The Road To Robert Johnson And Beyond, CD B

We Say...

Review by John Morthland

When you take everything away from Robert Johnson except the music — when you ignore the myth that built for nearly half a century, the stories of going to the crossroads to sell his soul to the devil, his outlaw's death at age 27, the lack of even a photograph of the man until fairly recently — you are left not necessarily with a musical genius who revolutionized a genre, but with a probing songwriter (and arranger), an impassioned singer, and a brilliant guitarist and synthesizer of prevailing blues traditions who indeed added key innovations of his own.

Johnson's two sessions — November 1936 in San Antonio, June 1937 in Dallas — came at a time when country blues (and specifically Delta blues) was fading in the marketplace. His music was broad enough to take in all the blues — urban and rural, vocal and instrumental — of the present and recent past, and also to point to the future (according to those who saw him in his last months before his 1938 death, he was experimenting with a trio format that mirrored the first wave of Chicago blues while retaining a jazzy, jump blues).

Johnson was a real songwriter. Where most country bluesmen strung together a series of verses from a pool they all dipped into — as he himself did on his hair-raising version of Son House's "Walkin' Blues" — Johnson wrote songs that evolved a theme and/or told a story with a beginning, middle and end. Which is not to say all his songs besides "Walkin' Blues" were entirely original, for he usurped other shared verses as much as the next guy; he usually just harnessed them differently. Consider the very first song he ever recorded, "Kind-Hearted Woman," which is based on urbane pianist Leroy Carr's "Mean Mistreater Mama" with a dollop of Kokomo Arnold, and which develops Johnson's relationships with women in considerable detail; or, better yet, consider "Love in Vain," one of the Johnson tunes revived by the Rolling Stones, which stunningly uses conventional blues imagery (some borrowed from Blind Lemon Jefferson) to tell a complete story. Or consider the striking imagery ("I can tell the wind is risin'/ The leaves tremblin' on the trees") of "Hellhound on My Trail," arguably the fullest realization of his favorite theme, that of the tormented, even doomed, outsider in a strange and hostile land.