"… Robert Johnson is acknowledged as perhaps the most accomplished and certainly the most influential of all bluesmen.…" This overwhelmingly biased opinion, dressed as "acknowledged" fact, not only appears in a rock magazine whose readers are in dire need of real information about the blues, but it was written by someone whose familiarity with the blues is more than superficial; someone who, indeed, should have known better.

That a writer with much more than a passing acquaintance with the blues should continue to perpetuate the Robert Johnson myth is evidence only of how firmly the myth is entrenched. The purpose of this article is not at all to denigrate Robert Johnson, who really was one of the finer bluesmen, but to discuss the implications of the myth as well as some general problems centered around the concept of "influence."

But first, the myth itself: "acknowledged as perhaps the most accomplished [bluesman]." Whether we read "accomplished" in the sense of "dynamic" or "effective," there is considerable disagreement among those enthusiasts who have been listening to the blues for years; few of them would name Robert Johnson as their favorite country bluesman. The names one might hear would be Charlie Patton, Tommy Johnson, Skip James, Son House, or maybe William Harris or Garfield Akers. And since Johnson is not usually mentioned in this context, it is rather a misrepresentation to suggest his superior accomplishments are acknowledged facts. Yet we might add that the writer mentioned above did say "perhaps" in the matter of accomplishment, and not press the case any further.

But I consider the next clause, "… certainly the most influential of all bluesmen," to be stretching die facts to the point of fabrication. How one decides how influential someone is is no doubt a problem of considerable difficulty, but since everyone seems to ignore it, it's best that we now take it up.

Johnson's influence, as well as that of other performers, is usually discussed in terms of who sings like him, who plays like him, and what songs of his are sung by others. What is not usually discussed is, how did the performer affect the evolution of blues as a whole? Clearly, taking this last question into account makes the matter more difficult, but there are many who would still feel that the effect of Johnson has been supreme.

I think this latter view is narrow and erroneous, but it is worth investigating nonetheless. Why is Robert Johnson felt to be influential, especially by those whose introduction to the blues is comparatively recent (the above writer and a few others excepted)? First, influence is not synonymous with publicity, and whereas the degree of influence that can be credited to Johnson is a matter of dispute, there is no question that he has posthumously been enveloped by an enormous amount of publicity, not all of it undeserved, beginning with the publication of The Country Blues and the release of the first Robert Johnson LP a few years later. His life and accomplishments indeed became legend, and the romanticism of the tale of the intensely passionate but shy youth who was poisoned while still young did not fail to exert a certain amount of attraction for its own sake. Rock groups not only helped perpetuate the myth, but seemed to swallow it whole, for although many city blues artists exerted a powerful influence on latter-day rock, Johnson was one of the few country blues artists to have had his songs adopted. Since the songs were really no more suitable for adaptation than countless others, and since every positive attribute of a Johnson performance was lost when transferred to the rock mold, why were Johnson's songs chosen, aside from the legend and romance which surrounded them? Simply because the rock groups were attracted by Johnson's intensity, passion, and power—all qualities which were, unfortunately, not transferable.

Another answer to why Johnson seems so influential is that to the beginner, the bluesmen who influenced Johnson are virtually unknown. Many people knew that Son House had great influence on Johnson, but they never seem to really appreciate the meaning of it all. One is ultimately misled into thinking that ideas developed elsewhere actually originated with Johnson. Additionally, certain artists, Muddy Waters and Johnny Shines, for example, who are popular and held in high esteem today, actually were influenced by Johnson. Yet the esteem in which these artists are held tends to de-emphasize the importance of their contemporaries who were not influenced by Johnson. Howlin' Wolf, for example, owes much to Patton and Tommy Johnson (and maybe Robert Johnson, too), but B. B. King's style evolved out of an amalgam of Lonnie Johnson, Django Reinhardt, Dr. Clayton, and T-Bone Walker. To trace the Robert Johnson influence in Muddy Waters, Elmore James, or Johnny Shines is indeed worthwhile, but it has usually had the effect of underestimating the importance of every other artist who ever lived.

There is also a tendency to lump all slide guitarists into the category of "artists influenced by Robert Johnson" where clearly a magnificent slide guitarist like Robert Nighthawk owed his heaviest stylistic debt to Tampa Red.

My personal feeling is that Robert Johnson was not nearly as exposed to the public or other artists as dozens of his contemporaries or predecessors were, either personally or on records, and that it is only the high position to which several of his followers have risen that distorts his actual effect on the blues. One might advance the argument that it is simply because Johnson influenced those artists who later became noteworthy that we must say his influence was great, but I can only disagree: once again, we are left with hundreds of performers, uninfluenced by Johnson, who are totally, and unjustifiably, ignored.

In discussing those performers who influenced Johnson, we are presented with a new difficulty. We know who influenced Johnson: Patton, House, Skip James, Lonnie Johnson, and '30s performers like Kokomo Arnold and Peetie Wheatstraw, yet it is nearly impossible to trace those artists who influenced Patton, House, and the other singers from the '20s. We know some names, but we've never heard the music as it was played and sung by the bluesmen of 1900. Without debating the issue of whether the blues of 1900 was really the "blues" or whether it was some earlier, more loosely-developed form, the Pattons and other singers of the '20s appear more original because so few of their influences are traceable. (One can, however, find slight influence of earlier singers on Patton's records).

Originality itself is not the sole criterion, of course, for the tracing of influences proves only that an artist was part of the continuum along which the blues developed—it is hardly demeaning to have evolved out of something. Yet those musical factors which influenced Muddy Waters are often traced to Robert Johnson and no further. For certain purposes, this may be acceptable, but in general, a researcher should be thorough enough to trace these factors as far as he can—it may be regrettable that we cannot very well penetrate the early 1900s, but there is no reason for stopping at 1936.

One of the most glaring examples of the perpetuation of this error is the tendency to credit Robert Johnson as the originator of the "Rolling and Tumbling" theme. Musically, it is the melody and guitar line used by Johnson in his "If I Had Possession over Judgment Day"—it is also used at a greatly de-accelerated pace for his "Traveling Riverside Blues." This melody was used later by Muddy Waters "Down South Blues," "Rollin' and Tumblin'" with Baby Face Leroy), Howlin' Wolf, Big Joe Williams, Sunnyland Slim, Elmore James, and others. The tune predates Johnson by nearly ten years, however, being done most identifiably by Hambone Willie Newbem's piece, but the melody is also associated with what other singers call "Brownsville Blues," recorded in 1929 by Sleepy John Estes as "The Girl I Love, She Got Long Curly Hair."

The song "Baby Don't You Want to Go" or "Sweet Home Chicago" has been performed by artists like Magic Sam, Junior Parker, Bobo Jenkins, and Jimmy McCracklin, and it is easily traced to Johnson's "Sweet Home Chicago," but Kokomo Arnold made it popular in 1934, before Johnson as "Old Original Kokomo Blues." An earlier recording, however, was Scrapper Blackwell's "Kokomo Blues" (1928), a slightly different song, but still the prototype.

Muddy Waters' "Walking Blues" and "I Feel Like Going Home" are easily traceable to Johnson's "Walking Blues," but to fully appreciate the evolution of the piece, it must be understood that Johnson got the melody and rhythm from Son House's "My Black Mama."

At this point we are confronted with the question, where did Muddy Waters and Johnny Shines learn the song? From Johnson or from House? The answer is that for all practical purposes, they learned it from Johnson, and because of this, Johnson must be given a certain amount of credit. We have mentioned that there are other ways of evaluating performers besides originality, and this is one of those ways. While Robert Johnson might have learned things from other singers, many later singers learned from Johnson. It is possible that Johnson might have been effective in rescuing a song like "Roll and Tumble Blues" from undeserved obscurity, and although it seems likely that the song would have carried on without Johnson's help, through Estes, Furry Lewis, etc., we have no way of knowing whether Muddy Waters would ever have heard it, or in what form it would have ultimately survived. In the case of "Baby Don't You Want to Go" it would seem that Kokomo Arnold's version was more popular than Johnson's, and that it was he and not Johnson who exerted the strongest influence on many of the later artists who performed the song. It is senseless to engage in too much speculation about the effects of broken links in the chain of evolution, but it is necessary to realize that Johnson's role in a link in that chain may still assure him of a vital position, even when his originality, or the preposterous amount of influence he is assumed to have, is subjected to questioning.

Besides, influence must also be placed on those songs of Johnson which were entirely (or largely) original; songs like "Hellhound On My Trail," or songs like "Dust My Broom" which have indeed become blues standards.

Perhaps the most difficult task is articulating what it is that makes Johnson so popular today; in some sense it is involved with his dynamism, his intensity, and his poetry, all difficult subjects to analyze. Forme, he is one of the great ones—but not the greatest. I've listened to him for many years, but it is the other singers I discovered at the same time (Patton, Tommy Johnson, William Harris) that have maintained the intensity of their original attraction. To answer the question I introduced earlier, regarding the effect of the performers on the blues as a whole I have to say that for many different purposes, I would discover different answers. But my answer for the most influential, from any point of view, would never be Robert Johnson. One must consider those artists like Big Bill Broonzy who wrote hundreds of blues songs, dozens of which became standards in the repertoires of later artists. Or artists like Leroy Carr, or to a lesser extent, Peetie Wheatstraw, whose influence seems to cover a more broader range than Johnson's; and even contemporary performers like B. B. King who seems to have affected the styles of many younger artists.

But not Robert Johnson. There seems to have been something unusual about Johnson, both in his style and his position. In many ways, he was out of his time, echoing the tone of the blues of earlier years. Not really the greatest, but a performer magnificently powerful, poetic, and unique, an artist whose enduring vitality inescapably draws our attention, just as it must have attracted Muddy Waters, Johnny Shines, and Elmore James, dozens of years ago.