Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, By Elijah Wald, Amistad, 342 pp., $24.95
Mention the name Robert Johnson and a whole world is conjured up. A bluesman's bluesman, he came from the heart of the Mississippi Delta. Trailed by a hellhound, he sold his soul to the devil at a desolate crossroads so he could play guitar like no one else. Dead more than two decades, he would become an icon when his music was discovered by a clique of English rockers.
"Up until I was 25," wrote Eric Clapton, one of Johnson's latter-day disciples, "if you didn't know who Robert Johnson was, I wouldn't talk to you. . . . His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice."
In Elijah Wald's entertaining "Escaping the Delta," a history of the blues, Wald dares to deconstruct the myth that grew up around Johnson after his death at age 27 in August 1938 in Greenwood, Miss. Sold his soul to Satan? Balderdash, says Wald, adding that the legend emerged from one contradictory testimony in an oral history of bluesman Tommy Johnson (no relation).
The be-all, end-all of the blues? Not among his audience at the time. While living, he had one minor hit, "Terraplane Blues." That, and 28 other songs recorded in two extended sessions, made scarcely a dent among black audiences who snapped up songs by Leroy Carr, Lonnie Johnson, and Tampa Red, three giants mainly forgotten today.
Why? Because, argues Wald, Johnson was one-stop shopping for the white liberal folklorists and record collectors: a synthesizer of Carr and Kokomo Arnold's infectious melodies; Tampa Red's slide guitar; Son House's intense, countrified north Delta sound; and Skip James's moody soulfulness. Although Johnson wore a suit, to many he epitomized the stereotype of the poor meandering folk singer. The youngest of 11 children, he knew three fathers before he was 7. After he married young, his wife died in childbirth. Coming from Mississippi -- that perceived center of social, economic, and racial injustice -- who better to sing and to play authentically about loneliness and despair amid the Depression? He played guitar, considered more folksy than the piano. He died young, luring romantics. He had only those 29 recordings, attracting collectors.