder's project is to sample this proliferation of discourse and to extract its meanings. This is not a book designed to uncover the real Robert Johnson—for Schroeder this is an impossible task likely to reveal more about the documenter than the documented. Instead Schroeder sets out to read contemporary American culture through its fascination with the bluesman. To map this terrain she takes her bearings from Roland Barthes's semiotics, John Fiske's theories of popular culture and S. Page Baty's work on Marilyn Monroe. In an energetic and colloquial prose style, she leads us through the Johnson discourse medium by medium. We begin with the furor surrounding the 1994 Robert Johnson commemorative postage stamp (the National Smokers Alliance [sic] complained when the Post Office reproduced a well known photograph of Johnson minus his cigarette) and wind up in cyberspace and chaos theory; en route we pass through blues scholarship, documentary film, feature film, fiction, drama and poetry. The coda makes the necessary self-reflexive gesture: Schroeder acknowledges that to analyze a booming discourse industry one has to add to it, and she hopes that in so doing she has shed light on the uses of Robert Johnson's image in particular, on American society in general, and has "exemplied what cultural criticism can do and how it can help us to understand the extent to which we create ourselves, our culture and our own significance" (164).

At moments the analysis is richly nuanced. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Schroeder's background in drama criticism, the book is most assured when discussing theater, notably Bill Harris's 1992 play Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil. Drawing upon W. E. B Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Schroeder deftly unpacks the play's complex racial politics in an account simultaneously polemical and attuned to the performance dynamics of Harris's piece. Schroeder offers an equally illuminating reading of a report hastily written on the back of Johnson's death certificate by LeFlore county registrar, Cornelia J. Jordan. Jordan conducted a half-hearted "investigation" into Johnson's death and spoke with both "the white man on whose place this negro died" and "a negro woman on the place" (43). The white man's words are given in Jordan's report but the woman's are not. Schroeder's point is that the woman's testimony is never commented upon by blues historians either; they also overlook the account, this time in favor of official documents or the opinions of medical experts. At moments like this, Schroeder's book is at its sharpest: it simultaneously reads the reconstructions of Johnson's story and the ideological assumptions underpinning them.

But given the wide range of media brought into play, some unevenness in the quality of the analysis is perhaps inevitable. One chapter is devoted to contemporary fiction: Schroeder takes three novels published in 1995—Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues,Walter Mosley's RL's Dream and Alan Rodgers's Bone Music—and...