SOURCE: "Standing at the Crossroads Between Vinyl and Compact Discs: Reissue Blues Recordings in the 1990s," in Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 105, No. 416, 1992, pp. 215-26.

Thinking about Robert Johnson generates questions about the impact of phonograph recordings on folk tradition. After all, Robert Johnson is characterized as a bellwether—the artist who represents the transition from country-dance musicians limited to local influences to a new breed of professionals whose technique and repertoire were influenced by phonograph recordings. Fairly or not, Johnson is portrayed as an innovator who conceptualized and shaped his songs in a modern way, as preformed units conditioned not by the needs of an audience of dancers but by the limitations of recordings.

To a certain degree, the strange career of Robert Johnson has been shaped by three manifestations of his recordings that reflect the major changes in commercial sound recording formats. The first few 78s issued in his lifetime brought him the status and notoriety of a recording artist. David "Honeyboy" Edwards, who knew Johnson, provided an anecdote illustrating the prestige of recordings. A Delta woman offered Johnson a dime to play "Terraplane Blues" on a street corner in Greenwood, Mississippi. When Johnson replied "Miss, that's my record," and played it, the crowd agreed, and rewarded him with nickels, dimes, and quarters, proud to hear a recording star in person.

As much as his early recordings augmented his local reputation, they also paved the way for his eventual national recognition, spurring John Hammond and Alan Lomax to search for him. Then as the 1960s ended, Frank Driggs and Columbia reissued his 78s on an LP, King of the Delta Blues Singers (CL 1654), later followed by King of the Delta Blues Singers: Volume II (C 30034). These albums made a terrific impact on the folk- and blues-revival audience and countless coming-of-age musicians, including me. Robert Johnson's songs obviously spoke to alienated '60s youth culture, providing strangers to the blues tradition the opportunity to filter Johnson's potent lyrics through their own imaginations. On the surface it seemed a perfect union. He was, after all, dead, and his new fans could safely re-create meaning in his songs at their own convenience. These new devotees did not share a cultural frame of reference with Johnson, yet they firmly believed his blues songs to be literally auto-biographical. Any one of them could smoke a joint, listen to the songs, and puzzle out their interpretation of his life based on the images in his compositions. Johnson's most successful biographer, Peter Guralnick, characterized this romantic approach to the blues: "Blues offered the perfect vehicle for our romanticism. What's more, it offered boundless opportunities and certain characteristics associated with the music itself."

Justin O'Brien, reacting to the publication of the first Robert Johnson photograph (now familiar because of its use in the Complete Recordings and related publicity), also reflected back to his teenage encounter with the first Columbia LP, and its impact on him and his friends.

We became the cognoscenti, sharing a fascination with this mysterious man and his equally mysterious music. It seemed it was ours to mythologize, a man and his music who we thought were long forgotten by any admirers and also culturally neglected by blacks who by the '60s had largely rejected the blues as a musical expression.

Other critics echo recurring themes: how hearing Johnson changed their lives and how their own reading of his song lyrics allowed them to put together their very own personal Robert Johnson. The process of romanticizing and appropriating his songs continues with today's new format, whether vinyl, tape, or disc. Today, however, he is much less of a stranger, thanks to lots of fieldwork, several recently released photographs, and the commentary of people who knew him. But even with the excellent supporting data documenting the new boxed set [Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings], we findthattoday's critics and reviewers continue to prefer the mythic Robert Johnson to the human blues artist.

How do we explain why we consistently mythologize Robert Johnson? First, there's the hype, partially fanned by Columbia's promotion and partly self-perpetuating, which has generated an incredible volume of misinformation. Granted, the average journalist, like the average reader, should not be expected to command in-depth knowledge of African-American folk belief, the blues as a traditional system, or the history of white perceptions of the blues. But if most writers and readers simply started from scratch, and not Old Scratch either, we would be better served by, and in a position to learn something about, the life and art of the long deceased man of the hour.

However, this has not been the case, and an unfortunate, deeply fixed set of misconceptions has been brought to bear at the beginning of any discourse related to Johnson. These include the pernicious notions that tie his musical personality to the devil, and that credit him with inventing rock and roll. Granted, both ideas connect generally with the blues as a whole and certainly make for good copy. The former idea comes from methodological errors in the reconstruction of Johnson's life in which Johnson's few references to the devil are interpreted literally by an audience eager to accept the more exotic elements of African-American folk belief.

The development of white America's version of the Robert Johnson myth—and I see it more as myth than legend—dates back to John Hammond's appreciation for producer Don Law's "tall tales" of Johnson's recording session. Even here misinterpretation abounds. Johnson's turning his back to an informal audience of Mexican musicians is read as an example of extreme shyness rather than the more typical musician's desire to guard his instrumental techniques. Anecdotes that came to light circa 1938 were rehashed and fleshed out as Johnson's posthumous fame spread via his limited 78 rpm records. By the time King of the Delta Blues was issued, these stories had become fixed as gospel.

Only more recently, with the boxed set and with the opportunity to interview rock stars who listened to the first LP, has the retrospective connection between Johnson and rock and roll surfaced. Actually, his first wave of folk-revival fans would have disputed this contention tooth and nail, although in a broad sense Johnson's music fits into a continuum of many blues artists who set the stage for rhythm and blues, including Louis Jordan, the personal choice of Johnson's stepson, Robert Junior Lockwood, as the inventor of rock and roll.

Who talks about Robert and the devil? Maybe it's more a question of "who asks." When I interviewed Lockwood, "Honeyboy" Edwards, Johnny Shines, and Henry Town-send, as long ago as 1979, they spoke of him at some length but never offered any comment about a deal with the devil. In 1991, these same living experts who traveled with, and learned from, Robert Johnson all ridiculed the idea of a deal with the devil. Robert Junior Lockwood told Worth Long,

There are some people who want to try to get some glory because Robert is so popular. They say they knew Robert and they don't know a damn thing. They talked about him selling his soul to the devil. I want to know how you do that—I don't like the way they are trying to label him. He was a blues musician just like the rest of us.

During a 1991 Festival of American Folklife workshop, Johnny Shines responded,

I want anybody that believes in that, bring me your soul up here and lay it on the stage. I want to see it. If you can sell your soul you got to have control over it—if you can't do that, you can't sell your soul. I don't believe those lies. I never did believe it.

At the same workshop, "Honeyboy" Edwards acknowledged the crossroads but shifted focus to a separate folk belief:

I walked them old country roads and get to them old dirt crossroads. I'd sit there at the fork and I'd play my guitar. And my father told me said "Honey, you want to learn to play guitar hang it over your head at night."

Another workshop participant, Henry Townsend, also heard about the crossroads.

Indeed I did. I heard at the end of the rainbow there's a pot of gold. But I was smart enough even when I was a ki d … I would make a little mist of rain and you could see a little rainbow is in there. And I knew there wasn't any pot of gold right there in the yard. So I believe in selling your soul to the devil in the same way I believe in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

What Townsend did say of Johnson was more to the point: "He was one of those people if you played it right, he could play with you, if you played it wrong, he could play it with you and whatever you do, it was right for him because he was just so bright—I thought he was brilliant."

If his peers deny the story, who then seems committed to equating Johnson's skills with the devil? Delta resident and former Living Blues editor Jim O'Neal surmises: "The mythic proportions of the Johnson legend are largely the product of modern day white audiences as well as writers' enthusiasm." Perhaps, but not exclusively. African-American expatriate bluesman Julio Finn proves as guilty as his white counterparts when it comes to creating his own version of Robert Johnson: "The devil became his excuse for being a genius—a word by the way, none of his white biographers has used to describe him—having made his pact he felt that it was all right to see things in a way no one had seen them before."

Finn, who knows more about neo-African belief systems than most writers, stakes the ranch on the devil deal, positing two opposing camps of Johnson biographers: "the bluesmen who knew him and believe he made a pact with the devil at the crossroads; and the folklorists who don't."

Finn's assessment obviously doesn't include the musicians who knew him best, but to be fair, his argument implies blues people could accept the devil reference because it was part of their overall folk belief system. As to the folklorists, I'm not sure whom he is referring to, although it certainly fits me.

Although Finn is nice enough to acknowledge folklorists and knows Chicago blues artists intimately, he casts his lot with the romantics, and even though his version of the devil is slightly more African, his method, like that of his white counterparts, remains based in projecting, on the basis of textual analysis, what Robert Johnson thought. Here again, Johnson's power to elicit a sense of connection that allows people to flatly state what he was thinking, let alone what he did, never fails to amaze me. More than 14 years ago I complained about the process of constructing biography from repertoire, warning that the result would be part tradition and part the biographer's fantasy. Apparently, it is impossible to convince anyone that blues songs do not mirror the singer's own experience; nor is it possible to deter people from nurturing their own image of Johnson as satanist, genius, outsider, and inventor of rock and roll. So why should I spoil the fun? Isn't it reward enough that great traditional music can break into the charts? Maybe so. But I worry that misconceptions about Robert Johnson and his art, which once only affected a few, may now have a much broader impact on the way a popular audience thinks about blues.

From another perspective, I'm sorry the media hype obscures Johnson's gifts, which were those of synthesizer as well as innovator, a creative individual working within a tradition yet able to mold it into his own personal vehicle. His voice is a great blues voice—in fact, if you listen closely you will hear several voices because he had yet to find a single voice for all his work. Perhaps the best entrée into his music is The Roots of Robert Johnson (Yazoo L 1073), a compilation that, although it lionizes the individual, at least provides a sense of the sources of his musical vocabulary by presenting the work of the artists he emulated and with whom he shared a tradition. Historically, it also begins the odd story of his relation to phonograph recordings, demonstrating that he learned from the records of stars like Lonnie Johnson and Leroy Carr.

It's also worth noting that his fans prefer the excitement of experimentation, and possible indecision, in his work compared to the mature confidence of Lonnie Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Minnie, or even Blind Boy Fuller, who to my mind was much like Johnson in his skills as a synthesizer or cover artist. Perhaps I feel out of sorts because Johnson's notoriety, as opposed to his skills, has obscured the presence of the other major artists in the, [CBS's] "Roots n' Blues" series whose records initially far outsold those of Robert Johnson.

Then, again, America can only handle one star at a time. This applies particularly to roots music, especially at the crossover level. We tend to simplify traditions by proclaiming single fountainheads, the so-called kings or queens of bluegrass, zydeco, or western swing, rather than muddling through the maze of traditional influence. Current pop history now dubs Johnson innovator, the source, so to speak, of the music of the Rolling Stones and other blues rock contingents. The cover of Musician (January 1991) magazine proclaims Johnson "The Father of Rock and Roll." I understand rock and roll, bastard that it is, to have many parents.

Without discounting Johnson's musical gift and the innovations his fellow musicians credit him with, the statement that he was the father of rock and roll is incorrect and has political ramifications. To my mind it is insulting and deliberately evasive to credit a single outsider genius with something produced by a culture, including the countless recorded and unrecorded musicians who shaped the blues over the last 100 years. As I see it, the line is now supposed to read that Robert Johnson invented rock and roll. He was unique, different from his contemporaries, an aberrant outsider with supernatural connections. Then he up and died, leaving his music in the hands of today's inheritors, including Eric Clapton and Keith Richards. Clapton's fans have become Johnson's fans and, for what it's worth, have appropriated Johnson and his music for their own ends.

Obviously Robert Johnson has already outlived most pop groups even after his death. Still the hype keeps coming. But then again blues as commercial music is no stranger to hype.